ABSTRACT
At the time of the Spanish Conquest, South America was populated by Native Americans living in both high civilizations and as hunter-gatherers. The developed civilizations were located mostly toward the west, near to the Pacific Ocean, and within the Andean valleys of modern Colombia. In these regions the emergence of these high cultures is dated from almost 1000 years BCE, reaching their peak with the Inca Empire. This last started its expansion in 1400 CE and lost its independence with the Spanish Conquest in 1532. The extent of the Inca expansion has no equivalent in North American history: it managed to cover what today is Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and parts of Chile, Colombia, and Argentina. The hunter-gatherers and horticulturists on the other hand, settled generally in the eastern slopes of the Andes and extended within the Amazonian forest up to the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless some also established themselves in the Argentinean plateaus, as well as in the southern valleys of Chile. In both these types of societies there are suggestions that millenarianist or messianic movements emerged even before the arrival of the Spaniards. However, it is only for the period after the Conquest that we have the most reliable information about such movements.
