Yucamane
The Andes are the longest mountain range on Earth, extending from the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in southernmost South America to Venezuela in the north. In southern Peru, the Andes consist of several mountain chains including the Western Cordillera and the Eastern Cordillera, with elevations of up to , which are separated from each other by the Altiplano.
Vertical archipelago
Absent the use of trade to access resources, economic transactions were essentially intra-lineage obligations of labor. These lineages required a base level of self-sufficiency to achieve autarky. In the Andes, a long mountain range with a great variety of ecozones and resources, the need to access the proper lands for specific crops or animals meant lineages created miniature colonies or sent seasonal migration (such as transhumance) in different ecoregions. As the Andes are a relatively young mountain range, there is an especially great variation in rainfall and temperature, which has great importance for agriculture. This is all the more important as only about 2% of the land in the Andes is arable.