More About Machu Picchu

Early architects
                 An architects (ARK-i-tekt) is a person who designs buildings and supervises construction.  The Incas not only designed and built buildings, but they also planned streets, water systems and stairways for their mountainside city.
                 Most buildings in the area at the time of the Incas were built of mud bricks.  But at Machu Picchu and other sites, the Incas used granite stones that had been loosened from the mountain by earlier earthquakes.  They also quarried, or cut, stones from the earth.
                 The huge stones were moved by hundreds of men pulling them with ropes made of grass.  Then they were shaped by men pounding stones on them.  Some of the stones had many sides; one found in a temple wall in Machu Picchu had 33 corners.
The Sun Temple
                For the Sun Temple at Machu Picchu, the most talented Inca  stonemasons showed their skills.  They made a curved wall around a stone waka, a religious object.  The sun shinning through windows in the curved wall made patterns on the waka.  The Inca planned religious ceremonies around these patterns of light and shadow.
The Lost City
               When the Spanish arrived in 1532, they brought new diseases that Andean people could not resists.  Many Inca people died of smallpox and other diseases.  This and the war against the Spainiards may have been the reasons that the people of Machu Picchu left the city.
               In 1572, the Inca fought their last battle against the Spanish at Vilcabamba --- the 'lost city of the Incas."  Bingham finally found Vilcabamba, then known as Espiritu Pampa, in August 1911.  But he wasn't sure that it was the last capital of the Incas.  To him, it didn't seem important or large enough to be the "lost city."
              After another expedition to the area in 1912, Bingham came to the conclusion that Machu Picchu must have been the Incas' final capital city.
              Today, experts agree that the ruins that are now called Espiritu Pampa are actually the city of Vilcabamba --- the lost cityof the Incas.