Machu Picchu and the Creativity of Humans

Machu Picchu—another wonder of the world conquered. Machu Picchu was built only in the 1400s, during the height of the Incan Empire.

I want you to keep this fact—that Machu Picchu is only about 700 years old—in your head as you read further. For context, the Alhambra was built in the 1200s. The Taj Mahal was built not much later, in the 1600s. Beijing had a population of about 600,000. And here we are, with a city built of stones on a mountaintop, unfinished.

The other note is that Machu Picchu was unfinished. In the last days of the Incas, after it had become painfully obvious that the Spanish would be successful in their conquest, the population living there fled. Walking around today, you can still see the cut stones in the quarry, ready to be put in place, but abandoned there for hundreds of years.  

So, let’s start with some history of the city. The greatest Inca, Pachacuti, ordered the construction of a palace-city complex for his comfort and safety. Machu Picchu’s location was chosen strategically by the intersection of two independent values: religion and safety. The location is one of the only in the Sacred Valley where you have a clear view of the sunrise on both the winter and summer solstices, two majorly important holidays for the Quechua, and indeed, there is a temple to the sun with two windows, which align to the locations of the sunrise on each date. In addition, Machu Picchu sits in a very safe area—protected by Machu Picchu Mountain, Huayna Picchu Mountain, and Putucusi Mountain. Again, the Quechua people didn’t name their mountains, so these names are modern inventions. 

Temple of the sun

Construction of Machu Picchu was done mostly from the location of the city; the quarry is next to the city, still on the ridge between the two mountains that the city sits on. As for transit in and out of the city, an Inca trail runs parallel to the mountain, staying relatively flat and allowing for the most efficient route for the runners to convey information. Also, there is a system of tunnels digging into the mountain, all the way down to the river. These tunnels are closed off nowadays by the government, after people died in them, though we saw where the entrances were.

Nowadays, a road you can take by bus, or hike up, gets tourists from Aguascalientes to the top.

Construction on the city continued until its last day.

In the 1530s, the Inca, Atahualpa, was caught in an immense power struggle with his brother. Unfortunately, the two were unable to recognize that their squabble provided the perfect keyhole for the Spaniards to sneak in through, and quickly, the Incas were overthrown. Hualpa, in Runasimi, means chicken. And note, there were no chickens in the Americas. There were really just alpacas, llamas, vicuñas, and guinea pigs as valuable animals that could do work or be eaten. So Atahualpa’s name is itself a commentary on the Spaniards’ influence by that point. Once it became obvious that the Spaniards would conquer, everyone fled the city. Most were enslaved by the Spanish, and the Spanish began to disrespect the Quechua culture by spreading Christianity, avowing that the Quechua gods of nature were not the true god.

The actual mechanics of overthrowing the Incas was brutal. The Incas did have their brews—their chichas—but wine was not a concept developed here. And note, nowadays, Peru is most proud of its native liquor, pisco, which is made from grapes. So, the “Peruvian National Drink” of a Pisco Sour was never rooted in native culture, but rather, Spanish conquest. But I digressed. Conquistador Francisco Pizarro introduced Atahualpa to wine, getting him quickly hooked on the drink. When Pizarro offered with Atahualpa’s permission, wine to the other high-ups in the Incan government, Pizarro poisoned the wine and killed them all. Only Atahualpa remained, and he was imprisoned, where they used him to find the location of the empire’s stores of gold and silver.  

The city lay untouched for centuries, letting the jungle creep in, filling the walls with vines and weeds. It stayed like this, in disrepair, unfinished, unloved, until Hiram Bingham, a Hawaiian-American professor who had set out to South America on a quest to discover the untold histories of the continent, managed to get locals to guide him to the rumored location of this mysterious lost city. And what he found was amazing. What he found would lead to Peru making itself known worldwide for its history and nature.

Zack and I exploring Llaqtapata, parts of which still lay deep in the jungle

Now, it’s important to remember that civilization in modern-day Peru did not begin with the Incas. In fact, not even close. The Valdivia and Chavín cultures are among the earliest settled cultures in the world, existing millennia BC, though we know very, very little about them due to their lack of a writing system and lack of a continuous ancestry. The Incas became synonymous with Peruvian tourism because, unlike these early cultures, we know about them. The Inca Empire didn’t exist long ago, the Quechua stayed around and proud since, and they keep their traditions into the modern day.

So what did Hiram Bingham find? Well, first and foremost, he found a city.

What I found most amazing about Machu Picchu is that it looks like a city. The first thing you see is a guard house. The house has four brick walls, it has a door, some windows, and an A-Frame. Small? Yes. In fact, most of the houses for families in the city are small. But unmistakably, and unremarkably, a house.

The Guard House

Walking around more, you get the amazing view from the top of Machu Picchu, looking down on it and across to Huayna Picchu. You see the terraces making up the farming sector, and the densely packed houses and streets of the urban sector. But again, had you asked me which part of the city was which, I could have told you. This city isn’t a foreign, bizarre place. That though the Quechua people, nor any of their ancestors, had ever interacted with a European or an Asian, their city looked just like what you may expect to see in the Levant or in the Indus Valley.

But again, the Levant, the Indus Valley, have archeological sites on the orders of millennia. This is just a few hundred years old. Its centuries of hiding makes its current state feel ancient, not recent.

Our Hiking Family

After admiring the view for some time and receiving an hour-long history lesson about the Incas and the city (much of which has found a home, scattered from place to place in the blog. Also, there was one very aggressive llama working his way around the different tour groups as we were sat down listening to Elisban talk. He liked to eat backpack straps, and though he had me as a target, I quickly hid my straps to avoid llama spit on my nice new backpack…), we went down into the city. We entered through the great gate, and quickly saw houses upon houses.

Us in the gate to the city

Incan houses were, as I said, houses. Now, the Quechua tradition is for families to live all together under one roof, in one room for everything. Their living room was their kitchen and their bedroom. On the walls were slots for decorations and object storage. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. Just normal things you may expect from any house. They did, though, have a complete lack of bathrooms, and they did not shower. There is a natural spring, though it was used for ritual purposes only, and not for bathing. Apparently, fleas is a common issue for Quechua people, and Elisban, as a kid, had a problem with fleas, as he never really showered. He now does shower as regularly as a Salkantay Trail tour guide can.

It was very cool, though, how “in touch” the city is with its nature. Often, rocks that couldn’t be mined or moved would be in locations that they wanted to build. Instead of letting that deter them, they simply built their walls around these rocks! As well, the classic Inca “slant” is present everywhere, which, as I discussed in the Incan walls article, helps protect against damage in earthquakes.

To our left was a series of terraces. Though we like to think of terraces, both in the Andes and in Southeast Asia as being for farming, that’s not their only purpose here. These terraces ran all the way down the mountain, to within eyeshot of our hiking path from yesterday, and acted as restraining walls. Again, in the case of an earthquake, if these walls weren’t in place, the damage from an ensuing landslide could be catastrophic. But there were also farming terraces. Though the majority of the farming terraces were not in the residential portion of the city, there was a small set of terraces designed as a “lab.”

The Quechua, as I have said several times, were very in-touch with the nature around them. They truly understood their world to an amazing degree. On these terraces were a series of several “micro-climates.” Here, they controlled the elevation, soil condition, and sunlight of each location, and they were able to plant the same plant—perhaps corn, yucca, or rice—in all these different climate zones, seeing which were the best for the plant. To be a respected member of Incan society, you had to prove that you knew which plants should be planted where in this laboratory.

But that’s just the beginning on how they were in touch with their world. In the middle of the residential area is an unassuming rock. But look at it again, front on. It is carved out to reflect exactly the mountainscape behind it. Another rock is carved so that its shadow creates, with the rock itself, a perfect Chakana, but only on the day of the winter solstice.

Left: Half-Chakana rock with its shadow skewed, Right: rocked carved like the mountains

Another unassuming rock (and I wish I had a picture of it, but I forgot to take one in the moment) sits “downtown.” But this rock is roped off. Why is it special? you may ask. Why did they rope it off? Well, it’s actually a compass. The corners of the rock point exactly, to a degree or two, to the cardinal directions. And when I say cardinal directions, I mean the north, east, south, and west that we are familiar with today.

The Incas had developed the exact same navigational system that we did.

And remember how the Spaniards imprisoned Atahualpa after killing all those around him, using him to find the empire’s stores of gold and silver? Well, the Incas also valued gold and silver just as highly as the Europeans did.

Zack and I went to an pre-Columbian art museum in Cusco, and what did we see but necklaces, crowns made of gold, a set of bowls, and special cups that they used to make toasts at joyous occasions.

Pre-Columbian artifacts that are recognizable to their modern counterparts

Being here, in South America, and in a country so in touch with its pre-Columbian roots, I have had some weird reflections. I’ve been thinking about human nature, about what humans have done that’s creative, and what is nearly hard-wired into our brains. Thoughts like “if I were to start the world at the dawn of humanity again, how different would the world really look by the year 2024?” Because seeing all these objects, all these Inca sites, hearing all these stories, I am convinced that humans aren’t all that creative. That if civilizations that never contacted each other both came up with the idea of a “cheers,” that they both came up with the exact same navigational system to the very degree, that both came up with the idea of single-family homes made out of bricks, maybe we aren’t all that creative after all. The idea caught me off guard, and Zack dismissed it, saying, well how else are you going to build a house? But I just cannot get it out of my mind that there has to be some other idea of a house. Some other way in which they could have come up with a shelter to live that wasn’t a house as recognizable as they are. I mean, their houses had A-Frames for G-d’s sake!

Anyways, a trip to Machu Picchu is amazing. The scenery is stunning, and it offers lots to think about. Out of all the archeological sites I’ve been to, I think I appreciated this the most. First, because of its deceptive age—it feels ancient, and yet, is relatively modern. And second, that it’s the remnants of a culture that never interacted with my own. That this is how a totally isolated group of people saw the world, what their “normal” was, and how they solved problems and understood their world. Finally, having hiked to Machu Picchu, being there felt more like an accomplishment, a treat to end a week filled with highs and lows.