In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. Guided by a different Cosmos-vision, the Inca social and military elites limited the use of Spanish weaponry and horses as means to maintain the powers in their hands and resisted the adaptation of the Western modes of war in order to revalidate their way of life that was threatened by the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitled A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years in Britain) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. In the final analysis it appears that the Incas, rather than not being able to, would not change and transform. With this in mind, the aim of this article is to study the factors due to which the Incas supposedly resisted change and insisted on continuing with their traditional practices of war. As the Incan society displayed tendencies of continuity in its traditional practices of war and, on a smaller scale, change and transformation by appropriating European weaponry and horses, the former served in the formation of the negative perception of the Incan society as conservative and unable to evolve in accordance with its new reality, while the latter was seen as merely a rare exception in which the Incas would attempt to imitate their enemies only to fail due to their incompetence. By and large, existing studies of the conquest of the great Inca Empire by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century simplify the unexpected triumph of the few Spaniards over the many Incas, attributing it to the superior weaponry and warfare of the conquistadors.
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