Like an Inca*

Saturday morning, not a bad night’s sleep so feeling much better and the sun is shining. A climb to the outskirts of Cusco to visit some archaeological sites. First stop was Sacsayhuamen (pronounced something like ‘sexy woman’ – there you are Barry a perfect item for you to comment on). Sacsayhuamen was a ceremonial centre and even though it is now a ruin it has some magnificent and very impressive Inca walls. Some of the massive rocks weigh 130 tons and fit together with absolute perfection. This precision, combined with the rounded corners of the limestone blocks, the variety of their interlocking shapes, and the way the walls lean inward, is thought to have helped the ruins survive devastating earthquakes in Cuzco. The theory is that the stones would have been quarried and then precisely carved in advance to create the tight joints made to fit into prepared pockets in the wall. Then the stones would transported some 3km from the quarry (the Inca did not have the wheel or use beasts) then towed up a ramp and above the wall, where they would be placed on top of a stack of logs. The logs would be removed one at a time to lower the stones into place so that they fitted so exactly that a piece of paper cannot fit between them. The whole site is laid out with geometric precision to resemble the head of a puma and the Sun rises exactly opposite the great altar on June 21, the mid-winter solstice (remember we are now in the southern hemisphere).


We also visited Puka Pukara, probably a guard house for another site we visited called Tambo Machay which is even higher at 3765m and was a shrine to water – the site is in excellent condition with the water still gushing forth and the niches for the statues of the gods intact – the gold and silver that would have lined these niches having long since been removed, melted down and transported to Spain or made into some hideous Baroque altar inside a Latin American cathedral.


The last site we visited was Qenqo with some fine examples of Inca stone carving remaining in situ inside a large hollowed-out rock that houses an altar upon which the sun falls at midday on the mid-winter solstice when a sacrifice of a black llama would have been carried out.
In the afternoon, some more wandering around and a visit to the beautiful Museo de Arte Precolombio which contains superb examples of pottery, metalwork (largely gold and silver), wood carving and shellwork from the Moche, Chimu, Paracas, Nazca and Inca cultures. Inevitably it was the pottery that fascinated and amazed us – some of it was animistic sculptures with the influences on Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and John Maltby quite obvious but other more simple pots amazed us with the construction techniques and decoration – if some potters could produce as good as this today the CPA could have a shop as big as Selfridges (and we’d probably spend all our money there!)

* Song by Neil Young from ‘Trans’ album