Sawse - Stir it Up!

Machu Picchu is an ancient Incan city, shrouded in the mountains of Peru. It was not discovered until 1911 when Hiram Bingham, an American explorer who was in fact looking for The Lost City of Gold, stumbled upon the ruins. However, what many might not know is that people had actually been living in the ruins long before Bingham set foot in Peru. These indigenous people had neither the means nor opportunity to bring the “lost city” to the attention of the outside world.

Part of the fascination that visitors to this magical place feel is that of being entangled in the mystery surrounding the origin of the place. They can let their imagination wander free among the ancient walls and the sub tropical forests. Though no written documents exist to verify any historical events, something important must have occurred there during the Inca period.

The site is quite easily the most amazing thing you can feast your eyes on. Machu Picchu was completely swathed by a dense jungle, which was cleared away because of a great expectation of finding gold and treasure. The only things the explorers managed to find were the skeletons of an abandoned city, and some bodies. Machu Picchu was the only Incan city that was spared during the Spanish onslaught; the reason why it was built and who lived there is still a mystery. Initially all the bodies exhumed were that of women, leading archaeologists to conclude that it was a city for a chosen set of women, but soon they discovered tombs which held men’s corpses as well, which made the ratio closer to even.
Another theory is that it was a site to train the next Inca generation. This theory stemmed from the fact that Machu Picchu had two schools, one for boys and the other for girls. The boy’s school was assumed to be for training the next Incas, and the girl’s school was supposedly for training girls who have been selected to be the next Incas’ wives. However, nothing concrete has ever been recorded and the mystery still lingers.

Machu Picchu stuns with its amazing architecture. The stones have nearly perfect right angles. The amount of patience it must have taken to sit scraping at a single stone for months is awe-inspiring in itself. It was an Incan tradition to carry a stone up the mountain when visiting Machu Picchuas a gesture of the hard work that went into building the city.

The Lost City of Gold that Bingham was after is said to actually exist. There have been many who claim to have seen this city deep in the jungle. For those of you who are already packing their bags, you might be interested to know that it is guarded by an ancient tribe which supposedly loves tearing up and examining the entrails of white people. The tribe is said to allow only those with high spiritual growth to pass through the jungle. How they measure spiritual growth is still not known, so the careless traveler may end up dead before he even gets to prove his spiritual growth.

One important artifact found in Machu Picchu is the “intihuatana”, which is basically a column of stones that rises from a rectangle block of stone the size of a piano. Intihuatana translates to “hitching post of the sun”. During the winter solstice, the Incas thought that the sun had disappeared into the sky. Accordingly, a ceremony was conducted by the priest to tie the sun to the stone in order to prevent it from disappearing altogether.

The intihuatanas in the other cities were decimated by the Spanish, since the Spanish never found Machu Picchu, it remained unscathed. Visiting Machu Picchu requires a long train ride through the Peruvian Andes, which makes you wonder if it’s really worth the trip. Once you arrive at the site, however, it is so spectacular that you would scold would certainly be glad that you took the time and effort to get there.

The newer objects that have been excavated at Machu Picchu have led to some startling conclusions. Machu Picchu was neither a spiritual center, as Bingham concluded, nor was it a refuge for the defeated Incas. It was a high altitude luxury retreat for the elite few, like an Inca Aspen. This hypothesis is theorized on the basis of the findings of a number of vicuna wool tunics, which only royalty were allowed to wear.

Carbon dating of the artifacts found in the site discredited Bingham’s theory that the city was occupied for centuries. The city was active for less than a hundred years before being abandoned. The fact that it was never discovered by Spanish invaders at the time of the conquest, and even during their centuries of colonial rule, suggests that it was long abandoned and forgotten. The objects found at Machu Picchu are similar to artifacts that have been found all over the Inca Empire, so it is possible that the city’s inhabitants were from different ethnic groups and spoke different languages. This new interpretation came after nearly 90 years had passed since Hiram Bingham III whacked the bushes around him to the highest ridge in the Andes and was treated to a dreamscape straight out of the pre-Columbian era. Shrouded amidst the mist and cloud was Machu Picchu, with the imperial stones that gently rise from the verdant undergrowth.
The expression “lost city” was popularized by Bingham, and came to be the fuel for imagination run wild. Finding Machu Picchu proved to be much easier than trying to uncover the mystery that surrounded it. The towering structure was no doubt an architectural marvel, and attested to the audacity of the Incas, but the questions of who lived in this isolated place and for what purpose, were always met with silence. Bingham proposed three hypotheses, each of them completely off base, but improvements in technology and the revival in research at the site, have to an extent, demystified Machu Picchu.

Tags: Discovery of Machu Picchu, Machu Picchu history, Mystery of Machu Picchu, Peruvian Tour