Machu Picchu, Wak'a

1425-1550

Name(s) currently unknown

Machu Picchu, PER

The site of Machu Picchu had been abandoned by the Inka before the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century. The site has living areas and terraced fields, but also a high concentration of buildings and features with a sacred purpose. Many of these are carefully cut out of live rock, or integrate live rock features.

Visible at right is an outcropping of live rock adjacent to a small open plaza. It probably functioned as a wak’a, or shrine for worship, as well as the foundation for another building. Buildings at the site are typically long single roomed structures, with hipped roofs and large evenly set doorways and windows, like the one at left. In the 15th and 16th century, this and the other structures at Machu Picchu would have been roofed with wooden beams supporting thatched roofs. In the background, the terraces that surrounded the site are visible. They were used to grow foodstuffs. Stairs cut into the live rock allowed passage between the different layers of the site.

A Sapa Inka would usually commission royal estates. Machu Picchu seems to have been commissioned by Pachacutic Inka Yupanqui, the ninth Sapa Inka, and built between 1450 and 1470. This was a planned site, the artisans who created it may have come from as far away as Lake Titicaca, bringing tools and technology with them.

The site is built out of local stone, some of it highly finished, but most of it cut into blocks like those visible here. Inka masons had extraordinary skills, and all these blocks were cut and finished primarily with stone tools.

Set on a mountain pinnacle overlooking the Urubamba river, Machu Picchu was connected to the Inka capital of Cuzco by the famous Inka Road. This narrow stepped path was impassible for Spanish horses and carriages, so gradually, knowledge of the site was confined only to local peoples. It was local guides who led the US archeologist Hiram Bingham to the site in 1911. Many of the fruits of Bingham’s excavations ended up at Yale University in Connecticut.

Sacred architecture can take many different forms. The Inka were highly sensitive to visual relationships between the built environment and surrounding topography, and often incorporated unusual outcroppings of rock into their buildings. Many of these rocks were believed to be wak’as, holding sacred powers, sometimes because they were manifestations of a revered ancestor.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Burger, Richard L. and Lucy C. Salazar. 2004. Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Valencia Zegarra, Alfredo and Arminda Gibaja Oviedo. 1992. Machu Picchu: la investigación y conservación del monumento arqueológico después de Hiram Bingham. Qosqo [Cuzco]: Municipalidad del Qosqo.