Word: inca
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Inca Irrigation...
Fifty miles to the southeast stood Cuzco, the administrative capital of the 15th century Inca Empire and, to the Incas, "the navel of the world." Just over the granite slopes to the northwest lay Machu Picchu, a templed citadel so shrouded by mountains and mystery that no white man found it until 1911. Patallacta was between the two on a stone-paved Inca highway, part of the Royal Road that climbed and twisted more than 5,000 miles through the Andes. The town, with its 115 dwellings guarded by a hilltop fortress, probably served as "a pit stop for Incas...
Five centuries later, Ann Kendall is trying to revive them. Her objective, beyond the usual archaeological digging and dusting, is to convert information about the past "to practical use in order to improve the economy." With a modest investment of labor, Kendall insists, Inca irrigation could pay rich dividends to this overwhelmingly poor country, where food and potable water are in chronic short supply. "I don't say that this scheme is going to empty out the slums of Lima, get people back on the land, recreate an Inca civilization," she says, "but it's possible to make...
...four summers, Kendall and an international team of volunteers, meagerly financed by a grab bag of charitable sources, have been laboring like Inca road gangs, repairing broken stonework, rebuilding terrace walls and clearing canal channels choked with debris. Aside from applying a little cement and plastic sheeting to canal beds, they have stuck to traditional Inca stoneworking techniques. So far they have managed to reirrigate only 30 acres. But even this small step forward-or backward-has begun to change some of the lives of the handful of farmers on the slopes around Patallacta. One peasant has requested and secured...
...aqueducts to working order, she may be inadvertently disturbing other fragile remnants of the ancient culture. The Peruvian government, however, applauds her efforts: earlier this year she became the first foreign woman to receive the country's Order of Merit. Luis Valcarcel, one of the pioneers of Inca archaeology, also approves. "Her project is praiseworthy," he says, "because she is not trying simply to draw up a catalogue of ruins; she is trying to restore them to their original condition." Modern Peru has much to learn from the early natives, says Valcarcel. "The Incas had a deep sense...