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A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock. CAROLYN DEAN. Duke University Press, Durham, 2010. 297 pp., 15 plates, 53 figures, glossary, bibliography, index. $24 (paper).

The Inka are justly famous for their distinctive architectural style and their megalithic tradition. This book centers on one of the primary elements of the Inka's natural and cultural world—stone. No previous studies of Inka material culture have taken stone itself as the focal point of investigation, and rarely has this substance been explicitly theorized as a key cultural category and something potentially more than just inert matter. In this regard, as well as in the conscious attempt to view Inka stonework through a local indigenous (rather than Western) lens, Dean's book is a departure from the norm and as such offers a number of original insights into native Andean ontologies and the significance of stone. Among these is the discussion of transubstantiation in Andean thought and, vis-a-vis rock, erasure of the intellectual divide between modified and unmodified stone; ideas about rock as kin; and the relationship between landscape, ancestors, and rock. The evidence utilized in this study includes Inka stonework itself, early Colonial references to such, and modern ethnographic and folkloric information pertaining to the cultural significance of stone. While Dean is an art historian by training, the book is consciously structured (though not stridently so) as an argument against the imposition of Western art ideals and art historical categories on the "visual culture" of non-Western/precolumbian societies. To this end, the author opts for an anthropological approach in attempting to better understand Inka stonework from the inside out.