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About the disoccupation when discovered |
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The colonial occupation |
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The most considerable fire, which also presents carved stones broken with blows, is that which was produced on the top of the most visible and luxurious shrine of the citadel of Machu Picchu, today known as the Torreon which was the crypt of some very important personage - like Pachakutec - who surely had his mummy preserved in the cave found under this building. There the stones are heat fractured by the action of intense, sustained fire. Perhaps in the crypt, as in the temple of Pachamac in Lima which Hernando Pizarro destroyed, there was flammable organic material made up of remains of animal sacrifices, aromatic plants, oils and other things.
The extirpators of idolatry carried off whatever gold there was and burned everything else. In the north window of the Torreon remain the holes which served to fasten the sheets |
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of gold, which could well have had the form of an image of the Inca, like that which the chroniclers say was in the temple if Qorikancha in Cuzco, where similar traces remain.
If Machu Picchu were the mausoleum of Pachakuteq, we could think the destruction was produced after 1550, the time at which, according to the chronicler Juan de Betanzos, the mummy of the Inca was still in "his house" in Patallacta. In effect, Juan Polo de Ondegardo alone could have seen it around 1560. If we follow Raul Porras Barrenechea in his history of the extirpation of idolatry, Machu Picchu could have been the first victim of those Vandalic evangelizing practices.
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pag. 1
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