Peru visit 2007

Majesty and Mystery: Ancient Civilizations of Peru

Hear mention of “Peru” and Machu Picchu — the lost city of the Incas, hidden for half a millennium beneath a carpet of jungle growth and discovered only a century ago — immediately comes to mind. This is probably the best-known Inca ruin among the hundreds dotting the countryside and around nearly every bend along the roads (or trails) in the southern part of the country. Our recent visit to Peru was under the auspices of Elderhostel and scheduled for October, after the peak tourist season. The heavy rains had not yet begun. However, the skies were overcast, explaining the lack of contrast in some photos. But the views were still awe-inspiring.

To reach Machu Picchu, one takes a train along a section of the Urubamba River. This river continues on to the Amazon, but the jumping off point for Machu Picchu is the town of Aguas Calientes. (Left click the photo above left for details. This composite photo was taken from the ridge at Intipunku or the Sun Gate, about one hour and a half up the Inca trail from Machu Picchu. This is the first view of Machu Picchu that greets those more enterprising souls who opt to trek 2 to 4 days along the Inca trail to reach the ruins.)

From Aguas Calientes, one hops on a bus that eventually makes its way up a series of hairpin turns to the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge and the entrance to Machu Picchu. This is the only hotel at the site, but standard room rates of $795 were not the main draw! Our group stayed below at the elegant Inkaterra Machu Picchu Hotel in Agua Calientes (see photos, accommodations scattered in the forest at the left and dining room at the right), which at about $400 for a double wasn’t much cheaper. But the rooms were nice!! (Villas are available for $1,500 a night for those so inclined.)

The ruins of Machu Picchu straddle a ridge, located at about 8,000 feet above sea level. It is flanked on both sides by steep slopes leading down to the Urubamba River below. In addition to the spellbinding view of the natural surroundings, the impressive stone masonry contributes to this view (see photos below). Construction of the city began in the mid-15^th century and it was abandoned barely a hundred years later, with the arrival in coastal Peru of the Spanish conquistadors and Catholic clergy. While they generally participated in much of the destruction of indigenous cultures and accomplishments as they colonialized what is now Peru, as they had with the Mayan and Aztec cultures in Central America, they fortunately never found Machu Picchu. It remained untouched, except for being temporarily overwhelmed by jungle vegetation, as was the case with Angkor Wat.

Unlike stone used for Inca construction in the Cusco area, which had to be transported from a quarry several dozen kilometers away, stone in Machu Picchu was conveniently found in the middle of the city (see photos below left).

Many of the walls are made of close-fitting stones. These were set in place without any mortar, yet fitted so closely that a knife blade cannot be inserted in the joints. This construction is even more awe-inspiring at other sites, such as those in Cusco (see photos later). One can be but puzzled by how these stones — some irregularly shaped and weighing over 100 tons each — were dressed, transported, and eventually set in place with great accuracy.

One might expect that the Incas employed chisels or other metal tools. However, this was apparently not the case. The Incas did have some mastery of metallurgy. Initially, they had access to gold, silver, and copper. Then in the 15th century, at about at the time the Inca expanded their empire throughout what is present-day Peru and beyond, tin became available from Bolivia. Copper alloyed with small quantities of tin (about 10 %) produced bronze, a metal stronger than wrought iron. In spite of this development, it is believed that stone rather than metal tools were used to dress the stones used in their masonry.

So how was this done? I was able to track down an article on Inca stone masonry I recalled reading in Scientific American (February 1986) two decades ago. The author, Jean-Pierre Protzen, was also intrigued by this question, and during a sabbatical leave followed by annual visits to Peru; he focused on studying Inca walls in Cusco, Sacsayhuaman (see later), and Ollantaytambo; and the quarries from where the stones came.

The stones did not appear to have been cut from bedrock. Rather, in one quarry, the quarrymen combed the rockfalls in the quarry for stones which met their specifications. In another quarry, the rock was so fractured that pieces could be pried off with bronze pry bars or wooden poles.

As for dressing these stones, Protzen noticed that the cutting marks on Inca stones were similar to those found in Egypt, where stone masons had shaped their stones by pounding away with stone “hammers”. At the quarry site, Protzen found sufficient quantities of similarly rounded cobblestones (that originated in the Urubamba River) to convince him that these were the tools used for dressing the stones. When the stone hammer was directed at an angle to the vertical onto the stone being worked, flakes of the stone would be removed (see a diagram above from the magazine). Using this method, Protzen was able to whittle down quarry stone to the desired shape with “little time and effort”.

The technique for transporting the large stones up to several dozen kilometers (!) is still not completely clear. Polishing and striations on one side of some stones indicated that they were dragged. The larger stones exceeded 100 tons and would have required an estimated 2,300 men to move. A Spanish writer observed that 20,000 men were assigned to the construction of Sacsayhuaman near Cusco, 6,000 of whom were delegated to the transportation detail. But this gives rise to new questions: How could each of the 2,300 men be harnessed to a single stone to do their share of the pulling?

Once at their destination, fitting the stones in a wall was probably not an easy task. It seemed largely a matter of trial and error, a difficult task given the size of some stones. Protzen quotes a Jesuit priest, a noted “reliable observer”, as saying “All this was done with much manpower and much suffering in the work, for to fit one stone to the other, until they were adjusted, it was necessary to try them many times.”

With the end of our visit to Machu Picchu, we left the verdant, more luxuriant Amazonian side of the Andes, and headed southeast, up out of the Sacred Valley of the Incas (see photo at left) to the higher, drier, more desolate, yet still alluring climes. We climbed back up to Cusco, the capital of the Inca empire, located at about 12,000 feet above sea level (see photo at right). The clay roofing tiles used everywhere in town makes it difficult to see where the red roofs stop and the red countryside begins.

In Cusco, the Inca capital, further examples of Inca stone masonry can be found. This work, such as that along Calle Loreto (below, left), illustrates the precision and regularity of the stonework. This road leads to Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, one of the most important Inca temples. After the conquest of what is now Peru by the Spanish in 1533, the Dominican Order built their monastery (below, second from left) and the Church of Santa Domingo over the Inca temple which served as its foundation. A curving 6-meter-high Inca wall supports the facade of the Church (below, third from left), which the Spanish built in the conventional manner with stones and mortar. The photo (below, right) shows one of the Church’s circular arches resting on an Inca wall.

Just outside the town of Cusco and looking down onto the city is Sacsayhuaman, the most important site after Machu Picchu. The construction at this site further illustrates the prowess of the Inca masons. The most prominent structure here is a series of three massive, zigzag retaining walls (see three arrows on left photo). The Spanish eventually tore down the buildings within these walls and ransacked the area as a source of construction materials for the city of Cusco. Only a small part of the original complex remains. The person standing in the foreground in the photo on the left gives an idea of the massiveness of many of the stones making up structures.

This question of how these enormous stones, a few exceeding 100 tons in weight, were erected and manipulated remains. But this question is not unique to Inca works found throughout Peru. It is also asked by those visiting Stonehenge in England or the pyramids and obelisks of Egypt. Various theories are posited, some attempted, others relegated to one’s imagination (e.g., levitation by aliens from outer space). The definitive answer is yet to be discovered.

But in Peru, the task seems more complicated because the stones generally were of all sizes and shapes. Each had to be custom-made. And they were also frequently large and weighty. Each was a piece of a puzzle, where each piece had to be precisely custom-fitted in a matrix of other pieces. Dressing these stones would have been like trying to make a replacement piece for a cardboard jigsaw puzzle, cutting a piece by trial and error until it fits precisely. But in the case of the Inca puzzle, they had to prepare puzzle pieces made of stone weighing up to 100 tons! Manipulating those pieces for trial-and-error fitting would have been a bit more challenging than working with cardboard.

The Inca originally settled in a small area around Cusco (see view of the Cathedral of Cusco). But beginning in the 15th century, the Inca emerged as a powerful state that set about conquering neighboring cultural groups, such as the Chimú,, Moche, and Lambayeque cultures. The Inca are by far the better-known cultural group because, in the glory days of the Inca empire, it governed an area that extended into Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile — almost the entire length of the western coast of South America — and was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. However this period was brief, barely a century, and was brought to a cruel end at the hands of the Spanish led by Pizzaro and the Catholic Church.

Much of the population of Peru, and a number of cultural groups, were located in the western part of the country — in the rugged Andes and in the narrow plains squeezed between this range and the Pacific Ocean (see map). Prevailing winds sweep the moisture from the Amazon Basin westward over the Andes, and as the winds are forced to rise over the mountains, the cooler temperatures at higher elevations cause the moisture to condense in the form of rain and snow which drops over the mountains. By the time the winds reach the narrow strip of land between the Andean range and the Pacific Ocean, they have lost their moisture. The narrow band of land is generally dry and is largely barren desert. However, roughly 50 rivers originating in the Andes cross the narrow deserts corridor to empty in the ocean, irrigating the land through which they pass, increasing the productivity of the land bordering these rivers (or irrigation canals).

Several cultures found their home in this part of Peru, living off both the rich maritime resources as well as land that they irrigated with the waters working their way down the Andes. These included the Moche and Chimu groups, who eventually contributed to the glory of the broader Inca nation.

In northern Peru, in the midst of lush, verdant irrigated lands, 40 km from Chiclayo, one’s attention is drawn to what to an untrained eye are barren, eroded hills, not of bedrock and boulders but of dirt, dotting the otherwise flat countryside. But rather than being ordinary hills, they identify the location of massive structures build by the Moche cultural group. But unlike the stone masonry used by the Inca at the peak of their development, the Moche used materials indigenous to their area — dirt — to build large truncated pyramidal structures of sun-dried adobe bricks.

At Huaca Rajada (Moche culture), careful excavation into the loose soil washed down one of the “hills” by erosion from the occasional rains in the area caused by El Niño reveals the base of a temple constructed of hundreds of thousand of sun-dried mud bricks, each bearing the distinctive mark of the brick maker (see photo at left). These formed immense truncated pyramidal structures. At Tucume (Lambayeque culture), immense flat-topped structures reveal a multi-floor construction (see photo at right). Such structures frequently served religious purposes and contained tombs for generations of nobility. These structures were built in phases. Each new layer of tombs required the addition of soil and brick, progressively increasing the height and base of the existing structure, with these pyramids slowly working their way to the heavens. This was similar to those Russian babushka dolls, wooden dolls that come in a range of sizes, the bigger covering the smaller.

The first site we visited in northwestern Peru, Huaca Rajada, was discovered just two decades ago, largely untouched by the grave robbers who pose a serious problem to archeologists trying to document the history of the region. One of three structures at the site contained the tomb of the Lord of Sipán surrounded by items he would need for his afterlife: ornaments and utensils of gold, copper, silver: textiles; ceramics, as well as (the skeletons of) three young women, two men, and a boy; and two llamas and a dog as well. The Lord of Sipán lived in the 4th century.

The first photo below is an aerial view of part of the Huaca Rajada complex, showing one of the three adobe pyramids, with excavations of several tombs. The second photo shows one of the tombs, partially rebuilt at the site after the excavation was completed. And the last is the rebuilt tomb of the Lord of Sipán, pictured with some of the refurbished gold ornaments and other items found with him.

The following illustrations are artists’ conceptions of the Huaca Rajada site and the construction of a pyramid.

The following day we visited Tucume of the Lambayeque culture (11th - 14th century) which is comprised of 26 large pyramids, the largest being four-tenths of a mile long, 900 ft wide, and 100 feet high (700 x 270 x 30 m). The composite photograph below show several of the pyramids of Tucume, most of which have not been excavated. This view looks westward across the irrigated lands toward the Pacific Ocean.

Just beside the Pacific Ocean and north of Trujillo, we then visited El Brujo (Moche) that at first appears like a sand dune rising 100 feet above the surrounding desert. It contains a multiroom temple in which was unearthed large multicolored friezes which have been preserved not only because of the extremely dry climate of the Pacific coast of Peru but also because of the tradition of building new levels over older structures, thereby isolating the old friezes inside from the elements outdoors. Local grave looters discovered the murals accidentally in 1990. Some of the thousands of holes dug in the area by grave looters can be seen in the foreground of the photo below. Below are some views of this structure. The middle photograph is a tabletop model of the structure.

We also visited what is considered the former capital of the Moche kingdom, built in the 6th century and considered a religious center and an urban settlement. The two major structures that dominate the site are Huaca del Sol (Pyramid of the Sun, photo at right) and Huaca de la Luna. (Temple of the Moon).

The Huaca del Sol is made of 4 major platforms or floors (about 170 feet high). Only part of this structure remains. A significant portion of the original construction was destroyed by the Spaniards who diverted the streamflow of a local river to wash away the dirt making up the structure, leaving behind gold ornaments and other articles of value they sought. (The backside of the structure shown above was affected).

The second structure, the Huaca de la Luna, built up against the White Mountain, is presently being researched. But as can be seen for a view of part of this structure in the photo below on the left, this structure has over the centuries been visited by treasure hunters who have dug an impressive maze of tunnels within the structure. An excavated courtyard, with friezes and paintings can seen in the right photo.

The structure is also home to a variety of painted reliefs or friezes. The photo on the left shows parts of two levels of the structure within the mass of earth and adobe bricks making up the pyramid. The right photo is a representation of the decapitator found close to a small plaza where human sacrifices were performed. The middle photo illustrates how the structure was carefully covered with bricks when the next level was added.

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FYI: The daytime and the nighttime photo used to make the animated photo of the Cathedral of Cusco were taken from the dining room of our hotel in Cusco.