Construction of Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu was built around 1450 as a country estate for the Inca ruler Pachacuti and was abandoned within about a century. It sits on a ridge some 2,430 metres above sea level between two peaks, above a bend of the Urubamba river, on ground that required terracing before anything could stand on it. It was not a city and not a fortress and not, on the current evidence, a religious refuge for chosen women — the three explanations offered in turn since 1911. The documentary evidence found in a sixteenth-century Spanish land case names it as a royal estate of Pachacuti's lineage, and the skeletal remains from the cemeteries are a mixed population of retainers from across the empire. Perhaps 750 people lived there in season and far fewer in the wet months. The engineering is what has kept it standing. Something like sixty per cent of the construction is underground: deep foundations of crushed rock for drainage on a site that receives two metres of rain a year, on two fault lines, with terraces built in layers of stone, gravel and soil. The finest walls are fitted without mortar, the blocks shaped to each other so closely that a blade will not enter. The Spanish never found it, which is why it survives. Hiram Bingham was shown the site by local farmers who were living there in 1911, and took thousands of artefacts to Yale, which returned them a century later after a legal dispute. Peru now limits visitor numbers and routes because the ridge is eroding under about a million people a year. The site was never lost in any local sense, and the word discovery in the older accounts is doing a great deal of work.
- Year: 1450 CE
- Category: Cultural
