Word: pachacuti
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...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...
...written language--but the Spaniards, who conquered so much of South America, kept plenty. Fifteen years ago, John Howland Rowe, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was studying the archives left by the Spaniards at Cuzco and came across a 16th century lawsuit filed by descendants of Pachacuti seeking the return of royal family lands, including a retreat called Picchu. Over the years, other researchers have dug deeper into the mystery, none deeper than Burger, a onetime student of Rowe's, and his wife Lucy Salazar, a Yale archaeologist...
According to Bingham, Machu Picchu was in reality the Tampu-Tocco ("Window Tavern") of pre-Inca legend, a mountain fortress maintained by the kings of the Amautas, who ruled the highlands of the Andes for 62 generations. The last king, Pachacuti VI, was mortally wounded in a battle with barbarian tribes of the Amazon jungles, probably in the 8th century A.D., and his body was carried by his loyal warriors to Tampu-Tocco. With the death of Pachacuti, the widespread kingdom of the Amautas broke into pieces...
Manco Capac called himself Inca (King) and was the first ruler of the greatest nation the continent had ever known. According to the 17th century Inca chronicler, Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, when Manco Capac had consolidated his power, "he ordered works to be executed at the place of his birth, consisting of a masonry wall with three windows." The only such wall yet found is in Machu Picchu...
...Theory. Bingham is convinced that the city he found is older, perhaps a thousand years older, than Cuzco, which dates from about 1100. To this spot, he believes, the pre-Inca ruler Pachacuti retreated before Amazonian hordes. On the mountain terraces, the pre-inca civilization survived to go forth with manco, the first Inca, to Cuzco and the far-flung empire (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador) that the Spaniards found. To this peak the last Incas fled to live out their days in cloudswept palaces that no white man saw till, in 1911, Hiram Bingham found them...
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