Machu Picchu: A Primer
Background, History, and Context to introduce the Inca Empire and this UNESCO World Heritage Site and Wonder of the World to your K-12 Classroom
The Inca Empire: Background
An the height of their power, the Inca* made up the largest Pre-Colombian Empire in the Americas, and possibly the largest empire in the world during the 16th century (1500s). The Empire expanded rapidly, taking over massive amounts of territory in quick succession, much like the Roman Empire. Modern-day Cusco, Peru served as the hub of Incan military, political and administrative pursuits. The Inca civilization was reigned for only about 100 years before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1530s and were eventually defeated in the 1570s.
*Side Note: The Inca Empire is known by various spellings/titles, including the Incan Empire, the Inka Empire, or sometimes just “The Inc(k)as”. In Quechua, the indigenous language in Cusco and the Peruvian Sacred Valley region, spoken by the Inca people prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s (and still spoken today by many) it is known as Tawantinsuyu, which literally translates to “The Four Regions”. Many terms, including names of important Inca leaders, vary depending on whether you are looking at the Quechua/Inca or the Spanish version of the word. Further complicating matters of spelling is the fact that the Inca were an entirely oral society without a writing system. Quechua, too, was a completely oral language and has only begun to be codified into writing in the past few decades for the sake of cultural preservation and teaching the language to new generations. Thus, even within the Quechua language today, spellings can vary substantially from person to person and, generally speaking, one simply spells words the way they sound, without too much worry for accuracy.
Economically and socially, the Inca were a highly stratified, hierarchical society with kings, princes, princesses, and citizens who were obligated to pay tribute to their leaders and had little to no chance of obtaining upward mobility or changing their station in life during their lifetime. At the same time, however, there was a firm belief in the Inca Chakana, a cross that symbolizes many aspects of the complex and multifaceted Andean Cosmovision. While the chakana is represented and described in a wide variety of ways by various sources, it usually has 3 steps per side which seem to touch on various themes, including:
The 3 pachas or worlds and 3 animals that symbolize each:
- Hanan Pacha – represented by the condor – the upper world above, sometimes thought to be inhabited by Gods (yet with the belief that no one, not even a divine being, is superior to any one or thing else),
- Kay Pacha – represented by the puma – the every day / middle world, where we live, here and now
- Pacha Mama – represented by the serpent – Mother Earth, nature, the world “below”, but not in the same vein as that of a Christian worldview where often the idea of an underworld implies evil or death.
The 3 Inca Laws:
- Do not lie
- Do not steal
- Do not be lazy
The 3 concepts of community work for the greater good:
- Ayni – reciprocity between individuals within the community– exchange of goods, resources, time, and energy between community members to ensure all needs are met (e.g. If at my elevation I cannot grow corn but can grow potatoes, and you can do the opposite, we can trade and both have more variety in our diet).
- Minka – communal work on publicly shared land (e.g. You help me plow my field today and next week I will help you come and repair/rebuild your roof, or perhaps together we will work a community field and harvest the crops together).
- Mit’a – essentially taxes of some sort/paying tribute to the Inca leaders – the Inca sometimes required 200% tribute, which I am still trying to wrap my mind around. While this may sound like a way of keeping commoners in their place without the ability to improve their lot in life (and perhaps it was), when the Spanish arrived and observed the Inca society, they saw that ran incredibly smoothly, as a Marxist-like socialist state in which the rulers amassed resources and then redistributed them by need to each. In addition the Inca rulers facilitated Mita/paying tribute by ensuring that their followers had the amount of arable land needed to farm and produce the crops required for paying tribute. So, in some way, it seems, the Inca were benevolent dictators?
Disclaimer: We don’t know much & what we do know is 2nd-hand
There is very little known about the short-lived but very powerful Inca Empire; furthermore, it is important to remember that even what little that is known is only understood through the lens of the Spanish who conquered the Inca in the 1500s and took the time to record some of the oral history of the impressively vast empire in writing.
Prior to the Spanish conquest, there was no written record of any of the Incan language, way of life, practices, religion – nothing! This means that there may have been, even in the written records that were eventually recorded by the Spanish, historical manipulation. The advantage (or disadvantage depending on your position. and point of view) of an entirely oral society is that people whose contributions were not valued were able to be erased from the oral history of the Inca.
Therefore, please keep in mind, literally everything I am about to share is just a theory or hypothesis, and/or may have been misinterpreted by those who attempted to take what was a society with a rich oral history, with no written language, and map it onto their own epistemology (way of knowing) which included the written word and Catholicism, among many other factors. Also keep in mind that I myself may have misheard or misinterpreted some of the information learned as part of the tours I’ve been lucky to be part of during this Fulbright grant, so I apologize in advance for any inaccuracy you may encounter here and encourage to use this as just one source of many to supplement your planning for introducing this complex, fascinating culture to your students!
Geography, Mythology, & Context of Inca Empire
The Incas had 12 kings, “Sapa Inca” (big Inca) who were considered to be the divine “Sons of the Sun” – the Sun (“Inti” in the Incan language, Quechua) being the main God of the Incan Religion. The Inca Empire reigned for only about ~100 years in South America from about the 1430s to the 1530s, prior to the Spanish Conquest lead by Francisco Pizarro.
There is one version of an Incan origin myth that holds that the first Inca King, Manco Capac, and his wife, Mama Occla, were children of Inti (The Sun God), and his wife Mama Killa (Mother Moon), who emerged from Lake Titicaca. Thus, Manco Capac and Mama Occla, being children of Gods, were divine themselves.
To preserve the divinity of the royal bloodline, royal intermarriage was projected as a reality to the people – though it may not have actually occured very much, or at least not in such a way that any sort of incest would have been a worry, given that some Inca kinds had multiple wives and fathered up to 100+ children with them.
Much like the way that royal bloodlines are carefully preserved throughout the world to this day by permitting marriage only with other royals, the Inca suggested to their people that the first-born son of the king and queen (prince), who was considered fully divine, having had 2 divine parents, would marry someone else who was also also fully divine (in this case, his sister) and thus maintain the royal, divine bloodline.
One particular Inca King, Sari Tupac, was actually given permission by the pope to marry his sister to preserve the bloodline! Sari Tupac was the brother of and predecessor to the rather more infamous Tupac Amaru, often called the “last Inca” who was eventually captured by the Spanish and beheaded and quartered in the main Plaza De Armas in the center of Cusco City, thus ending indigenous rule and sheparding in the era of Spanish colonization in the region.
The Inca Conquest
Before the Spanish conquest of the Inca came the Inca Conquest of much of South America. In the short amount of time that the Incas ruled, they managed to conquer an incredible area of land mass, stretching from Ecuador, in the north, all the way down through Chile in the South:
How did the Inca conquer so much land so quickly? Two principle methods were used, according to one of our great lecturers and renowned South American anthropologists specializing in the Inca empire, Dr. Brian Bauer, professor at University of Chicago:
- Alliances through inter-marriage: The Inca would move in, go meet their neighbors, and conduct sister exchanges to both 1) form alliances and build trust and 2) ensure the growth of the Inca empire in the next generation. Upside: peaceful, organic growth and trust; Downside: time-intensive. Thus, sometimes, instead, they resorted to Method #2:
- Conquest through threat of war: Inca would move in, go meet their neighbors and say “hey we just moved in next door and we have 5,000 men in arms behind us – so you pick: join us or fight us! (Upside: quick, efficient takeovers and accumulation of wealth. and resources; Downside: violence, and hired armies who proved to be less loyal in times of need).
Machu Picchu: An Incan Citadel in the Mountains
Machu Picchu is thought to have been an Inca retreat for special occasions, built by Pachacuti, the 9th of 12 Inca Kings, who was well-known for his city planning and designed much of present-day Cusco as well. Nestled among a series of beautiful Andes mountains peaks, the construction of the citadel of Machu Picchu is often the topic of wonder-filled discussion.d
Why is this?
First, the Incas did not have a wheel, nor did they have any exposure to horses until the arrival of the Spanish during the conquest in the 16th century (1500s).
Furthermore, Incas were renowned for their stonework, often using huge rocks that either were naturally present and building around them (never changing nature, but practicing “organic construction” by using whatever was already present and making it even better- see pic of Temple of the Pacha Mama – Mother Earth – below – to see an example of how they built a perfect tiny Inca wall between two larger, naturally occurring rocks or boulders that formed the foundation of the temple), or, some think, locating huge, sacred rocks (“huaca” or “waka”) in the Sacred Valley of Peru and then somehow relocating them (again, without a wheel or horses) to their current location in the difficult-to-access, surrounded-by-mountains Machu Picchu.
History and Modern (Re)-discovery of Machu Pichu
Around 1450, at the height of Inca power, Machu Picchu was built, probably by city planner and 9th Inca ruler Pachacutec, who ruled from approximately 1438–1471. It was never finished, however, and in fact was abandoned during the Spanish conquest by the 1570s. Some people ask “what happened to the Inca?” Or especially “What happened tot he people who inhabited Machu Picchu?”
Most empires have a very natural rise and fall, and that particularly the rapid growth of the Inca empire, coupled with the fact that you could not become an Inca but had to be born one, meant that their empire would have fallen eventually anyhow. It is also possible that some Inca died of smallpox before or during the Spanish invasion, even though the Spanish never found Machu Picchu itself (germs travel faster than people anyway). However, it’s also true that there are people with Inca blood still living in Cusco today, or in the Sacred Valley, or Aguas Calientes (the small town at the base of Machu Picchu mountain). The Inca did not simply disappear; their empire may have been dismantled, and many of their leaders, especially, were ransomed, died or were killed, but, there are still remnants of Inca culture and language everywhere you look in this area of Peru.
Many people mistakenly believe that Machu Picchu was discovered by American explorer Hiram Bingham when he travelled to the area in 1911. It would be more accurate to say that Bingham re-discovered the citadel (in particular its agricultural terraces) that was not only already known to be there, but was even being actively farmed by local families. It is true, however, that Bingham brought international attention to the site and completed much of the clearing and excavating of the site over expeditions in 1911, 1912, 1914, and 1915. It is also useful to note that while Machu Picchu is sometimes known as the “Lost City of the Inca” this is false and stems from Bingham’s original misconception and misattribution that Machu Picchu, in all of its wonder, must have been the last Inca stronghold, when in fact the last Inca held power, at the end of their reign, in the less visually stunning Vitcos and Vilcabamba.
Peru declared an area of about 9 hectares (90,000 square meters) including and surrounding Machu Picchu a “Historic Sanctuary” in 1981, including some of the adjoining Amazonian jungle region.
Finally, in 1983, Machu Picchu was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), who described it as “an absolute masterpiece of architecture and a unique testimony to the Inca civilization”.
Machu Picchu: Theories and What we Know
While we know some details about Machu Picchu, much of this majestic citadel is still shrouded in mystery. This is partly because of the oral history of the Inca and their lack of written records, but also because Machu Picchu’s location was never discovered by the Spanish, even during the conquest.
Arriving at Machu Picchu
To this day, arriving at Machu Picchu is a feat. You mor or less have two options for how to get there:
- Hike the Inka Road, beginning near Ollytantambo and going for 4 days until reaching the citadel by way of the Inti Punku, or Sun Gate, the doorway to Machu Picchu.
- Take an approximately 2 – 2.5 hour bus or taxi ride to Ollantaytambo; from there, take an almost 2-hour train through the very narrow Andes mountain valley to Aguas Calientes, also known as Machu Picchu Pueblo. From Aguas Calientes, probably the next morning, pay to take a 20 – 30 minute bus ride up to Machu Picchu itself through a bus company that has a monopoly on the route, to visit the Incan Citadel (most people go with this bus/taxi-train-bus route, as I have done twice in the past year, first as part of my traveling sabbatical and second as part of this Fulbright Hays grant for K-12 teachers to explore the culture and language of the Andes region):
It is unsurprising, given the difficulty of arriving, that the Spanish may have missed Machu Picchu in their focus on hunting down and executing the last Inca king, Túpac Amaru, in their quest to fully establish Spanish rule in the area.
Construction and Architecture of Machu Picchu
The original foundation rocks of Machu Picchu are granite and sourced from the Sacred Valley of Peru, meaning that the Inca took the rocks from either Cusco, approximately 80 kilometers away, or from the valley itself, and moved them all the way to and up the mountain in order to build the Citadel. This is especially impressive when one remembers that the Inca not only had no wheel but also no horses! For some of the huge huaca/waka (sacred foundation stones) in Machu Picchu, it is a complete mystery how the Inca were able to get them there!
There are ruins of a long, likely originally 2-story inn (kallanca in quechua) situated above Machu Picchu, which suggests that there was a place for those who made pilgrimmage to Machu Picchu to stay, and that although Machu Picchu was mostly intended as a retreat for members of the nobility and royalty it must have also served other purposes (or perhaps just have housed a great many other Inca who were necessary to keep the society of the nobles running smoothly even when away from the city center of Cusco).
All of the windows and doors in the buildings of Machu Picchu face either East, towards the sunrise, or West, towards the sunset, which aligns with the notion of the Inti (sun) as the most important Inca God.
Machu Picchu’s location up in the mountains also suggests the importance of nature to the Inca religion, in particular, the desire for proximity to the sun and moon. The Inca were incredible astronomers and used a complex system of water reflection pools to view astronomical signs with near perfect accuracy. They also constructed nearly perfectly level bases and foundations for all of their buildings, agricultural terraces, and irrigation and drainage systems, which helped to control erosion along the mountainsides on which the city was built. It is not known how these perfectly level constructions were made since there is no lasting evidence of any technological device such as a modern day level that would be necessary to obtain such architectural perfection.
Peru has two main weather seasons – a rainy season lasting from approximately April to November and a dry season from May to October. The weather is also made rather more complex due the the altitude (Cusco is about twice the height of Denver, Colorado, the “mile high city”, at about 11,000' above sea level while the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu are a few thousand feet lower). This mix of seasons and altitude often results in a need to wear many layers in the morning and evening with a mid-day period of high sun (enough to become badly sunburned if you forget your sunblock).
Sometimes Machu Picchu is closed during the rainy season due to the risk of flooding and increased erosion; however, when it is open, it is said that you are able to see a “festival of water” flowing throughout the irrigation systems of the city, which form whirlpools.
Inca stoneworkers built their walls at a 13 degree incline and built their windows and doors in the shape of a trapezoid in order to account for seismic (Earthquake) activity in the Andes region and to increase stability. To this day, there are original Inca walls in Cusco that remain nearly perfect, next to Spanish colonial walls that were destroyed and needed to be rebuilt following various Earthquakes over the years.
The 13 degree angle that the Inca used in their construction also leads to all kinds of fascinating architectural details throughout Machu Pichu. For example, the tallest building in the citadel is called IntiHuatana (the solar observatory, which literally translates from Quechua to mean “sun wrapped”). This observatory houses a sun dial with a 13 degree beam on top. Machu Pichu is located at 13 degrees latitude south, so when the sun hits the beam at its zenith (highest point), it shows no shadow, and thus the sun dial can be used to tell time of day and dates, as a calendar.
Machu Picchu’s Possible Purpose(s):
While Machu Picchu was almost certainly used as a special retreat for the Inca nobility, some of the alternate purposes of Machu Picchu may have also included:
- A place for agricultural experimentation, using a series of carefully constructed terraces with a complex irrigation and drainage system,
- A smaller city center / economic hub (as an alternative to Cusco) complete with shops and space for people to apprentice in various artesan crafts and trades,
- A space for ceremonial and ritual religious sites, including various temples, such as the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Mother Earth, the Temple of the Moon, the Temple of the Condor and the Temple of the Three Windows:
- A powerful astronomical solar and lunar observatory, with a sun dial at a 13 degree angle to aid with reading times and calendar dates.
- A place to practice experimental city engineering and planning on the part of Pachacuti, the 9th Inca King and first emperor, who was also responsible for planning much of the city of Cusco.
The Inca Empire: Further Resources for Exploration
While I have learned so much about the Inca civilization here in Peru and Pre-Incan Indigenous cultures in Ecuador, this post in no way does this hugely fascinating and complex topic justice. Since all I have done in this post and in this blog is scratch the surface of all there is to know and understand about the Inca and Pre-Inca, I’d like to also suggest a couple of otheThe Great Inka Road is a wonderful coffee table book full of engaging essays, photographs, maps, and easy to digest information about the Inca Empire that also has an accompanying online site produced by the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian with great content to incorporate into a K-12 setting. I will take the following brief description from their online site as it, since it is more concise and useful than anything I’d be able to put into words in a single paragraph:
The Inka called their empire Tawantinsuyu, which means “the four regions together.” At its peak, the empire covered much of western South America.The Inka Empire rose rapidly and burned bright. In little more than 100 years, it grew from a small kingdom in the highlands of Peru to become the largest empire in the Americas.The Qhapaq Ñan, or Road of the Inka, made this triumph possible. A vast complex of roads, bridges, and other structures, the Qhapaq Ñan was the largest construction in the Western Hemisphere when Inka power was at its height. The Inka state used the road system strategically to oversee diverse populations within an empire of 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles), the equivalent of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas combined.
Want to know more? Click around on the Great Inca Road’s accompanying online site to explore content you might want to use related to teaching about:
- Ancestors of the Inca
- The Inca Universe
- The Spanish Colonial Invasion starting in the 1500s
- The Spanish Colonial Invasion in the 1500s
- The Inca Road Today
The Great Inka Road is a complement to a major National Museum of the American Indian exhibition of the same title. Therefore, if you find yourself in or near Washington, D.C. In the United States, a field trip to this museum exhibit would also be a great way to bring some of the history and culture of the Inca to life for your students. I am hoping to perhaps add a visit to this museum and exhibit to our trip itinerary to Washington D.C. with eighth graders who are interested next year!
Here is another website I’ve found that have great content to supplement what I’ve shared above:
If you liked this article, click the 💚 below so other people will see it here on Medium.
Also, note that you can see pictures of my travel here:
Fulbright Hays Teaching the Andes PhotoStream
@beckyjoy — personal instagram
