They conquered a region nearly as harsh and forbidding as the Himalayas. They ruled over a world of mountains and mist, rivers and drought, clouds and grass. They thought themselves descendants of the Great Sun, and thus worshipped it, as they would a father who gifted them with food, clothing, and gold.

And yet, for all their advancements, and the skill of their race, their civilization lasted for no more than a hundred years.

The Incas ruled South America at the same time that Europe was slowly rising out of the Medieval Ages. For a century, the race dominated the Andes, with its cold peaks; the South American lowlands, with its alternating decades of drought and rain; and the midlands, home to both cropland and mines. They called their world the Land of the Four Quarters, the Tahuantinsuyu, an empire home to 15 million people scattered across the Andean Cordilleras, the Atacama Desert, and the Amazon rainforest.

In any case, and in any environment, the Incas found a place to plant their crops, to feed their people and keep a surplus.

The secret to the Inca’s success was mita, an efficient system of forced labor imposed upon every Inca by the Incan king and his wives. Only 65 days of the year were needed for a family to tend to its needs. On the rest, people were tasked to work on temple-owned fields, bridges, roads, terraces, temples, and palaces, or extract gold, silver, and other precious metals from the mines.

It was mita that made the Incan empire a vast, formidable network. Two major roads crossed the empire from North to South, plunging deep into mountain-darkened valleys; then wending dangerously through steep precipices looking down upon gray, rocky ravines; before diving once more into coastal plains whose air was barely salted by the nearby Pacific. It was through these roads that goods traveled, sometimes on the backs of workers, sometimes borne by the llama, the Incan beast of burden.

The Incas had no wheels or carriages, nor paper, nor a system of writing, but they were able to build palaces and shrines on any terrain their empire presented. Their architects and masons built clay models to plan their work, then, during construction, used plumb bobs, sliding scales, and bronze and stone implements. The stone blocks to be used for fortresses and temples were brought high up the mountains on ramps and rollers. Despite the “primitive” set-up, every brick and stone was laid out and fitted with extraordinary precision.

As impressive as the roads and palaces was Incan agriculture, which, as it thrived in environments as diverse as frost and drought, was a miracle all its own. Each clan, or ayllu, was a farming community, and each family had to work cooperatively to make the most of the land. The adults plowed the fields, while the children worked by keeping the pests and birds out of the cropland. At the end of each harvest was a Sun festival, held as thanksgiving, and as supplication that the earth would yield even better crops in the following season.

Since the empire was composed mainly of high, snowy mountains, the Incas employed terracing, to shape the land for their needs; irrigation, to draw water constantly to the fields, even in times of drought; drainage, to empty the fields in times of heavy rain; and fertilization, using animal droppings, or guano, or the remains of slaughtered llamas.

Incan terraces are an architectural, as well as agricultural marvel. The Incas built a system of moisture retention into their terraces by layering sand and stone, clay, and then fertile soil upon each other. If the harvest exhausted the layering, they turned to the Three-Sisters system, first, planting corn; then beans, when the corn reached a certain height, so that the bean vines could be anchored on the corn stalks; and last, squash, to fill in the spaces between the crops. If either system would not work, then fertile soil was carried from kilometers away, through the Incan highway, and used to fill the terraces.

One such terrace system survives in Moray, where concentric circles rise up from the earth, as though in a grain-carpeted amphitheatre. Each step is a “microclimate,” simulating the sweltering humidity of the lowlands, then rising to the temperate cool of the midlands, before going up to the snow-bitter heights of the mountains. At the bottom, they planted peppers and fruit. In the middle, they sowed beans and maize. At the very top were the hardy potatoes. Moray, in a sense, was an Incan experimental station.

The most important Incan crop was the potato, which could withstand heavy frosts and the low pressure of high altitudes. The Incas kept their tomatoes outside, exposing them to the alternating frost of night and sun of day, until the vegetable was completely rid of moisture. At this point, they reduced it to potato flour, or chuno, which could be stored for a long time. Corn was another important Incan crop. They ate it fresh, dried, or popped – and even fermented it to make an alcoholic beverage called saraiaka, or chichi.

With agriculture producing an overwhelming array of food, and the mines yielding gold and silver beyond all measure and reason, the Incas had everything they needed. As a result, they rarely stole, and if so, they had no prison to be locked into. Their crime could be repaid by throwing the perpetrator off a cliff.

This array of abundance and wealth ultimately led to the Inca’s demise. In the 15th century, pale skinned newcomers arrived, taking with them the knowledge of a burgeoning, Renaissance Europe – and bringing with them diseases hitherto unknown to the isolated empire. The Incas were nearly wiped out with plagues. Those who survived found that their conquerors shared their love for gold and silver, and would overpower an entire continent, destroy its temples and palaces, and subdue its peoples if only to bring glory to a king across the seas.

In the end, the Inca disappeared into myth, their language into history, their tales and peoples into the forests and mountains of South America.

In the meantime, their work in agriculture yielded more than 20 varieties of corn, 240 varieties of potato, and an overwhelming spread of squash, beans, pepper, peanuts, cassava, and the grain quinoa. Their work produced more than half the agricultural products that the world eats today. Their legacy lives, rooted in the faraway heights of the Andes, and spanning the world as widely and diversely as the Incan empire itself: from land to land, and from dinner plate to dinner plate.