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About the disoccupation when discovered |
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Written testimonies |
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Machu Picchu was an Inca urban center and consequently was inhabited and active at the time of the invasion of the Spanish. There is no reason to doubt that this could not be true. It was not built previous to the installation of the Inca State; that is, it was not over 100 years old at the time of the Spanish conquest of Cuzco, even if there had been dwellings or installations from earlier times in the sanctuary. Nevertheless, despite having been a very important place, it is not mentioned nor is any account given of other places, like Choqekirau, on the other side of Salqantay, or Tipon or several other places in the nearby area. However, in the known writings from the sixteenth century, some of which have been recently found, and also in the chronicles - if we read them in connection with the present knowledge - there are references to the zone and presumably to the site.
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There are several documents from the sixteenth century which speak of Piccho or Picho in the area where the sanctuary is found. In fact, as John H. Rowe says, it was Melchor Arteaga, Hiram Bingham's guide who baptized the site only as Machu Picchu, without making reference to that together with Wayna, it formed Piccho. Thanks to these writings, we know that it was close to the route to Vilcabamba, which the Spanish looked for in order to combat the Inca rebels there between 1540 and 1571. Thanks to the studies of Luis Miguel Glave and of Maria Isabel Remy we have been able to know of a 1568 document that speaks of the "town of Picho" and mentions the lands cultivated by the Incas and the caciques who lived there. Therefore, in 1568 the town still existed that, with every certainty, is Machu Picchu. The document says that that territory was conquered by Pachakutec Inca Yupanqui, who appropriated most of the land from Torontoy downriver - this Juan de Betanzos and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa ratify - and that the cacique of the town cultivated coca. There is another document from the same period that mentions that the inhabitants of Picchu paid tribute in coca to the Spanish and also that in the time of the Incas "that which they formerly gathered there served to make sacrifices and ritual to the dead bodies as was the custom in this kingdom to do among themselves". This agrees with the hypothesis that the sanctuary could have been destined to the cult of the "dead bodies", a possible reference to mummies.
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pag. 1 - 2
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