What Is Machu Picchu? An Inca Estate the Spanish Never Found
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On 24 July 1911 a Yale lecturer named Hiram Bingham, looking for the last capital of the Incas, was led by a local farmer up a ridge 2,430 metres above the Urubamba river to a set of stone terraces and buildings under the forest, with two families farming among them. It was not the city he was looking for, and it was not lost, since people in the valley had always known it, but it was something the Spanish conquerors had never reached and therefore never wrecked, and it is the most complete Inca site that exists. What it was for was worked out only in the last thirty years.
What it was
Bingham thought it was the birthplace of the Incas, then the refuge of the last of them, and neither was right. Sixteenth-century documents found in the 1980s show that the estate belonged to Pachacuti, the ninth Inca ruler, who built the empire from a small kingdom around Cusco into a state that ran the length of the Andes between about 1438 and 1471, and that it was built around 1450 as a royal retreat: a country palace where the emperor, his family and court came in the dry season, with a staff of a few hundred to run it and a permanent population of perhaps 750. It had a temple of the sun, the ruler's residence, quarters for nobles and for the servants, storehouses, and terraces that grew maize and potatoes for the household, and it was one of several such estates that each Inca built for himself and his lineage.
How it was built
The site is a saddle between two peaks, Machu Picchu, old peak, and Huayna Picchu, young peak, above a bend in the river, and the engineering that let a town sit there is mostly underground. The Incas terraced the slopes with retaining walls backed by layers of stone, gravel and topsoil that drain the four metres of annual rain, and they built the buildings on foundations that go deep into the terraces; about 60 percent of the construction is below the surface, which is why it has stood through five centuries of earthquakes and downpours. Sixteen fountains fed by a spring run down through the town in a stone channel. The features:
- •Around 200 buildings on the ridge, of granite quarried on the site
- •The finest walls cut from blocks fitted without mortar so closely that a blade cannot enter, in the imperial style reserved for temples and the ruler
- •The Intihuatana, a carved stone on the highest point whose name means hitching post of the sun, aligned to the solstices
- •The Temple of the Sun, a curved wall whose window catches the sunrise at the June solstice, built around a natural rock
- •Terraces totalling about five hectares, enough to feed the estate but not a city
- •A road, part of the Inca network of 40,000 kilometres, connecting it to Cusco three days' walk away
Why it was abandoned
The Spanish reached Cusco in 1533, and the Inca state collapsed in civil war, smallpox and conquest within a decade; the royal estates lost their purpose when the emperors who owned them were dead, and Machu Picchu seems to have been left by about 1572, when the last Inca resistance in the mountains was crushed. The Spanish never went there, and no chronicle mentions it. The forest took it, the terraces went on being farmed intermittently by people from the valley, and it appeared on a map in 1874 and in a local landowner's records before Bingham arrived with a camera and the National Geographic Society, which put it on the cover in 1913 and made it the emblem of the Incas.
The bones and the argument
Bingham excavated in 1912 and shipped some 5,000 objects and about 170 skeletons to Yale, under an agreement whose terms Peru later disputed; after a century of argument the collections were returned to Cusco in 2011 and 2012. The bones settled a question. They were not, as Bingham thought, overwhelmingly female, which he had taken as evidence of a convent of the Virgins of the Sun, but a mixed population, and isotopes in the teeth showed that they had come from across the empire, from the coast and the highlands, which fits a royal staff drawn from every province. The site's meaning has thus moved from the mystical to the domestic: it was a great house, in the most spectacular position its owner could command.
Machu Picchu now
About a million and a half people visited each year before 2020, up a switchback road from the town below or on foot along the Inca Trail, and the numbers are limited by ticket to protect the terraces from the weight. It was declared a World Heritage site in 1983 and one of the new seven wonders in a 2007 poll, and the Peruvian government has argued with Yale, with UNESCO, with the operators of the railway and with the descendants of the landowners over who owns what. The site remains what the Incas made it, a royal house on a mountain whose builders left no writing and whose visitors, since a farmer led a lecturer up the hill, have had to infer everything from the stones.
The takeaway
Machu Picchu was a royal estate built around 1450 for the Inca emperor Pachacuti on a ridge above the Urubamba, a dry-season palace with a temple, terraces, fountains and a staff drawn from across the empire, engineered on deep drained foundations that have survived five centuries. Abandoned after the Spanish conquest and never found by the Spanish, it was farmed by local people, published to the world by Hiram Bingham in 1911, and understood as a country house rather than a lost city only when the documents and the bones were read.