Word: machu
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There was no doubt in Hiram Bingham's mind that he had stumbled onto something mystical in the summer of 1911, when he discovered the dazzling Incan settlement now known as Machu Picchu. He was convinced that the remote Peruvian outpost dotted with temples was a sacred city, the birthplace and final stronghold of the Incas, where virgins sought sanctuary and priests worshipped the sun god. The charismatic Bingham--a Yale University archaeologist, later a Connecticut Governor and U.S. Senator and much later a model for Hollywood's Indiana Jones--announced, in a series of magazine articles and best-selling...
...what, exactly, are they visiting? More than 90 years after Machu Picchu first landed on the scientific map, modern archaeologists are making a persuasive case that it wasn't a spiritual center at all. Machu Picchu, it turns out, may have been nothing more than a mountain retreat for the Emperor Pachacuti and his royal court, sort of a 15th century Camp David. "It was just a country palace where they'd go to get away from the capital, Cuzco," says Yale archaeologist Richard Burger. "It was only a three-day walk away...
...retrospect, Bingham can be excused for concluding that Machu Picchu was the holiest of Incan sites. Its inaccessibility certainly suggested that. So did some of its apparently religious structures, which were built with distinctive three-window designs, evoking the legend that the Incan people were created by three brothers who appeared through a trio of portals. And the large percentage of uncovered skeletons that Bingham's expert determined to be female suggested the remains of an Incan nunnery...
Burger and Salazar undertook fresh interpretations of tools and dwellings and concluded that Machu Picchu was heavily populated by craftsmen, probably brought there by the royals to tend to their material needs. Facial studies of recovered skulls reveal a healthy stew of ethnic groups, pointing to a multicultural mix of servants as opposed to a uniform class of priests. Skeletal analyses conducted by physical anthropologist John Verano of Tulane University, one of Burger and Salazar's collaborators, show that the ratio of females to males was a comparatively even 3 to 2 and that families and even infants lived...
Call-in listeners asked Brumagim, who had been a researcher for the 2002 Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia book, for advice on upcoming trips to the Galapagos Islands and Machu Picchu...