Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Machu Picchu

Starting point is 00:00:00 High in the Andes Mountains of Peru lies one of the world's most famous archaeological sites. It was built by a civilization without iron tools, wheeled transportation, or a conventional writing system. Yet its builders created extraordinary stonework, terraces, fountains, and drainage systems on a steep mountain ridge. For centuries, it remained largely unknown beyond the surrounding region, before the wider world learned of it in the early 20th century. Learn more about Machu Picchu on this episode of Everytta. Everything Everywhere daily. Legendary has arrived in Alberta with BetMGM Sportsbook.

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Starting point is 00:02:08 Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nispresso.com. Machu Picchu gained international fame in 1911 when a Yale expedition led by Hiram Bingham brought the site to global attention. Yet Bingham wasn't looking for Machu Picchu. He actually stumbled across it by accident. His real target was Veal Kabamba, the legendary mountain refuge Monko Inga founded in 1539 after his failed siege of Kusko. Bingham, like other treasure hunters and explorers of his time, expected the stronghold to hold vast amounts of gold. For more than three decades, four successive rulers waged guerrilla resistance from

Starting point is 00:02:52 Vuel Kabamba until Spanish troops captured and executed Tupac Amor, the last Incan emperor, in 1572. The Spanish burned the jungle city, leaving it swallowed by vegetation and fueling the legend of the lost city of the Incas. This was the prize that Hiram Bingham was actually looking for. While earlier explorers relied on colonial maps or just sheer luck, Bingham was trained as a historian and took a different approach. He actually talked to the locals. He followed their oral histories and even hiked with anyone willing to guide him.

Starting point is 00:03:29 On July 24, 1911, Bingham met Melchor Artiaga, a Quechua-speaking farmer living along the Urubamba River Valley. Without Artiaga, Bingham would likely have hiked right down to the valley floor without ever knowing what was at the top of the ridge. Arteaga had lived in the valley his entire life, farming a modest plot and selling supplies to travelers. Through an interpreter, Bingham asked about the local ruins. Arteaga didn't hesitate. He said that high atop the mistrouted ridge opposite his hut

Starting point is 00:04:02 lay magnificent stone palaces and terraces. Artiaga pointed up towards the ridge between two jagged summits. Winapechu, which meant the young peak, and Machu Picchu, which meant the Old Mountain. While Bingham's skeptical companion stayed behind, Bingham offered Artiaga one silver sole, or about 50 cents, to guide him up to the ruins. And thankfully, Artiaga took the deal.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Artiaga led Bingham in an armed escort across a terrifying footbridge of logs lashed with vines over a raging rapid, which Bingham crawled across on his hands and knees. The group hiked for nearly four hours through more than 2,000 vertical feet of snake-infested cloud forest. At the saddle between the two peaks, they found local families farming the terraces, seemingly oblivious to what was above them. Artiaga rested while an 11-year-old boy, Pabloito guided Bingham through the final bamboo thicket to the citadel. Emerging into the clearing, he was stunned. He later recounted his amazement in his journal by noting, quote, It fairly took my breath away. What could this place be? Why had no one given us any idea of it?

Starting point is 00:05:16 The site held me spellbound. I could hardly believe my eyes. End quote. Bingham was convinced that he had found the lost Incan city of Veal Kabamba. In an incredible twist of irony, Bingham actually walked right through the ruins of the real Veal Kabamba barely a month after visiting Machu Picchu. Unimpressed by its modest stone dwellings, an overgrown brush, he dismissed it as an insignificant outpost, refusing to believe the legendary rebel capital could be so ordinary after seeing Machu Picchu. Yet despite the wonders he saw, Bingham only spent a few hours taking notes and pictures at Machu Picchu before moving on in search of Vealcabamba, which he believed was deeper in the jungle. In an era before Howard Carter found

Starting point is 00:06:03 King Tut, Machu Picchu was a massive archaeological discovery. But perhaps, Rediscovery is the better word, as Bingham didn't discover the site per se. Local farmers had known about it for years. They just didn't tell anyone because nobody had asked them. Nonetheless, Bingham was determined to amplify what he had found. When he returned to the United States with pitchers in hand, Bingham pitched National Geographic editor Gilbert H. Grovener and secured a landmark $10,000 grant which was matched by Yale University. Bingham agreed that National Geographic received the first rights to publish the expedition's official findings and photographs. In April 1913, National Geographic dedicated an entire monthly issue to a single topic for the first time.

Starting point is 00:06:56 Filled with nearly 250 photographs, that single issue turned Machu Picchu into a household name. And on a side note, despite having nearly every issue of National Geographic from the last 125 years, I do not have this issue, and it is very hard to find. I check eBay every other day, and I almost never see it listed. Yale wanted to expand the holdings of its Peabody Museum of Natural History with artifacts from Bingham's expedition. Bingham returned to the Uruwamba Valley in July of 1912 to lead a major archaeological and historical study. The $20,000 in grants gave him unprecedented resources, which he dedicated to removing centuries a forest buildup at the site. As the team cut back the jungle each day, they made astonishing

Starting point is 00:07:45 discoveries. They revealed a granite city complex with fountains, plazas, and ceremonial spaces. The excavation revealed more than just stone structures. The team found pottery, bronze tools, and more than 170 ancient skeletons buried in caves in the cliffs. Yale Bone archaeologist George Eaton erroneously claimed that most of the bones were female, leading Bingham to conclude that the site was a religious sanctuary for the sacred virgins of the sun. Known in Quechua as Akia Kuna or chosen women, the virgins of the sun were an elite class of young women selected from across the empire to serve the state religion and royal court. Raised in dedicated sanctuaries under a vow of chastity, they wove the empire's sacred

Starting point is 00:08:33 textiles and brewed ceremonial maize beer. They were frequently betrothed to nobles or allied chieftains to seal imperial alliances. However, Bingham's theory was wrong. Later DNA test showed the skeletons were a 50-50 mix of men and women and not the domain of the virgins of the sun. But despite these errors, the physical work accomplished that summer was undeniable. They had reclaimed the site from the jungle. In the process, National Geographic got its iconic photographs, and Yale received tens of thousands of ancient artifacts. These artifacts remained in Connecticut for nearly a century before finally being repatriated to Peru in 2011. Since Bingham's rediscovery in the 1913 issue of National Geographic, researchers have spent

Starting point is 00:09:20 more than a century debating Machu Picchu's true purpose. Bingham clung to his twin theories that the site was either Veil-Kabamba or a sanctuary for the virgins of the sun until he died in 1956. Modern researchers, however, have thoroughly dismantled both of those theories. Today, the consensus holds that Machu Picchu was an elite royal estate built around the year 1450 for the 9th Incan emperor, Pachucati. Set in the warmer cloud forest below Kusko, it served as a seasonal retreat where the sovereign and his royal court could escape the harsh Andean winters, hunt, feast, and entertain regional leaders.

Starting point is 00:10:01 Evidence also points to an astronomical observatory at the site as stone markers operated as precise solar sundials that track solstices and agricultural cycles. Machu Picchu's dramatic placement within a sacred Andean landscape suggests that it also might have been a ceremonial center. Rather than serving a single narrow function, Machu Picchu is now believed to have been a multi-layered imperial masterpiece, part royal retreat, part political showcase, and part sacred ceremonial sanctuary. While the purpose of Machu Picchu has inspired debate, civil engineers have been fascinated

Starting point is 00:10:39 by how the Inca built it. Planning a site, 8,000 feet above sea level, on a seismically active ridge that receives more than 80 inches of rain per year, presented serious challenges. The Incan Empire's technological capabilities made things even more difficult. Before Europeans arrived, the Americas had no beasts of burden, capable of hauling heavy loads. No oxen or horses could drag the enormous stones to the top of the site. The site was a natural quarry, which made gathering the granite easier,

Starting point is 00:11:14 but the large stone still had to be moved significant distances without the technology that we call the wheel. The Inca had no written alphabet to formalize designs, as administrative record keeping relied on the Kipu system, a series of different color. knotted ropes. Overcoming these obstacles required a massive workforce, mobilized through the META system, the Inca's mandatory labor tax owed by every household to the state. The single greatest threat to Machu Picchu, however, was water. Without an ingenious drainage network to divert the torrential rains the site received, the complex would have collapsed in a mudslides,

Starting point is 00:11:57 washing the entire citadel into the canyon. Solving this problem required engineers to build 129 drainage outlets that carried water safely down to the valley below through a sophisticated network of terraces covered with topsoil and gravel. Terracing had a long history in the Incan Empire. It was the key to their agricultural system, and repurposing it at Machu Picchu was a natural extension of the technology. But as impressive as Incan hydrology was,

Starting point is 00:12:27 the stone work is even more impressive. Bigam praised Incan stone masonry throughout his career, and in his book The Lost City of the Inca's he noted, quote, The flowing lines, the symmetrical arrangement of the ashlar's, and the gradual gradation of the courses, combined to produce a wonderful effect, softer and more pleasing than that of the marble temples of the old world. Owing to the absence of mortar,

Starting point is 00:12:53 there were no ugly spaces between the rocks. They might have grown together. On account of the beauty of the white granite, this structure suppressed in attractiveness the best ink of walls in Kusko. Dimly, I began to realize that this wall in its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave were as fine as the finest stonework in the world. End quote. Mortar was the conventional solution to the problem facing ink and engineers, but they clearly

Starting point is 00:13:21 understood that they were building in an earthquake zone and that the stones needed to move. Engineers have praised the stonework as the region has been struck by earthquake since its construction, and the stones have danced and shifted as they were supposed to, allowing the stone structures to survive for centuries. The site's long-term damage actually came from jungle encroachment rather than from seismic activity or structural flaws. Remarkably, Incan stone masons cut the stones with such precision without iron or steel tools. Masons drove dry wooden wedges into natural fissures and then soaked them with water. As the wood absorbed the moisture and expanded, the outward pressure cracked the granite along clean fracture lines. Archaeologists have reverse engineered these practices using hammer stones found at the site.

Starting point is 00:14:14 More than 500 years later, the stones at Machu Picchu are still so tight that neither a knife blade nor a sheet of paper can actually be put between them. To bring water to the ridge, Inca engineers tapped a high-altitude spring and built a gravity-fed canal that delivered a constant stream into the citadel. Known as the stairway of the fountains, the 16 cascading basins provided water to the site for both practical and ceremonial purposes. Historians long debated why Machu Picchu was abandoned, but the modern consensus points to a tragic end. Occupied for less than a century,

Starting point is 00:14:52 the estate was abandoned in the 1530s during the chaos of civil war and the smallpox epidemic that preceded the Spanish conquest. Machu Picchu was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 and voted one of the new seven wonders of the world. Today, more than 1.5 million visitors make the difficult trek up into the cloud forest every year to visit. Machu Picchu endures because it's more than just a spectacular collection of ruins. It's a monument to the Incan engineering and to the Incan Empire. Hiram Bingon didn't truly discover Machu Picchu, but he did introduce it to the wider world, beginning more than a century of research that continues to reshape our understanding of the site. And even today, after decades of excavation and study,

Starting point is 00:15:43 Machu Picchu still retains some of the mystery that made it famous in the first place. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research in writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast.

Starting point is 00:16:15 As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast, apps, you two can have it run in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Machu Picchu

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