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Reconstructing the past |
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Every time we are faced with a place whose written history does not exist, there is a great temptation to imagine how it was and who lived there in its time of splendor. We conceive of people walking through the streets and plazas, seated or performing ceremonies, using their vessels, dressed with their adornments... Live or written reports no longer exist, but we all know something like this happened in that place. Archaeology and ethnohistory help resolve those and other questions, but of course they have limitations. Who lived in Machu Picchu and what did they do? If the hypothesis that it was the mausoleum of Pachakutec Inca Yupanqui is valid, it is worth the trouble to know as it could have been that place in such conditions.
The mausoleum of the Inca was surrounded by temples, altars and other spaces where the coya, the head of the |
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panaca ("family") of Pachakutec, his servants, and the amautas who maintained the cult lived, far from the regular circuit of the roads, in the middle of a forest of orchids. If Machu Picchu was the Inca's "house", called Patallacta in the chronicles, it must have been constructed during his long mandate at the beginning of the fifteenth century, some hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish. According to what the old accounts say, those residences were used by the Incas themselves for their recreation and rest while they lived. They were endowed with all the resources necessary for their operation without depending on the outside, with their own fields for cultivation, livestock, workshops and the rest.
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