RH-0102ArchitectureCitiesAmericas

Machu Picchu, the mountain estate of an Inca ruler

Dated: 1420 to 1532
Place: Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, Urubamba province, Cusco region, Peru · The Inca state, Tawantinsuyu: an estate of the ruler Pachacuti and his lineage, built by Andean stonemasons and labourers
Coordinates: 13° 10′ S · 72° 33′ W (approximate)
Remains: Fragmentary

Late afternoon light on the stone buildings of Machu Picchu: a long row of roofless houses with steep triangular gables stands along a ridge above stepped terraces of bright green grass held by dry stone walls, with a flight of stone steps on the right; a few visitors and a llama give the scale. Behind rises the sharp, forested peak of Huayna Picchu, and blue mountains fade under cloud in the distance. — Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsCC-BY-SA-4.0Original record

From the archivist

The builders chose a saddle of rock between two peaks, with the river roaring in a loop far below. They cut the granite of the mountain itself, shaped blocks that fit without mortar, and laid out houses, shrines, stairways, water channels and terraces that hold the slope like the steps of a great seat.

It was not a fortress or a city of the common people, but the estate of a ruler, Pachacuti, who began turning a small kingdom around Cusco into what became the largest state of the Americas. For about a century his household, servants and gods lived there. Then the Spanish came to Peru, and the estate was left to the forest and to a few farmers.

In 1911 one of them led a Yale lecturer up the slope. Bingham photographed, dug, and sent crates north. A century later, after a long dispute, they came back.

What the archive keeps is a row of gables against the peak: stone that outlasted the thatch, the household and the empire.

Established

Machu Picchu stands at about 2,430 metres above sea level on a ridge above the Urubamba river, in a mountain forest; UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1983 as a site of both cultural and natural value (UNESCO).
Reading Spanish documents of the sixteenth century, including one of 1568, the anthropologist John Rowe argued in 1990 that the site was a royal estate of the Inca ruler Pachacuti (Rowe 1990).
Radiocarbon dates on the bones and teeth of 26 people buried in four cemeteries around the site, published in 2021, show that it was occupied from about 1420 to 1532, some two decades earlier than the date of 1438 that colonial written sources give for Pachacuti's rise to power (Burger et al. 2021).
On 24 July 1911 the American explorer Hiram Bingham, then teaching at Yale, was led to the ruins by a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga; families were then living on the site and farming its terraces (Bingham 1913; Yale 2015).
Bingham's expeditions of 1912 and 1914 to 1915 excavated the site and sent the finds to Yale; Peru sued the university in 2008, and under an agreement of November 2010 the collections were returned between March 2011 and November 2012 (Yale 2015).

Interpretation

The name of lost city given to Machu Picchu after 1911 says more about its reception abroad than about the site, which local farmers knew and used, and which others had visited before Bingham. Bingham himself believed he had found Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Inca, which is now placed elsewhere. The estate's mix of residences, temples, terraces and fine stonework is read as a royal retreat with a religious role, and even its original name is discussed. The 2021 dates rest on burials and so date the lives of those who lived there rather than the laying of each stone, and they suggest that the chronology drawn from colonial chronicles may need revising.

In 10,000 years

In 10,000 years, will anyone know which stones were set by Inca hands, and which by those who came after to hold them up?

Sources (5)

Burger, R. L., Salazar, L. C., Nesbitt, J., Washburn, E., Fehren-Schmitz, L. New AMS dates for Machu Picchu: results and implications. Antiquity 95 (383), 2021, p. 1265-1279. · doi.org
Rowe, J. H. Machu Picchu a la luz de documentos del siglo XVI. Histórica 14 (1), 1990, p. 139-154.
Bingham, H. In the Wonderland of Peru. National Geographic Magazine 24 (4), April 1913 (the work of the Peruvian Expedition of 1912 under Yale University and the National Geographic Society). · archive.org
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu (inscribed 1983). · whc.unesco.org
Yale University. Peru-Yale partnership for the future of Machu Picchu artifacts, Yale News, 4 June 2015. · news.yale.edu

Provenance

Held by The site belongs to the Peruvian state and is managed by its Ministry of Culture; the objects excavated by Hiram Bingham are kept in Cusco, at the UNSAAC and Yale International Center in the Casa Concha

Between 1912 and 1915 Hiram Bingham's Yale expeditions excavated Machu Picchu and shipped thousands of objects and human remains to the Yale Peabody Museum. Peru, which had lent them, asked for years for their return and sued Yale in 2008. After an agreement in November 2010, the collections went back to Peru in March 2011, December 2011 and November 2012, and are kept in Cusco by the national university of San Antonio Abad and Yale.

The stone buildings and terraces stand, partly restored, visited by crowds whose numbers the Peruvian state limits; the excavated objects are back in Cusco.

I · We built

RH-001021 of 23RH-0084

Scholarly review in progress. This fragment follows the method of the archive.

Machu Picchu, the mountain estate of an Inca ruler

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