Dan Snow's History Hit - 2. Machu Picchu: The Rise of the Inca Empire

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Part 2/4. At their most powerful, the Inca had the largest empire in the world. Lasting just one century from the mid-15th century, it stretched across the South American continent from the Amazon to the Pacific. The Inca developed ingenious ways to grow food in some of the world's most extreme climates, they managed to convert disparate tribes to their way of life without violence (mostly) and yet they didn't have money, wheels, or even a written language. How did they do it?Join Dan as he traverses Peru's Sacred Valleys while he and his expert guests trace the rise of the mighty Inca Empire.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.The Rest of the Series:Episode 3: Inca Gods and Human Sacrifices Episode 4: The Fall of the Inca EmpireEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

At the turn of the 20th century, American explorer Hiram Bingham set out to find Vilcabamba, the last remaining stronghold of the Inca Empire after the Spanish conquest of the 16th century. Having heard stories of ruins deep in the Peruvian Andes, he and a small team of researchers set out, guided by a local Peruvian villager, Melchor Arteaga. In his recollections, Bingham wrote, The morning of July 24th dawned in a cold drizzle. Arteaga shivered and seemed inclined to stay in his hut. I offered to pay him well if he showed me the ruins.

He demurred and said it was too hard a climb for such a wet day, but he finally agreed to go. When asked just where the ruins were, he pointed straight up to the top of the mountain. Bingham was led along a path before being handed over to a small 11-year-old boy to take him the rest of the way. After a hard two-hour climb up a steep mountain path, Bingham saw something wonderful. Suddenly, I found myself confronted with walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stonework. It was hard to see them, for they were partly covered with trees and moss, the growth of centuries. But in the dense shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and tangled vines, appeared here and there walls of white granite ashlars,

carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together. Dimly I began to realize that this wall and its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave were as fine as the finest stonework in the world. It fairly took my breath away. What could this place be?

It wasn't Vilcabamba. It was Machu Picchu, the stone city perched on the mountaintop in one of the most inaccessible parts of the central Andes. Few romances can ever surpass that of the granite citadel on the top of the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu, the crown of Inca land. He wrote those words in his bestseller,

Lost City of the Inca, published in 1948 to runaway success. In it, Bingham recounts the tale of his adventures through the Peruvian jungle, of doggedness, good fortune, and the discovery of a lifetime. It won him his place in the history books, as a man to be remembered. Bingham took three trips back to Machu Picchu, and those expeditions unearthed thousands of artefacts that revealed astonishing things about the Inca civilisation, how they lived, worshipped and thrived. These artefacts indicate a very different way of living, one almost unrecognisable to both the Europeans who arrived here in the 16th century and the North Americans

of the 20th. The Inca didn't have a written language. They didn't have money exactly. They didn't have horses. And yet they conquered vast swathes of South America. They transported food and goods to every corner, built magnificent temples, palaces and fortresses and managed to convert millions of disparate peoples to their way of life. How did they do it? The Inca Empire is an absolutely marvellous thing. You've got these road systems, you've got trade and transportation

with the most beautiful objects and feathers coming from the Amazon, shell coming from the coast. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. Over four episodes, I'm taking you to the Peruvian Andes to trace the rise of the great Inca Empire, its rulers and domination of the South American mountains, deserts and jungles. This is my series on Machu Picchu, episode two, the rise of the Inca Empire. After a very grey morning, very cloudy indeed, I felt a bit sorry for the tourists who've

come here on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. It's a bit like being on the west coast of Scotland on a bad day. You couldn't see a hand in front of your face. Now the sun is coming out, the clouds are slowly leaving, and you've got a bit of blue sky appearing above. While I'm here in Machu Picchu, the great Inca citadel, I'm going to get better acquainted with the Inca themselves. So I'm joined by two women who know this history very well. Bibiana Melzi-Rodriguez has spent 20 years researching Inca sites across Peru,

and Melbournea has been working as a specialist tour guide here for over a decade. Melvin, just give me the Inca 101. Who were they? Where'd they come from? And how does the archaeology shed light on or disagree with their origin story? Archaeologists in Cusco did a lot of studies and they found evidences about life in Cusco since 5,000 years before Christ. And then the formative period arrived. These people started to become more social. They formed social groups until they reached the Inca state. And we have two beautiful legends that we still study in the school until now. Men and a woman that came out from the Titicaca Lake, 400 kilometers away from Cusco, close

to Bolivia. So the legend says that this couple came out from the lake and the father-son ordered them to abandon the area and look for fertile valleys. The father-son gave them a stick made in gold, ordering that wherever the stick sunk, that will be the chosen place for you. So according to the legend, this couple, and when they arrived to Cusco, the stick sunk,

and they knew that that was the sign. The second legend, which is probably the most favorite for local people in Cusco, talks about four brothers and four sisters that came out from caves, Tamputoco, located in Cusco region. From the four brothers, three of them died because the conflicts started among them. Each one wanted to become the strongest one, the winner. Only one man survived, Manco Capa, which is the same man than the Titicaca Lake legend. So the Inca riding system

was only known by the royalty. That means that the citizens, farmers, workers, etc., Janaconas, didn't ride down. And how can you keep the history alive as a citizen if you don't write down? It has to be by memory, by oral transmission, by talking, all people talking with children, telling them what happened in the past. So you mentioned there's no written language, no alphabet, but they ruled over an enormous empire. They had to be administrators, right? I mean, how did they keep track of everything going on?

So we believe that the Incas had a writing based on quipus and tocapus. The quipus can be described as threads that have two parts. One thread goes in a horizontal way, which is the main part, and then many threads go in a vertical way. They were made of alpaca wool or cotton, depending on the area, and the Incas used them as abacus. So there are threads falling down and they started to make knots every certain distance. They can be very colorful. The studies made to the Kipus show that there is a counting system and the Incas used them as a computer to put all the number information about the census. The Incas used to make census

every five years according to the chronicles, which is so interesting because when you make a census, you are getting information about the real situation of your people. You can see and you can know how many people died a year, how many people were born, how many men, how many women, all these amazing details is what they put in the quipus. Even the number of potatoes that they could harvest or number of corn or products that they did. But something that is so interesting about the quipus is that the chronicles mention that the Spanish were so afraid that the Incas could send messages through them. Organizing a revolution, a resistance, and that's why the Spanish ordered them to burn quipus, to disappear the quipus,

and don't transmit the knowledge to the new generations. So they cut that transmission. That's why we can't read the quipus now because nobody knows how. Tocapus, geometrical designs based on lines, steps, vertical, horizontal, etc., that we consider it as well as another type of riding, but it requires a lot of studies. Bibi, how is Inca society structured?

It was a very hierarchical society. And you had the Sapa Inca, the leader his family and then you had nobles and then you had people that worked with the nobles okay then you had people that were like the leaders of the different communities like curacas they say and then you had the workers that were at the lower base of society. And then you had people that were even lower, that were brought from other places as workers. Even lower. So I've read that there were three Inca commandments. Is there truth to that? Something that is very interesting about the lifestyle, the lifestyle of the Incas,

lifestyle, the lifestyle of the Incas is the principles of life that was based in three as a sacred number. Don't be lazy, don't lie and don't steal. Amasua, amayulya, amakey. Which was something that everybody had to respect. The idea to don't be lazy is that even being old, you can be very useful for the society. Let's give you an example. I'm blind. I can't work. Okay, the Incas will say, we understand that, but you can play a flute,

you can play the drum, and that will be your contribution. In the same way the other one is carrying blocks of stones, you do the same, and both are valid. Melby, what about the archaeology? What can we tell about the lives of normal working people from what's left here at Machu Picchu? Talking about the citizens, we can mention that the average of families were probably three to two children. Definitely in their daily life, they were workers and they all had their own specialities. There were people related to pottery stuff, people related to weaving work, or people related to metallurgic activities. So that means that they were citizens that used to work as a duty to get production that

was basically used in Machu Picchu. But that doesn't mean that they worked all the time. They were human beings, and they had to have activities of relaxing as well. They could have a day off. There were big plazas in Machu Picchu that allowed them to have open areas. Most of the time Jews, their house is just for sleeping. Their houses were comfortable enough. They could have a lot of production of medicine as well. They could plant on the terraces herbs that could be used as medicine. So if, let's say, one of them got sick and if they require a doctor, they had the knowledge of the natural medicine. They could be

treated using this type of herbs, as we do now. Local people in Cusco hardly go to the doctor. We usually trust the local knowledge about herbs and medicine. But something that is very important to know is that it's more used as prevention. Like muña is an herb that grows wild, but when you smell it, it smells like mint. And that's well used for stomach problems, for example, no? And of course, coca. Remember that the coca leaf is still a sacred element for us. The tradition that we have with the coca leaves is to chew it. We grab like 20 leaves together, we put it in our mouth, and then we start chewing it until we form like a bubble gum,

and then we keep it in one side of the mouth, and then we start sucking. What is the effect of this? It's like you feel stronger, you are not thirsty, you don't feel hungry and it gives you a lot of energy. It gives you calories which is good when you have a very hard day of working. It's like drinking an American coffee or express because it wakes you up and it gives you all the energy that you want. In fact Machu Picchu city has an amazing relationship with the coca production. Machu Picchu was built in the frontier between the Andes and the jungle because the Incas wanted to

have control over the coca production. Coca was very valuable for them, not only for chewing it, for their ceremonies. What did Bingham find? What did those excavations reveal about the people who were here at Machu Picchu? Hiram Bingham found a lot of pottery, artifacts, chisels, hammers, but basically domestic stuff. He found 174 mummies located all over Machu Picchu, found in different cemeteries. That is proving to us that Machu Picchu had a big amount of citizens living in the area. But the evidences that we have from Hiram Bingham are very basic

because it seems that they didn't study well the bones, the skeletons, and they gave us theories that we don't use anymore, for example. And what about gold? Bingham was looking for that, for treasure, the city of gold. He didn't find anything that much of monetary value, did he? for treasure, the city of gold. He didn't find anything that much of monetary value, did he? That's right. According to Hiram Bingham, he didn't find any object made in gold in the city.

But in 1995, a Peruvian archaeologist called Elva Torres, she was studying one of the plazas in Machu Picchu. Look how interesting is that, because she wasn't doing the excavation in a temple, in a house, no. She was studying the smallest plaza in Machu Picchu because she wanted to get information about the composition of the foundation. And during this excavation she found a beautiful bracelet made in gold, but not pure gold. This is like a three metallic piece. It has gold, silver and bronze. And that became the only piece in gold found in the city.

We believe that this was an offering that probably the architect left underground as a way to ask the admission to the gods to start this project and to be successful. Architectors do that now at the present time, right? When they start building something, they leave a little offering in the foundation. Now, when you visit Machu Picchu, you see the ruins. But pretty much all the objects that were found in Machu Picchu have been moved to museums.

There's a tricky history to that, though. After his 1911 trip, Bingham became a household name. But with the fame quickly came criticism. First off, in his account of finding Machu Picchu, Bingham was accused of aggressive self-promotion and failure to acknowledge the information and knowledge provided to him by locals, which was absolutely instrumental in him laying eyes on Machu Picchu that first time. He also spent a lot of time avoiding the reality that this lost city had never really been lost. To his credit though, Bingham never claimed to have been the first person at Machu Picchu, only the first to understand its historic

significance, but this is probably debatable too. The other thing that dogged Bingham was the removal of artefacts. In the months after 1911, Bingham and his team returned to excavate Machu Picchu with support from Yale University. Within its warren of buildings, they found all sorts of artefacts and remnants from Machu Picchu's heyday. At first, the Peruvian government was conscious to protect their cultural patrimony from looting, so they passed a law forbidding artefacts from leaving the country. But in 1912, they did grant Bingham the opportunity to take the artefacts to the United States to be studied by Yale University, on the proviso that the Peruvians

could ask for them back at any time and they'd have to be returned. Over the years, some artefacts were returned, but most remained at Yale's Peabody Museum. It resulted in a decades-long and very bitter dispute between Yale and Peru. It got so bad that as recently as 2008, Peru sued the university in a US federal court. Even President Obama and the Pope were approached to try and resolve the tensions. In the end, an agreement was reached and in 2010, almost 100 years later, the artefacts were returned to Peru. Most of them are housed at the Casa Concha Museum in Cusco. Within the collection are some very unusual skeletons and skulls.

The Inca had a custom of wrapping a baby's head in order to change its shape as the child grew. Different communities across the empire wrapped the heads of their offspring in different ways to elongate them and manipulate the shape. The variety of skull shapes found at Machu Picchu suggest that people came from all over the empire to work at the site. Melbourne, this place, it's a vast royal city, high on an inaccessible mountain ridge. How did Pachacuti get the manpower to build it?

The Incas relocated specialists where their skills were needed. When the Incas conquered new provinces, they imposed their style of life. And one of that was to move a group of people called mitmas or mitimaes. They were hundreds of thousands of people that could be moved from place to place just for working. They were of course people in their best age and with the highest energy because they were going to do a good job somewhere. That was the best way to control everything.

When you move people from one city to another one, you take control about everything. Because that's the way how you can avoid a revolution. That's the way how you can avoid resistance, for example. But it's basically the idea to have enough workers to do anything. So it's forced labor. They were conquerors, and they had, you know, like enslaved people. They expanded through negotiations and marriages. There was definitely, you know, okay, I give you this, you will have this, these will be your benefits. Definitely, you will be part of our empire.

But in other cases is, okay, you know, this is battle. You fight us, we'll defeat you. In the Inca time, there was no money and everything was based on trading. If I'm a minimize and I'm going to a place where I have to stay a certain time to do a specific work, what do I get back? I'll get back houses, food, clothing, whatever I need while I'm working. My family is in charge of the government while I'm working. It's all based on trading. I work as a duty and then I'll have to get something back.

So the Incas used to have that very clear. Listen to Dan Snow's history hit, The Best is Yet to Come. Stick with us. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. In order to reign supreme, the Inca needed to be able to provide a reliable, regular, quality food source to its people.

They had to keep the masses sustained so they'd keep working and building and also because the Inca ruler had to keep his promise, join us and we will provide. But as the Empire grew they faced a logistical challenge, how to move food around. But the Incas, you've probably worked out by now, they were problem solvers and they built an astonishing network of roads extending over 25,000 miles. I'm travelling on one of them right now and as you can hear, it's pretty windy and bumpy. We've crossed a couple of rivers, it's a nice looking suspension bridge.

And in fact, the Inca used suspension bridges as well. They poured huge resources into these road building projects. Their suspension bridges were made from fibre but they used a lot of stone and they ensured that their roads could cross a really challenging mix of high mountains, deep valleys, jungle and desert. And every major road had lodges built a day's walk apart for travellers to stay, and they had a complex system of relay posts where runners could repeat information to one another for their communication system.

And remember, this empire did not have horses, it did not have wheels, so moving heavy stuff around was a big challenge. The two main north to south roads on the network, stretching from modern day Quito in Ecuador in the north, all the way down to Santiago, Chile in the south. And then they had numerous offshoots connecting hundreds of Inca settlements down a million miles away from the roads built across the Roman Empire hundreds of years earlier.

And they were absolutely the most sophisticated and extensive transportation system in the whole of South America to that point in time. So these roads were how the armies travelled, the messages were couriered, and food was moved around to where it was needed. So that helped to solve the problem of getting food to where it needed to be. But let's go back a step. The biggest challenge was growing the food in the first place in some of the most inhospitable terrains on the continent.

They have improved and expanded on what their forebears had achieved, and they worked out not only how to survive at this altitude, but thrive. For the Inca inhabited this part of the Andes, it was occupied by the Wari, and they too built great fortresses and roads and even some canals to move water around. But Peru's climate is one of the toughest and most extreme in the world. There's heavy rainfall in the monsoon season and it really mostly only falls on the west side of the Andes. Then on the east side, all the way down to the coast, it's pretty much desert.

The problem is that's where most of the inhabitants in this period lived. So once the Wari disappeared, there was a real breakdown in food production. There were lengthy periods of drought and people were unable to sustain the same levels of crop production. And when the Inca appeared on the scene not long afterwards, they built on the engineering legacy of the Wari

and they took things even further. So I'm on my way now to a site that will really show off the innovation and the ambition of the Inca. So fresh vegetables grow nicely to around 5,000 feet above sea level. Anything above that you start to get problems. You get poor, thin soil. You get high winds. You get a lack of flat ground in the mountains.

And a short growing season, cold temperatures. It's pretty tough up here where I am now. I'm in Morai in the Sacred Valley. I'm at 11,500 feet above sea level. And as many historians have pointed out, it's a place that on the face of it is pretty hostile to human habitation. It's hard to get things to grow here. But what I'm looking out over now at Morai is little short of a miracle.

This place demonstrates how the Incas didn't just learn to survive up here, they turned this place into a food production hothouse. So I'm looking out now at three enormous craters in the ground. This one here I'm looking at now must be 30 metres in depth and a couple of hundred metres across and they're all terraced. So they look a bit like the tiered benches in a Roman amphitheatre. It looks like we've gathered to watch gladiators fight in the middle. And each of those terraces is about So they look a bit like the tiered benches in a Roman amphitheater. It looks like we've gathered to watch gladiators fight in the middle. And each of those terraces is about three metres in height.

Just standing near me now, there's a kind of guttering system which shows where the water would be introduced to each terrace and then flow down to the next one. And the really interesting thing is the soil I'm walking on now was apparently brought in from all over the empire. What scientists think is that this place created a series of microclimates. Here you've got these stone walls that absorb this

powerful mountain sun all day and then at night when that sun goes away and the temperature plummets and trust me it does, that heat is then radiated from the rocks to keep those plants from freezing. That is clever enough, but it gets even more brilliant than that. So on each level, on all these different soils brought from around the empire, they would grow a different crop. You might have tobacco on one, squash and pumpkins and tomatoes, potatoes on another. Now anyone listening to this who's a gardener will immediately say, Dan, you're talking absolute nonsense.

All of these different plants need very different conditions to thrive well that's the point each of these terraces acted as different microclimates I said each of them have very different conditions I'm looking at the ones that are east facing and they've been in the shade all afternoon the ones that are west facing are sweltering in the sun still so with a mixture of soil and their orientation to the sun and the wind you can experiment with different crops and which ones thrive. And the thing I love about this place is that the temperature can be radically different depending on the altitude, depending on the height of the terraces. It's said that the terrace in the bottom I'm looking down on now, way below me, can be up to 12 degrees warmer than these top

terraces that I'm standing on. So they experimented, they used every little trick that geography and nature provided them with, and then a bit of engineering on top of that, and as a result they were able to unlock the secret of growing crops up here in abundance. By the time the Spanish arrived, the Inca were growing 3,000 different types of potatoes. Now for scale, today in the US, 250 varieties are grown. That is a lot of potatoes. And the Inca particularly focused on three staples.

The potato, maize and llamas. The good thing about each of those is they could be turned into food that would last. They developed a way of freeze-drying potatoes which you can do only at these high mountain altitudes where it's very cold at night and very warm during the day. A freeze-dried potato, let me tell you, will last a couple of years. With the maize they can ferment it and that would keep and then with llama they would butcher it, salt it, dry it, and they would turn it into jerky, which, telling you, is one of the few words in English that we get from Quechua, the language of the Inca. So the Inca couldn't just grow this stuff. They could preserve it. They could fill up their storehouses.

They could use food as a strategic asset for diplomacy, for controlling populations, and for feeding big armies and sending them on their way to conquer new territories. So despite living in this mountain fastness the Inca found that they could support a large population in pretty good health. They could hedge against everything that nature occasionally throws us like pests and drought. As I'm standing here looking out of this vast civil engineering project I am struck by how much of the Inca power relied on their ability to control water and grow crops. The Inca had this unique synergy between spirituality, sustenance and architecture, which enabled them to create a cohesive and therefore strong empire.

The Inca were engineers. They built great palaces and fortresses, manifestations of their might. They were sustainers. They knew the importance of food to power their empire and as a lure to others. They were believers. Their dedication to their faith created this strong unifying identity and a religious system to believe in, take strength from and use to exert control over others. And it's in Machu Picchu that we find this trinity. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm now walking through the ruins of Machu Picchu. I'm here with Bibiani Melzi-Rodriguez and Melvin Vienna. Can you tell me about the marriage of function and spirituality in the buildings here? The Inca society and the Inca builders had very challenging geography to work with for their constructions. And one of the things that I admire the most about these builders is how they respected this nature, this geography that they had. The Andes, the cloud forest, so hard to build there. But they had this amazing marriage between nature and themselves as good architects so they would use

what they had and not try to destroy it but adapt to it in the most outstanding way so you go and you build but you need stones there so you must identify the quarry to get the stones from. You're going to grow, you know, different kinds of crops. You need the water. So the water has to be brought here, but there must be a source of water. So that is something that resulted in this fascinating and so important marriage and adaptation to the geography and the nature surrounding them.

But we mustn't forget that besides this, it is also how important every single thing in nature was for them. It was a god. So here in Machu Picchu, this again was not chosen because, oh, it looks nice. It's also because you have your gods the mountains if we had this completely clear you can see the Salcantay the Apu Salcantay it's an amazing snow peak that you can see from Machu Picchu and then you have other mountains surrounding this place. The mountains were gods and they were called Apus. The water, the sun, Inti in Quechua. The rays, you know, the lightning. Everything in nature was sacred to them and they respected it.

So that is why they had this beautiful communion, let's say, with nature and what nature gave them. If you're ever on the site, if you look up at the highest point of the urban core, you see a place called Intiwatana. It was a mountainous peak that the Inca landscape, they carved into a mighty stone altar with a point sticking up out of that bedrock of the hill. It looks extraordinary. It's a magical place. But what do you think it's there for? What are the theories about how it functioned? Inti Watana, that means the place where you can tie the sun. That will be the translation in English. But Inti Watana was where the Incas were able to check the movements of the sun. That will be the translation in English. But Intiwatana was where the Incas were able to

check the movements of the sun. The idea to do that is to have knowledge about the planting season, harvesting season, to have a good idea when the time is perfect to do specific activities. when the time is perfect to do specific activities. And for sure that the Inti Watana had to be built at the beginning. It's located in the highest part of the city on the top of a trunk pyramid. That didn't mark the hour, but it marked specifically solstice of winter, June 21st, and then solstice of summer, December 22nd. The most important one, solstice of winter, because it's the day when the sun is going far away from the earth. It's the coldest day of the year.

And the Incas thought that the sun's father was going so far. It was going away. And they wanted to bring him back, saying, father, come back. And to do that, you have to go through ceremony, celebrations, festivity, dancing, music, sacrifices, etc. Tell me about these extraordinary mortars. They're kind of shallow bowls. They've got flat bottoms. The idea is that they're full of water and they can reflect the night sky. In the lowest part of the city, we have another important temple called now the Temple of the Mirrors. On the ground, there is a stone where we can see two circles

like mortars that were carved on the rock. But in this case, this building was open. It didn't have a roof, and the Incas could use it to see the sky. So not only related to the solstice of winter or summer, it was related to the Milky Way. So in these mirrors the Incas were able to see the stars, the moon, and make again predictions. It's like watching the Milky Way through the mirrors. The prediction is all related to farming, about the weather.

If there will be a good year of rain, that was very important for the Incas because if you have a year with no rain, that means complications in the farming activities. And if that will be a prediction, the Incas had to go through ceremonies, through offerings, through sacrifices, asking the nature to be good with them. And they considered that the Milky Way was like a duality of complement of the Sacred Valley located in Cusco. It's like a mirror.

Whatever we have in the sacred valley, we can see it in the Milky Way. It's night now, and it's the end of my first day in the Urubamba Valley. It's pitch black. The stars are out above me, a great spray of stars in the sky. It's famously a good place, apparently, to see the stars.

And through the trees, I can hear the rushing water going over some rapids in the Urubamba River. It's a magical spot. I can see why the Inca were so captivated by the night sky here. The Inca weren't just interested in the stars themselves, but also the dark spots, the blotches on the Milky Way, which were between the stars. And they were thought to be living animals. They identified a serpent, a fox, a condor, all of which were worshipped. Now when I'm standing here in the bottom of this valley with the great river running through it, the outline, the silhouettes of these giant peaks and the stars above, I can see why the Incas saw that they were part of something much bigger than themselves. A core belief of the Inca was that they believed that everything was interdependent.

The earth and the sky connected as part of one whole. It was sacred and it was alive. No wonder they were so committed in their belief systems and religious practices to placate the great powers that dictated their universe. In the next episode of this series, the powers that dictated their universe. In the next episode of this series, we're going to head to Arequipa, 200 miles south of Cusco, to tell the story of Juanita, the ice mummy,

an Incan girl whose perfectly preserved body was found at the top of Mount Ampato, a dormant volcano. She spent the last days of her life hiking up the cold mountain to a fate she'd been prepared for for weeks, an elaborate sacrificial ceremony. We hear from the man who found her in 1995. Some of the cloth that had been covering the face went to the side and there I was looking in as a face of anchor. Human sacrifice was just one of a number of dramatic and elaborate ceremonies performed by the Inca to Human sacrifice was just one of a number of dramatic and elaborate ceremonies performed by the Inca to worship and placate their gods. So tomorrow, look out for my next

episode of my Machu Picchu series, all about the Inca's gods, rituals, and sacrifices. And if you've enjoyed this series so far, do leave us a rating and a review wherever you listen to your podcasts see ya Thank you. you