Ghosts of Machu Picchu Page #4

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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

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