Ghosts of Machu Picchu (2010) Movie Script
1
High in the Peruvian Andes, there's
an ancient city called Machu Picchu.
lt is a ruin that defies explanation.
Who were the mysterious people who built
it and why did they build it here?
With no defensive wall,
it doesn't look like a fortress.
instead, there are fountains
and small pools...
temples...
and strange altars cut from granite...
...but little else
to explain how a people
who didn't have iron tools or the wheel
could have created
such a masterpiece...and why.
Now, new research
is solving these mysteries...
in the bodies and bones
of the people who once lived here...
To me this is the type of injury
more indicative of a weapon...
possibly of warfare.
There are clues far below the city...
and underneath it...
...and in the stories
of the mummies of kings.
Will all these revelations finally
lay the ghosts of Machu Picchu to rest?
Perched at 2,450 meters
on a narrow ridge in the high Andes
Machu Picchu is a remote
and mysterious ancient wonder.
Spread across the top of this ridge
are more than 200 structures
each built with exquisitely cut stone.
Some appear to be homes...others temples.
They surround a hectare green...
and all are fed
by open waterways and fountains.
It is a lost city, whose doorways and
passages hint at the ghosts of its past.
A place that is
at once beautiful and baffling.
There are no written clues in the city...
no carvings to suggest a purpose.
At its highest point,
the mystery only deepens.
There,
a beautifully carved pillar stands,
a graceful riddle to cap the site.
From this lofty height, the views
leave one stunned, but also curious.
How did the builders
get all this stone up here
and then cut it so finely
that they didn't even need mortar
to hold their walls in place?
Who built Machu Picchu?
And why did they build it
in this impossible place?
Even more perplexing,
why did they abandon it?
Throughout the city,
stones seemed to be on the verge
of being placed when work came to a stop.
Now, as never before, clues are emerging.
Some at the site
itself in new excavations.
Others at the lower
reaches of Machu Picchu
as teams explore them
for the very first time.
These mysteries have long
obsessed Fernando Astete,
director of the Machu Picchu
Archaeological Park.
There is such an important cultural legacy
here, not just for Peruvians,
but a legacy forthe entire world.
Making sense of that legacy is Astete's
challenge-along with getting to work.
He has one of the most precarious
commutes of anyone on the planet.
His path was built by a people
who were sure-footed with little fear
of heights
the Inca.
They rose to power in the mid-1400s in
part because they built such good roads.
Much of their 16,000 kilometer
network is still visible today.
They left other evidence that they
were master engineers and builders.
Their terraces, canals and stone
cities rival those of ancient Rome.
But unlike the ancient Romans,
they did all of this without the wheel,
without iron and without
a written language.
The Inca did have a calculating system
using knotted strings called khipu,
but it left no record
of their lives or their history.
So, much of what
we do know comes from the Spanish
who conquered them in the 1500s.
These accounts carry
the bias of conquerors.
A different view comes from
an Inca artist named Guaman Poma.
Poma was born shortly after the Spanish
arrived in Peru so he was
an observer who bridged both worlds.
He produced hundreds of simple
drawings about farming techniques,
royalty and the Inca history of conquest.
From both these sources,
we know the Inca were fierce warriors who
subjugated dozens of different peoples,
forging them into one
of the largest empires in the world,
stretching some 3800 kilometers.
They fed their people
by transforming steep slopes
into farmland with
the rise and run of terracing.
It's believed that more land was
under cultivation during Inca times
than is today in modern Peru.
But the most surprising
detail about the Inca
is that they ruled for only 100 years.
Then their empire was decimated,
first by disease, then civil war,
finally the Spanish Conquistadors.
From the Spanish, we know that
the last Inca emperor retreated into
the mountains,
to a city called Vilcabamba.
The Inca held out at Vilcabamba
for 35 years, until, finally,
in 1572 the Spanish destroyed the city.
Strangely, they left no written
record of where it was located...
and the legend of the lost
city of Vilcabamba was born.
It was a mystery
that had powerful allure.
Almost 350 years later,
it pulled an American explorer named
Hiram Bingham here on a quest to find it.
On the morning of July 24, 191 1 ,
Bingham, camera at the ready, reached the
top of a ridge and stepped into history.
"lt fairly took my breath away",
he later wrote.
Bingham's photos marked
one of the first times
that a moment of discovery
had been captured on film.
Today, those pictures are part
of a rare 23-volume explorer's
album detailing Bingham's discovery.
But what, exactly, had he found?
He called it by its local name
Machu Picchu, but he thought
it was the lost city of Vilcabamba.
A year later, when his team
discovered over 100 burials,
Bingham believed he'd found
the evidence to make his case.
After thorough examination, Bingham
and his bone expert, Dr. George Eaton,
reached an astonishing conclusion:
80 percent of the dead were women.
Eaton's data gave a sex ratio of 4 to 1,
4 times as many females as males.
Four to one really would
be a tremendous bias
and I think that's
what got Eaton excited.
He thought,
"My God, they're almost all women".
What could explain
a predominantly female cemetery?
Bingham thought he'd found the remains
Of the so-called Virgins of the Sun.
According to Spanish accounts,
the most beautiful girls in the empire
were chosen for this sacred convent.
Selected around the age of eight,
these virgins served the Inca emperor
for the rest of their lives.
Bingham guessed that when the last Inca
king retreated into the mountains
to escape the Spanish,
he took his sacred virgins with him.
So it all added up.
The skeletons of the virgins confirmed
that this spectacular city in the sky
had to be Vilcabamba.
Clearly for him, it created a great
magical romantic kind of picture that,
that made good book reading.
When published in the April 1913
issue of National Geographic,
the story was an overnight sensation.
Bingham became a star.
The only problem was
that the theory was wrong.
Investigations of other Inca ruins
revealed that the Spanish desecrated
almost every Inca
holy site they could find.
At Machu Picchu,
the entire city remained untouched.
But the most convincing
evidence against Bingham's theory
was in the very bones
he had found at the site.
When forensic anthropologist,
John Verano, re-examined them,
he found that the sex of
the skeletons was almost evenly split,
a far cry from Eaton's 4 to 1 ratio.
To figure out the sex of a skeleton,
you have to compare it
across many ethnic and racial groups.
Eaton's references were limited
to people of European or African descent.
People in the Andes are,
are relatively short, delicately built.
And I can only guess that what
he was looking at was bone size
and he said this looks like
a small person, therefore it's female.
In Bingham's collection, Verano also
found the bones of several children
and children and virgins
just didn't add up.
I just, I can't find
evidence to support that idea
that these were virgins of the sun.
I think that,
that can be pretty well ruled out.
Without the virgins
or any sign of Spanish desecration,
there was no proof to support Bingham's
theory that this was Vilcabamba.
So what was it?
With so few written records,
archeologists like Fernando Astete
must piece together clues about
Machu Picchu's history
wherever they can find them.
And he thinks he's just found one
in a nearby town called Patallacta.
Patallacta was important
because it supplied the food
for all the people
living at Machu Picchu.
Patallacta is a few hours
walk from Machu Picchu
along the main Inca
trail through the region.
lt is the closest place to Machu Picchu
where large-scale farming
could have taken place.
The people who lived at Patallacta
weren't just farmers though,
they likely played many roles-they could
have been stoneworkers, builders,
laborers.
Astete's best hope for understanding
Machu Picchu is to learn about the people
who lived here
the possible builders of the city.
Above the old Inca town,
up a nearly vertical slope,
a local guide has found
what looks like a burial niche.
Astete and fellow archaeologist,
Elva Torres,
believe it may be undisturbed
a gravesite last touched 500 years ago.
Hey, what's up?
And the tomb?
It's sealed.
We need to open it.
Before the tomb can be opened,
Astete's Quechua guide
makes an offering of coca leaves
to the spirits that dwell here, just
as his Inca forbearers would have done.
Pass it to me, pass it to me.
Be careful so the others don't fall.
Astete and Torres have investigated
many other burials in the area.
Most are far more accessible.
This tomb...has been constructed.
The other tombs don't use this style.
They're simply in caves, in natural
rock formations that are easy to get to.
Do you see anything?
No, it's very dark.
In the dim tomb light...
a human skull.
Yes, I see a skull.
So there's a skull and lots of bones.
Be careful, don't step on anything.
As Torres enters the cramped tomb,
the find only gets more tantalizing.
It appears there's
a couple of individuals.
But as she investigates, she finds
a lot more skeletons-nine in all.
And many show signs of injury.
Well, this problem regarding fractures...
they could be from everyday activities.
They could have been from a fall,
something may have fallen on them or
perhaps some other sort of activity.
In this case, they may have been
working in the quarries.
Could these be the skeletons
Of the builders of Machu Picchu?
They can't be sure until
they take a closer look in the lab.
There, Torres is joined
by bio-archeologist Valerie Andrushko.
Right away, they find some surprises
in the skulls from Patallacta.
They're full of holes.
It's the sign of
a procedure called trepanation.
Trepanation is the partial removal
of part ofthe skull
that the Inca practiced with very
high degrees of success.
Our understanding is that trepanation
was often done in order to release
intracranial pressure due to fractures.
It's skull surgery,
and healed wounds found throughout
the empire show that the Inca
were skilled at using
it to treat head trauma.
When we see evidence for trauma,
the question is always, is it related
to accidents or is related to violence?
This individual right here, this is
a complete fracture of the frontal bone.
It has perforated all
the way to the frontal sinus.
This type of injury
is not the type of injury
that one would
get from an accidental fall.
To me, this is the type of injury more
indicative of a weapon type injury,
possibly indicative of warfare.
In fact, several skulls from the tombs
show signs of blunt force trauma,
the type of fracture
you'd get from a club.
So these weren't builders
they were likely warriors.
Possibly, these individuals
may have been engaged in defense
of the sites around them, possibly
engaged in the defense of Machu Picchu.
This revelation stands in stark contrast
to the appearance of Machu Picchu
as a religious sanctuary.
This is a city dominated
by sacred temples and shrines.
The Temple of the Three Windows.
The Temple of the Condor, named
for its carved floor and stone wings.
The elegantly curved Temple of the Sun,
built on a rock that is
illuminated on the solstice.
And, at the highest point in the city,
a stone pillar known as the Intihuatana.
The evidence seems to be in conflict:
was Machu Picchu a military
fortress orwas it a religious center?
The answer can perhaps be found
in the ancient capital of Cusco
where the descendants
of the Inca still live.
Every year, during the Roman Catholic
festival of Corpus Christi,
statues of the Virgin Mary,
along with 15 other saints,
are removed from the cathedral
and brought to the square.
These performers may be paying
homage to Christian saints,
but the instruments they play
and the steps they move
to are actually Inca in origin.
That's because this Corpus Christi
procession is a Christian revision
of an Inca ritual.
Five hundred years ago, the Inca
also processed through Cusco.
But they didn't carry statues of saints.
They carried the mummies of their kings
whom they revered as gods.
It was likely one of these kings
who built Machu Picchu.
The quality of the stonework
alone suggests the city was royal.
Fernando Astete estimates that it would
have taken at least 50 years to complete.
Since the Inca Empire
only lasted 100 years,
focus has been on the earliest kings.
The accounts of a Spanish Jesuit named
Bernabe Cobo point to a dynamic leader
who founded the Inca Empire,
a king named Pachacuti.
But no one could ever prove
that Pachacuti built Machu Picchu.
A small clue was hidden in his name,
which means, "He who remakes the world.
Pachacuti was sort
of the Alexander the Great of the Incas.
He was the one who started
the expansion out of the Cusco region
and the Inca Empire began
to expand tremendously over areas
that had never been
conquered by the Incas before.
What we know of Pachacuti's history
is due in part to Father Cobo.
Cobo arrived in Peru after
the conquest in the late 1500s
and wrote his account based on interviews
with descendants of the Inca.
According to Father Cobo,
Pachacuti was renowned as a builder.
Having enlarged his empire with
so many and such vast provinces,
during the remainder
of his life this king devoted himself
to building magnificent temples
and palaces and strong castles.
The beautiful stonework at Machu Picchu-
so similar in style to Pachacuti's
temples in other Inca cities
suggests that the same
hand was behind the structures here.
But the most convincing evidence
linking Pachacuti to Machu Picchu
comes from a Spanish register,
held in the Colonial Archives in Cusco.
Dated 1568, it mentions
the town of Picchu
with a clear reference to its owner,
Inca Yupanqui, also known as Pachacuti.
The evidence is convincing.
It is Pachacuti, the first Inca emperor,
who ordered Machu Picchu's construction
and in a place that
would give any engineer pause.
If I was called in by Pachacuti
and ordered to build Machu Picchu at that
particular location, I would've gulped.
Engineering wise, it would seem
almost impossible to handle.
Fifteen years of study
by hydrologist Ken Wright
and a team of engineers is revealing
how the Inca pulled this off...
because the steepness
of the site isn't the only problem.
Machu Picchu also receives
torrential rains each year,
triggering frequent landslides.
And the site is crossed by not one,
but two earthquake fault lines,
making it a terrible place
on which to build a city of stone.
The location does have two virtues:
a nearby fresh water spring
and a supply of granite
there's a quarry right on the site.
When the Inca engineers
turned to building,
their first step would have been
to shore up the mountain.
They did it by constructing
a remarkable bulwark of terraces.
As Astete's team rappels
further down the cliff face,
they are discovering hundreds
of new terraces hidden below.
Usually, when people
refer to Machu Picchu,
they're only thinking about the Inca
buildings on top of the ridge.
But construction
has to begin at the bottom.
In other words,
you have to start with the terraces.
Terraces are fundamental to Machu Picchu.
While some terraces would have been
used for small-scale farming,
their primary purpose
was to hold the mountain in place
while draining a huge
volume of rainwater away.
That averages about 76 inches per year
and in terms of let's say Middle America,
that's a lot of water,
roughly two and halftimes as much as
the city of Chicago would get.
Left unmanaged,
that rainwater would turn the hillsides
to mud and Machu Picchu would slide away.
The Inca avoided that by creating
a sophisticated drainage system.
Inside the terraces, archaeologists
found a layer of rich topsoil.
Under that, a layer of sandy dirt,
and finally, gravel and larger stones.
We could say that they are
filtering galleries, meaning,
even when you get a lot of rain,
the terraces never flood
because the water is filtered
through these progressive
layers of material.
Instead of racing down the mountain,
the water slowly works its way into
the ground so there's almost no erosion.
With this basic design in hand,
the Inca fixed the first terrace into
the mountain, then started on the next,
replicating their way to the top.
Once there, Inca engineers had to reckon
with an even bigger water problem.
This is a city paved with stone
with few places for rainwater to go.
But the Inca had foreseen that problem,
and during construction carefully
placed more than a hundred drains
throughout the city.
Many of these drains delivered the runoff
from the elevated parts
of the city into the central plaza.
Further digging there revealed
a remarkable innovation
to handle all of that water.
Beneath the usual layers
of top-soil and gravelly dirt,
Wright's team hit a thick
layer of white granite chips
the spoil from years
of Inca stone cutting.
In effect, what the Inca did was
to build an underground drainage system,
a type of conduit,
to carry water safely away.
These were colossal earthworks,
extending nearly 2.7
meters below the surface
and encompassing several hectares.
They collected water
and shunted it away from the city.
The Inca engineers
spent about 50 percent,
maybe 60 percent over their overall
effort, underground, doing foundations,
site preparation, to make sure
that Machu Picchu would last forever.
So as vast as the city appears,
there's 60 percent more of it
underground, holding it all in place.
While the lnca went to great
lengths to get rid of water,
they also built fountains
which seem to celebrate it.
There are 16 fountains in the city,
each beautifully designed...
and a practical source of drinking water.
The fountains
are fed by a natural spring,
found nearby on the flanks
of Machu Picchu Mountain.
From there, the Inca engineered
a canal whose 3 percent grade
was carefully crafted to deliver just the
right amount of water to the fountains.
Wright calculated the flow to be
between 23 and 1 14 liters per minute
depending on the time of year
enough to sustain a population
of close to a thousand people.
It was remarkable, it was something
that created great respect by us,
for the Inca engineers
all those years ago.
It is a respect
also shared by Astete's team
as they restore
the Inca's original stonework.
In spite of their lack of iron tools,
the Inca were somehow able to transform
granite, a notoriously hard stone.
There's a clue to how they
did this in Machu Picchu's quarry.
We see here the basic method
the Inca used to cut rocks.
The idea is to create a "neck" in the
block and then cause it to fracture.
It was bone-jarring work.
The technique the Inca
used was direct hammering.
With the rough blocks, they'd
start with a large tool, like this one.
As you can see...it sheers very easily.
Then they'd gradually use the smaller
and harder tools to give it that strong,
smooth surface.
Once the cutters had roughed it out,
they put the stone on log rollers or mud
and pulled it close
to the construction site.
The final step was to move the stone
into place, and match it to its mate.
And here is the indentation they made,
which matches the edge
of the rock below it.
It's held up by this wedge until
they shape the two surfaces to match.
Then the wedge is removed and
the two stones fit together perfectly.
Here you can see...the brace points they
used to push the block up into place.
They put beams here to lift the rock up.
Once the rock was in place,
these points were beaten, just as you see
here, and here, in all these other rocks.
That means that the finishing
work was done at the site.
We can see that
this corner wasn't finished yet.
All this portion was yet to be cut off
in order to finish the wall.
Driven by a royal
mandate to build it here,
Machu Picchu is a tribute
to Inca engineering and artistry.
Its hundreds of terraces
buttress it from below.
The granite walls
are still solid after 500 years
because of a remarkable drainage system.
And it is crowned by
an ingenious lacework of fountains
cascading from the mountain spring above.
But why go to all this effort?
Why did Pachacuti order Machu Picchu
built in this forbidding place...
was it for religious reasons?
What we know of Inca religion comes again
from the chronicles of Father Bernabe Cobo
written after the Spanish Conquest.
They worship with equal reverence
and with the same ceremonial
services the sun, water, earth,
and many other things
that they held to be divine.
The Inca believed
that the sun and the mountains
were deities that had
to be appeased through ritual.
Cobo reported that one
of these rituals was child sacrifice.
This claim was dramatically confirmed
in 1999 by high altitude archaeologist
Johan Reinhard.
Then, Reinhard discovered three
perfectly preserved child mummies
on a high peak in Argentina,
in the southern part of the Inca Empire.
They had been sacrificed as an offering
to the same mountain gods Cobo described.
Perhaps the mystery of Machu Picchu's
location can be explained
by this reverence for the landscape.
We know that throughout the Andes
that people believed that the natural
environment has sacred aspects to it.
These landscape features...
at Machu Picchu...have helped explain
what otherwise is a tremendous mystery.
This idea, called
the sacred landscape theory,
suggests that in addition to worshipping
the sun, rivers and mountains as gods,
the Inca derived power by being
physically connected to them.
So, is that why Machu Picchu was here?
Machu Picchu is an unusual
place to build even for the Inca.
Their capital, now modern-day Cusco,
and other Inca towns like Pisac,
are in flatter, more accessible terrain.
It's also remote-a five-day walk from
the capital in Inca times and today,
it takes tourists four hours by train
followed by a harrowing
bus ride up to the ruins.
But throughout the site
are hints why the Inca thought
that this place was worth the trouble.
In certain places,
the Inca carved stones in the shape
of sacred peaks surrounding the city,
then displayed them
like massive, holy icons.
Even Bingham was struck by stones
like this one-called the Sacred Rock
that mirrors the outline of
Mount Yanantin directly to the northeast.
In Inca times, visitors
would approach Machu Picchu
from above where they could see the city
is surrounded by the holy Urubamba River.
For an agricultural people,
there was nothing
more important than water
and here was a place
firmly in the water's embrace.
There is one more piece
of evidence connecting Machu Picchu
to the sacred landscape.
At the top of a pyramid
shaped peak within the complex
is the sacred pillar
known as the Intihuatana.
This sacred pillar is in alignment
with four mountain gods
of supreme importance to the Inca,
according to Johann Reinhard.
The Intihuatana is situated such that
it's at a high point
in the center of the entire complex.
But at the same time,
it's the center of this massive landscape
because you have in the far distance
these great snowcapped peaks.
The highest ones in the entire region.
They also happen to correspond
to the cardinal directions.
Its views to sacred peaks,
proximity to the holy river,
and the alignment
with four powerful mountain gods
must have made this location
irresistible to the Inca.
But how did the first Inca emperor,
Pachacuti, actually use Machu Picchu?
Within the city,
there was a distinctive royal residence.
lt is located near the first fountain,
insuring that the king would have
the purest water to drink.
It's also close to the holiest temples.
But whether the city was
Pachacuti's royal court,
a religious center
or a military post remains a mystery.
A re-analysis of the skeletons
that Hiram Bingham
found suggests a possible solution.
During Bingham's excavation in 1912,
his team mistakenly identified these
skeletons as the virgins of the sun.
Recently, they've been re-examined.
If we could identify
who these people were,
it might explain
how Machu Picchu was used.
During his study, anthropologist,
John Verano found no evidence of violent
injury, so these weren't soldiers.
He also confirmed that their burials had
been simple with no high value artifacts.
That meant they weren't royalty.
In their bones, Verano found hints
that they weren't common laborers either.
Instead, they were from
a class of people in between.
I didn't see a lot of arthritis even
in the older adults at Machu Picchu
and that again made me think these are
not people working really hard in the,
with say stone masonry
or dragging rocks up the hills.
A critical clue to their identity
can be found in their diet-through
a technique called isotopic analysis.
ln this process scientists
vaporize a small sample of bone.
They are looking for the chemical traces
of the foods that have been
absorbed into its structure.
Among the vaporized particles, they found
a high percentage of carbon-13 isotopes,
which is the signature of corn.
Though it's common in Peru today,
in Inca times, corn was a royal food.
In fact, pollen analysis of the soils
from the hundreds of terraces here
shows that the little food
grown at the site was primarily corn.
And, as John Verano found,
corn leaves another signature.
Corn is rich in carbohydrates.
It's not good for your teeth.
So they had a lot of cavities, they had
a lot of abscesses, a lot of tooth loss.
So although they weren't royals,
these people frequently helped
themselves to the royal corn.
They also didn't do a lot of heavy labor.
So what were they doing here?
In some ways I guess
you could see it as a big hotel staff.
The caretakers
and servants of the estate.
This was a large staff-Verano
ultimately identified
the remains of 177 individuals.
The evidence is strong that Machu Picchu
was a royal estate for the emperor,
Pachacuti.
This would have been a peaceful retreat
where he and his courtiers
would have come to rest,
worship and enjoy themselves, their needs
tended to by well-trained royal servants.
And you can kind of imagine an entourage
of the royalty coming from Cuzco
along the road and everybody
at Machu Picchu saying whoops,
Let's get it ready, clean it up, and get
food and so on and welcome our guests.
But the new finds from the tombs at
the nearby farming center of Patallacta
don't seem to fit
with this peaceful picture.
The severe injuries in those
skeletons suggest that Machu Picchu
may have been connected to warfare.
So how could Machu Picchu
be a place of both war and peace?
According to Spanish accounts,
the Inca conquered this valley about
a decade after Pachacuti came to power.
So perhaps he built
it as a way to seal his conquest.
Incas were very
skilled in psychological warfare...
and they decide to build
this magnificent estate on the hilltop
that everybody living up
and down that valley is going to see,
from the first thing
they walk outside their door
to the last thing
that they go to bed at night.
That's a very powerful thing.
It's a message
of conquest and of possession,
that they own that land, and they control
the people who live within it.
So Machu Picchu
was a formidable symbol of Inca power,
a spectacular boast by Pachacuti,
not just of their engineering prowess,
but of their paramount link
to the sacred mountains and rivers.
Still, if this place played such
a critical role in demonstrating
the religious
and military power of the Inca,
why didn't the Spanish deface it
as they did to other sacred Inca sites?
And why isn't it ever
described in any Spanish accounts?
Part of the answer lies in the Corpus
Christi procession back in Cusco...
the annual festival that is
a Christian revision of an Inca ritual.
In that ritual, the Inca carried
mummies instead of saints...
especially the mummies of their kings.
When Pachacuti died in 1471,
he wasn't buried; he was mummified.
The exact process is unknown.
One theory suggests his body would
have been gradually freeze-dried:
left out in the searing sun by day,
and, alternately, frozen at night.
Through this repeated heating,
freezing and thawing, the corpse would
have become completely desiccated.
Curiously,
this is similar to how the local
Quetchua people preserve llama meat.
The result is jerky, which is one of
the few Quetchua words used in English.
Once preserved,
Pachacuti would not have been entombed.
Instead, he would have
continued to play an active role
in the politics
and rituals of the Inca world.
Drawings made by the Incan artist,
Guaman Poma, confirm
the use of mummies in this way.
We don't actually
have a mummy of an Inca emperor,
but we have descriptions of them
and5 we know that they were taken out
during major festivals and paraded.
We know that they had attendants
who would shoo away the flies
and give offerings every day, food
offerings, and drink to the mummies.
In other words, they were worshipped
and believed to still
play a role in the community.
Care and handling of the mummy would
have fallen to a group of family members
called the panaca who also took control
of all the king's royal estates.
But, over time, even Pachacuti's
panaca could have run short of resources.
Work at Machu Picchu may have slowed,
then stopped altogether.
The descendants of Pachacuti
had more pressing concerns.
Even before the Spanish Conquest,
small pox came.
It was followed by a bloody
civil war that left the Inca Empire
weakened and fragmented.
Barely 60 years after Pachacuti died,
the Inca Empire finally
collapsed under the Spanish invasion.
When the royal families were,
had lost their power,
they were disorganized.
There was civil war.
There was massive destruction of sites.
And the people at Machu Picchu
probably at some point just said,
Well nobody is coming to visit,
and the site really had
no reason to exist at that point.
By then, it is likely that all
but the loyal servants
had forgotten Machu Picchu.
And, after time,
even they probably just drifted away.
So the Spanish probably never heard
about Machu Picchu and more importantly,
never found it.
It was, for us, the luckiest mistake.
It meant that Machu Picchu
was left untouched
one of the only major Inca
sites to remain in tact.
While it still poses
confounding mysteries,
it also holds great promise
as new technologies
and finds allow us to come to terms
with the ghosts of Machu Picchu.
High in the Peruvian Andes, there's
an ancient city called Machu Picchu.
lt is a ruin that defies explanation.
Who were the mysterious people who built
it and why did they build it here?
With no defensive wall,
it doesn't look like a fortress.
instead, there are fountains
and small pools...
temples...
and strange altars cut from granite...
...but little else
to explain how a people
who didn't have iron tools or the wheel
could have created
such a masterpiece...and why.
Now, new research
is solving these mysteries...
in the bodies and bones
of the people who once lived here...
To me this is the type of injury
more indicative of a weapon...
possibly of warfare.
There are clues far below the city...
and underneath it...
...and in the stories
of the mummies of kings.
Will all these revelations finally
lay the ghosts of Machu Picchu to rest?
Perched at 2,450 meters
on a narrow ridge in the high Andes
Machu Picchu is a remote
and mysterious ancient wonder.
Spread across the top of this ridge
are more than 200 structures
each built with exquisitely cut stone.
Some appear to be homes...others temples.
They surround a hectare green...
and all are fed
by open waterways and fountains.
It is a lost city, whose doorways and
passages hint at the ghosts of its past.
A place that is
at once beautiful and baffling.
There are no written clues in the city...
no carvings to suggest a purpose.
At its highest point,
the mystery only deepens.
There,
a beautifully carved pillar stands,
a graceful riddle to cap the site.
From this lofty height, the views
leave one stunned, but also curious.
How did the builders
get all this stone up here
and then cut it so finely
that they didn't even need mortar
to hold their walls in place?
Who built Machu Picchu?
And why did they build it
in this impossible place?
Even more perplexing,
why did they abandon it?
Throughout the city,
stones seemed to be on the verge
of being placed when work came to a stop.
Now, as never before, clues are emerging.
Some at the site
itself in new excavations.
Others at the lower
reaches of Machu Picchu
as teams explore them
for the very first time.
These mysteries have long
obsessed Fernando Astete,
director of the Machu Picchu
Archaeological Park.
There is such an important cultural legacy
here, not just for Peruvians,
but a legacy forthe entire world.
Making sense of that legacy is Astete's
challenge-along with getting to work.
He has one of the most precarious
commutes of anyone on the planet.
His path was built by a people
who were sure-footed with little fear
of heights
the Inca.
They rose to power in the mid-1400s in
part because they built such good roads.
Much of their 16,000 kilometer
network is still visible today.
They left other evidence that they
were master engineers and builders.
Their terraces, canals and stone
cities rival those of ancient Rome.
But unlike the ancient Romans,
they did all of this without the wheel,
without iron and without
a written language.
The Inca did have a calculating system
using knotted strings called khipu,
but it left no record
of their lives or their history.
So, much of what
we do know comes from the Spanish
who conquered them in the 1500s.
These accounts carry
the bias of conquerors.
A different view comes from
an Inca artist named Guaman Poma.
Poma was born shortly after the Spanish
arrived in Peru so he was
an observer who bridged both worlds.
He produced hundreds of simple
drawings about farming techniques,
royalty and the Inca history of conquest.
From both these sources,
we know the Inca were fierce warriors who
subjugated dozens of different peoples,
forging them into one
of the largest empires in the world,
stretching some 3800 kilometers.
They fed their people
by transforming steep slopes
into farmland with
the rise and run of terracing.
It's believed that more land was
under cultivation during Inca times
than is today in modern Peru.
But the most surprising
detail about the Inca
is that they ruled for only 100 years.
Then their empire was decimated,
first by disease, then civil war,
finally the Spanish Conquistadors.
From the Spanish, we know that
the last Inca emperor retreated into
the mountains,
to a city called Vilcabamba.
The Inca held out at Vilcabamba
for 35 years, until, finally,
in 1572 the Spanish destroyed the city.
Strangely, they left no written
record of where it was located...
and the legend of the lost
city of Vilcabamba was born.
It was a mystery
that had powerful allure.
Almost 350 years later,
it pulled an American explorer named
Hiram Bingham here on a quest to find it.
On the morning of July 24, 191 1 ,
Bingham, camera at the ready, reached the
top of a ridge and stepped into history.
"lt fairly took my breath away",
he later wrote.
Bingham's photos marked
one of the first times
that a moment of discovery
had been captured on film.
Today, those pictures are part
of a rare 23-volume explorer's
album detailing Bingham's discovery.
But what, exactly, had he found?
He called it by its local name
Machu Picchu, but he thought
it was the lost city of Vilcabamba.
A year later, when his team
discovered over 100 burials,
Bingham believed he'd found
the evidence to make his case.
After thorough examination, Bingham
and his bone expert, Dr. George Eaton,
reached an astonishing conclusion:
80 percent of the dead were women.
Eaton's data gave a sex ratio of 4 to 1,
4 times as many females as males.
Four to one really would
be a tremendous bias
and I think that's
what got Eaton excited.
He thought,
"My God, they're almost all women".
What could explain
a predominantly female cemetery?
Bingham thought he'd found the remains
Of the so-called Virgins of the Sun.
According to Spanish accounts,
the most beautiful girls in the empire
were chosen for this sacred convent.
Selected around the age of eight,
these virgins served the Inca emperor
for the rest of their lives.
Bingham guessed that when the last Inca
king retreated into the mountains
to escape the Spanish,
he took his sacred virgins with him.
So it all added up.
The skeletons of the virgins confirmed
that this spectacular city in the sky
had to be Vilcabamba.
Clearly for him, it created a great
magical romantic kind of picture that,
that made good book reading.
When published in the April 1913
issue of National Geographic,
the story was an overnight sensation.
Bingham became a star.
The only problem was
that the theory was wrong.
Investigations of other Inca ruins
revealed that the Spanish desecrated
almost every Inca
holy site they could find.
At Machu Picchu,
the entire city remained untouched.
But the most convincing
evidence against Bingham's theory
was in the very bones
he had found at the site.
When forensic anthropologist,
John Verano, re-examined them,
he found that the sex of
the skeletons was almost evenly split,
a far cry from Eaton's 4 to 1 ratio.
To figure out the sex of a skeleton,
you have to compare it
across many ethnic and racial groups.
Eaton's references were limited
to people of European or African descent.
People in the Andes are,
are relatively short, delicately built.
And I can only guess that what
he was looking at was bone size
and he said this looks like
a small person, therefore it's female.
In Bingham's collection, Verano also
found the bones of several children
and children and virgins
just didn't add up.
I just, I can't find
evidence to support that idea
that these were virgins of the sun.
I think that,
that can be pretty well ruled out.
Without the virgins
or any sign of Spanish desecration,
there was no proof to support Bingham's
theory that this was Vilcabamba.
So what was it?
With so few written records,
archeologists like Fernando Astete
must piece together clues about
Machu Picchu's history
wherever they can find them.
And he thinks he's just found one
in a nearby town called Patallacta.
Patallacta was important
because it supplied the food
for all the people
living at Machu Picchu.
Patallacta is a few hours
walk from Machu Picchu
along the main Inca
trail through the region.
lt is the closest place to Machu Picchu
where large-scale farming
could have taken place.
The people who lived at Patallacta
weren't just farmers though,
they likely played many roles-they could
have been stoneworkers, builders,
laborers.
Astete's best hope for understanding
Machu Picchu is to learn about the people
who lived here
the possible builders of the city.
Above the old Inca town,
up a nearly vertical slope,
a local guide has found
what looks like a burial niche.
Astete and fellow archaeologist,
Elva Torres,
believe it may be undisturbed
a gravesite last touched 500 years ago.
Hey, what's up?
And the tomb?
It's sealed.
We need to open it.
Before the tomb can be opened,
Astete's Quechua guide
makes an offering of coca leaves
to the spirits that dwell here, just
as his Inca forbearers would have done.
Pass it to me, pass it to me.
Be careful so the others don't fall.
Astete and Torres have investigated
many other burials in the area.
Most are far more accessible.
This tomb...has been constructed.
The other tombs don't use this style.
They're simply in caves, in natural
rock formations that are easy to get to.
Do you see anything?
No, it's very dark.
In the dim tomb light...
a human skull.
Yes, I see a skull.
So there's a skull and lots of bones.
Be careful, don't step on anything.
As Torres enters the cramped tomb,
the find only gets more tantalizing.
It appears there's
a couple of individuals.
But as she investigates, she finds
a lot more skeletons-nine in all.
And many show signs of injury.
Well, this problem regarding fractures...
they could be from everyday activities.
They could have been from a fall,
something may have fallen on them or
perhaps some other sort of activity.
In this case, they may have been
working in the quarries.
Could these be the skeletons
Of the builders of Machu Picchu?
They can't be sure until
they take a closer look in the lab.
There, Torres is joined
by bio-archeologist Valerie Andrushko.
Right away, they find some surprises
in the skulls from Patallacta.
They're full of holes.
It's the sign of
a procedure called trepanation.
Trepanation is the partial removal
of part ofthe skull
that the Inca practiced with very
high degrees of success.
Our understanding is that trepanation
was often done in order to release
intracranial pressure due to fractures.
It's skull surgery,
and healed wounds found throughout
the empire show that the Inca
were skilled at using
it to treat head trauma.
When we see evidence for trauma,
the question is always, is it related
to accidents or is related to violence?
This individual right here, this is
a complete fracture of the frontal bone.
It has perforated all
the way to the frontal sinus.
This type of injury
is not the type of injury
that one would
get from an accidental fall.
To me, this is the type of injury more
indicative of a weapon type injury,
possibly indicative of warfare.
In fact, several skulls from the tombs
show signs of blunt force trauma,
the type of fracture
you'd get from a club.
So these weren't builders
they were likely warriors.
Possibly, these individuals
may have been engaged in defense
of the sites around them, possibly
engaged in the defense of Machu Picchu.
This revelation stands in stark contrast
to the appearance of Machu Picchu
as a religious sanctuary.
This is a city dominated
by sacred temples and shrines.
The Temple of the Three Windows.
The Temple of the Condor, named
for its carved floor and stone wings.
The elegantly curved Temple of the Sun,
built on a rock that is
illuminated on the solstice.
And, at the highest point in the city,
a stone pillar known as the Intihuatana.
The evidence seems to be in conflict:
was Machu Picchu a military
fortress orwas it a religious center?
The answer can perhaps be found
in the ancient capital of Cusco
where the descendants
of the Inca still live.
Every year, during the Roman Catholic
festival of Corpus Christi,
statues of the Virgin Mary,
along with 15 other saints,
are removed from the cathedral
and brought to the square.
These performers may be paying
homage to Christian saints,
but the instruments they play
and the steps they move
to are actually Inca in origin.
That's because this Corpus Christi
procession is a Christian revision
of an Inca ritual.
Five hundred years ago, the Inca
also processed through Cusco.
But they didn't carry statues of saints.
They carried the mummies of their kings
whom they revered as gods.
It was likely one of these kings
who built Machu Picchu.
The quality of the stonework
alone suggests the city was royal.
Fernando Astete estimates that it would
have taken at least 50 years to complete.
Since the Inca Empire
only lasted 100 years,
focus has been on the earliest kings.
The accounts of a Spanish Jesuit named
Bernabe Cobo point to a dynamic leader
who founded the Inca Empire,
a king named Pachacuti.
But no one could ever prove
that Pachacuti built Machu Picchu.
A small clue was hidden in his name,
which means, "He who remakes the world.
Pachacuti was sort
of the Alexander the Great of the Incas.
He was the one who started
the expansion out of the Cusco region
and the Inca Empire began
to expand tremendously over areas
that had never been
conquered by the Incas before.
What we know of Pachacuti's history
is due in part to Father Cobo.
Cobo arrived in Peru after
the conquest in the late 1500s
and wrote his account based on interviews
with descendants of the Inca.
According to Father Cobo,
Pachacuti was renowned as a builder.
Having enlarged his empire with
so many and such vast provinces,
during the remainder
of his life this king devoted himself
to building magnificent temples
and palaces and strong castles.
The beautiful stonework at Machu Picchu-
so similar in style to Pachacuti's
temples in other Inca cities
suggests that the same
hand was behind the structures here.
But the most convincing evidence
linking Pachacuti to Machu Picchu
comes from a Spanish register,
held in the Colonial Archives in Cusco.
Dated 1568, it mentions
the town of Picchu
with a clear reference to its owner,
Inca Yupanqui, also known as Pachacuti.
The evidence is convincing.
It is Pachacuti, the first Inca emperor,
who ordered Machu Picchu's construction
and in a place that
would give any engineer pause.
If I was called in by Pachacuti
and ordered to build Machu Picchu at that
particular location, I would've gulped.
Engineering wise, it would seem
almost impossible to handle.
Fifteen years of study
by hydrologist Ken Wright
and a team of engineers is revealing
how the Inca pulled this off...
because the steepness
of the site isn't the only problem.
Machu Picchu also receives
torrential rains each year,
triggering frequent landslides.
And the site is crossed by not one,
but two earthquake fault lines,
making it a terrible place
on which to build a city of stone.
The location does have two virtues:
a nearby fresh water spring
and a supply of granite
there's a quarry right on the site.
When the Inca engineers
turned to building,
their first step would have been
to shore up the mountain.
They did it by constructing
a remarkable bulwark of terraces.
As Astete's team rappels
further down the cliff face,
they are discovering hundreds
of new terraces hidden below.
Usually, when people
refer to Machu Picchu,
they're only thinking about the Inca
buildings on top of the ridge.
But construction
has to begin at the bottom.
In other words,
you have to start with the terraces.
Terraces are fundamental to Machu Picchu.
While some terraces would have been
used for small-scale farming,
their primary purpose
was to hold the mountain in place
while draining a huge
volume of rainwater away.
That averages about 76 inches per year
and in terms of let's say Middle America,
that's a lot of water,
roughly two and halftimes as much as
the city of Chicago would get.
Left unmanaged,
that rainwater would turn the hillsides
to mud and Machu Picchu would slide away.
The Inca avoided that by creating
a sophisticated drainage system.
Inside the terraces, archaeologists
found a layer of rich topsoil.
Under that, a layer of sandy dirt,
and finally, gravel and larger stones.
We could say that they are
filtering galleries, meaning,
even when you get a lot of rain,
the terraces never flood
because the water is filtered
through these progressive
layers of material.
Instead of racing down the mountain,
the water slowly works its way into
the ground so there's almost no erosion.
With this basic design in hand,
the Inca fixed the first terrace into
the mountain, then started on the next,
replicating their way to the top.
Once there, Inca engineers had to reckon
with an even bigger water problem.
This is a city paved with stone
with few places for rainwater to go.
But the Inca had foreseen that problem,
and during construction carefully
placed more than a hundred drains
throughout the city.
Many of these drains delivered the runoff
from the elevated parts
of the city into the central plaza.
Further digging there revealed
a remarkable innovation
to handle all of that water.
Beneath the usual layers
of top-soil and gravelly dirt,
Wright's team hit a thick
layer of white granite chips
the spoil from years
of Inca stone cutting.
In effect, what the Inca did was
to build an underground drainage system,
a type of conduit,
to carry water safely away.
These were colossal earthworks,
extending nearly 2.7
meters below the surface
and encompassing several hectares.
They collected water
and shunted it away from the city.
The Inca engineers
spent about 50 percent,
maybe 60 percent over their overall
effort, underground, doing foundations,
site preparation, to make sure
that Machu Picchu would last forever.
So as vast as the city appears,
there's 60 percent more of it
underground, holding it all in place.
While the lnca went to great
lengths to get rid of water,
they also built fountains
which seem to celebrate it.
There are 16 fountains in the city,
each beautifully designed...
and a practical source of drinking water.
The fountains
are fed by a natural spring,
found nearby on the flanks
of Machu Picchu Mountain.
From there, the Inca engineered
a canal whose 3 percent grade
was carefully crafted to deliver just the
right amount of water to the fountains.
Wright calculated the flow to be
between 23 and 1 14 liters per minute
depending on the time of year
enough to sustain a population
of close to a thousand people.
It was remarkable, it was something
that created great respect by us,
for the Inca engineers
all those years ago.
It is a respect
also shared by Astete's team
as they restore
the Inca's original stonework.
In spite of their lack of iron tools,
the Inca were somehow able to transform
granite, a notoriously hard stone.
There's a clue to how they
did this in Machu Picchu's quarry.
We see here the basic method
the Inca used to cut rocks.
The idea is to create a "neck" in the
block and then cause it to fracture.
It was bone-jarring work.
The technique the Inca
used was direct hammering.
With the rough blocks, they'd
start with a large tool, like this one.
As you can see...it sheers very easily.
Then they'd gradually use the smaller
and harder tools to give it that strong,
smooth surface.
Once the cutters had roughed it out,
they put the stone on log rollers or mud
and pulled it close
to the construction site.
The final step was to move the stone
into place, and match it to its mate.
And here is the indentation they made,
which matches the edge
of the rock below it.
It's held up by this wedge until
they shape the two surfaces to match.
Then the wedge is removed and
the two stones fit together perfectly.
Here you can see...the brace points they
used to push the block up into place.
They put beams here to lift the rock up.
Once the rock was in place,
these points were beaten, just as you see
here, and here, in all these other rocks.
That means that the finishing
work was done at the site.
We can see that
this corner wasn't finished yet.
All this portion was yet to be cut off
in order to finish the wall.
Driven by a royal
mandate to build it here,
Machu Picchu is a tribute
to Inca engineering and artistry.
Its hundreds of terraces
buttress it from below.
The granite walls
are still solid after 500 years
because of a remarkable drainage system.
And it is crowned by
an ingenious lacework of fountains
cascading from the mountain spring above.
But why go to all this effort?
Why did Pachacuti order Machu Picchu
built in this forbidding place...
was it for religious reasons?
What we know of Inca religion comes again
from the chronicles of Father Bernabe Cobo
written after the Spanish Conquest.
They worship with equal reverence
and with the same ceremonial
services the sun, water, earth,
and many other things
that they held to be divine.
The Inca believed
that the sun and the mountains
were deities that had
to be appeased through ritual.
Cobo reported that one
of these rituals was child sacrifice.
This claim was dramatically confirmed
in 1999 by high altitude archaeologist
Johan Reinhard.
Then, Reinhard discovered three
perfectly preserved child mummies
on a high peak in Argentina,
in the southern part of the Inca Empire.
They had been sacrificed as an offering
to the same mountain gods Cobo described.
Perhaps the mystery of Machu Picchu's
location can be explained
by this reverence for the landscape.
We know that throughout the Andes
that people believed that the natural
environment has sacred aspects to it.
These landscape features...
at Machu Picchu...have helped explain
what otherwise is a tremendous mystery.
This idea, called
the sacred landscape theory,
suggests that in addition to worshipping
the sun, rivers and mountains as gods,
the Inca derived power by being
physically connected to them.
So, is that why Machu Picchu was here?
Machu Picchu is an unusual
place to build even for the Inca.
Their capital, now modern-day Cusco,
and other Inca towns like Pisac,
are in flatter, more accessible terrain.
It's also remote-a five-day walk from
the capital in Inca times and today,
it takes tourists four hours by train
followed by a harrowing
bus ride up to the ruins.
But throughout the site
are hints why the Inca thought
that this place was worth the trouble.
In certain places,
the Inca carved stones in the shape
of sacred peaks surrounding the city,
then displayed them
like massive, holy icons.
Even Bingham was struck by stones
like this one-called the Sacred Rock
that mirrors the outline of
Mount Yanantin directly to the northeast.
In Inca times, visitors
would approach Machu Picchu
from above where they could see the city
is surrounded by the holy Urubamba River.
For an agricultural people,
there was nothing
more important than water
and here was a place
firmly in the water's embrace.
There is one more piece
of evidence connecting Machu Picchu
to the sacred landscape.
At the top of a pyramid
shaped peak within the complex
is the sacred pillar
known as the Intihuatana.
This sacred pillar is in alignment
with four mountain gods
of supreme importance to the Inca,
according to Johann Reinhard.
The Intihuatana is situated such that
it's at a high point
in the center of the entire complex.
But at the same time,
it's the center of this massive landscape
because you have in the far distance
these great snowcapped peaks.
The highest ones in the entire region.
They also happen to correspond
to the cardinal directions.
Its views to sacred peaks,
proximity to the holy river,
and the alignment
with four powerful mountain gods
must have made this location
irresistible to the Inca.
But how did the first Inca emperor,
Pachacuti, actually use Machu Picchu?
Within the city,
there was a distinctive royal residence.
lt is located near the first fountain,
insuring that the king would have
the purest water to drink.
It's also close to the holiest temples.
But whether the city was
Pachacuti's royal court,
a religious center
or a military post remains a mystery.
A re-analysis of the skeletons
that Hiram Bingham
found suggests a possible solution.
During Bingham's excavation in 1912,
his team mistakenly identified these
skeletons as the virgins of the sun.
Recently, they've been re-examined.
If we could identify
who these people were,
it might explain
how Machu Picchu was used.
During his study, anthropologist,
John Verano found no evidence of violent
injury, so these weren't soldiers.
He also confirmed that their burials had
been simple with no high value artifacts.
That meant they weren't royalty.
In their bones, Verano found hints
that they weren't common laborers either.
Instead, they were from
a class of people in between.
I didn't see a lot of arthritis even
in the older adults at Machu Picchu
and that again made me think these are
not people working really hard in the,
with say stone masonry
or dragging rocks up the hills.
A critical clue to their identity
can be found in their diet-through
a technique called isotopic analysis.
ln this process scientists
vaporize a small sample of bone.
They are looking for the chemical traces
of the foods that have been
absorbed into its structure.
Among the vaporized particles, they found
a high percentage of carbon-13 isotopes,
which is the signature of corn.
Though it's common in Peru today,
in Inca times, corn was a royal food.
In fact, pollen analysis of the soils
from the hundreds of terraces here
shows that the little food
grown at the site was primarily corn.
And, as John Verano found,
corn leaves another signature.
Corn is rich in carbohydrates.
It's not good for your teeth.
So they had a lot of cavities, they had
a lot of abscesses, a lot of tooth loss.
So although they weren't royals,
these people frequently helped
themselves to the royal corn.
They also didn't do a lot of heavy labor.
So what were they doing here?
In some ways I guess
you could see it as a big hotel staff.
The caretakers
and servants of the estate.
This was a large staff-Verano
ultimately identified
the remains of 177 individuals.
The evidence is strong that Machu Picchu
was a royal estate for the emperor,
Pachacuti.
This would have been a peaceful retreat
where he and his courtiers
would have come to rest,
worship and enjoy themselves, their needs
tended to by well-trained royal servants.
And you can kind of imagine an entourage
of the royalty coming from Cuzco
along the road and everybody
at Machu Picchu saying whoops,
Let's get it ready, clean it up, and get
food and so on and welcome our guests.
But the new finds from the tombs at
the nearby farming center of Patallacta
don't seem to fit
with this peaceful picture.
The severe injuries in those
skeletons suggest that Machu Picchu
may have been connected to warfare.
So how could Machu Picchu
be a place of both war and peace?
According to Spanish accounts,
the Inca conquered this valley about
a decade after Pachacuti came to power.
So perhaps he built
it as a way to seal his conquest.
Incas were very
skilled in psychological warfare...
and they decide to build
this magnificent estate on the hilltop
that everybody living up
and down that valley is going to see,
from the first thing
they walk outside their door
to the last thing
that they go to bed at night.
That's a very powerful thing.
It's a message
of conquest and of possession,
that they own that land, and they control
the people who live within it.
So Machu Picchu
was a formidable symbol of Inca power,
a spectacular boast by Pachacuti,
not just of their engineering prowess,
but of their paramount link
to the sacred mountains and rivers.
Still, if this place played such
a critical role in demonstrating
the religious
and military power of the Inca,
why didn't the Spanish deface it
as they did to other sacred Inca sites?
And why isn't it ever
described in any Spanish accounts?
Part of the answer lies in the Corpus
Christi procession back in Cusco...
the annual festival that is
a Christian revision of an Inca ritual.
In that ritual, the Inca carried
mummies instead of saints...
especially the mummies of their kings.
When Pachacuti died in 1471,
he wasn't buried; he was mummified.
The exact process is unknown.
One theory suggests his body would
have been gradually freeze-dried:
left out in the searing sun by day,
and, alternately, frozen at night.
Through this repeated heating,
freezing and thawing, the corpse would
have become completely desiccated.
Curiously,
this is similar to how the local
Quetchua people preserve llama meat.
The result is jerky, which is one of
the few Quetchua words used in English.
Once preserved,
Pachacuti would not have been entombed.
Instead, he would have
continued to play an active role
in the politics
and rituals of the Inca world.
Drawings made by the Incan artist,
Guaman Poma, confirm
the use of mummies in this way.
We don't actually
have a mummy of an Inca emperor,
but we have descriptions of them
and5 we know that they were taken out
during major festivals and paraded.
We know that they had attendants
who would shoo away the flies
and give offerings every day, food
offerings, and drink to the mummies.
In other words, they were worshipped
and believed to still
play a role in the community.
Care and handling of the mummy would
have fallen to a group of family members
called the panaca who also took control
of all the king's royal estates.
But, over time, even Pachacuti's
panaca could have run short of resources.
Work at Machu Picchu may have slowed,
then stopped altogether.
The descendants of Pachacuti
had more pressing concerns.
Even before the Spanish Conquest,
small pox came.
It was followed by a bloody
civil war that left the Inca Empire
weakened and fragmented.
Barely 60 years after Pachacuti died,
the Inca Empire finally
collapsed under the Spanish invasion.
When the royal families were,
had lost their power,
they were disorganized.
There was civil war.
There was massive destruction of sites.
And the people at Machu Picchu
probably at some point just said,
Well nobody is coming to visit,
and the site really had
no reason to exist at that point.
By then, it is likely that all
but the loyal servants
had forgotten Machu Picchu.
And, after time,
even they probably just drifted away.
So the Spanish probably never heard
about Machu Picchu and more importantly,
never found it.
It was, for us, the luckiest mistake.
It meant that Machu Picchu
was left untouched
one of the only major Inca
sites to remain in tact.
While it still poses
confounding mysteries,
it also holds great promise
as new technologies
and finds allow us to come to terms
with the ghosts of Machu Picchu.