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EARLY ANDEAN EXPERIMENTAL AGRICULTURE Jack VVeatherford There is only one Machu Picchu, but it guards many mysteries. The ruins of this ancient Peruvian city sit perched eight thousand feet above sea level on a mountain overlooking the Urubamba River. Even though in size Machu Picchu barely surpasses a village, the ruins show a complexity indicative of a much more important place. The stone houses with trapezoidal doorways and simple lintel construction do not resemble the houses of the puric, the common peasants, and the public buildings surpass any administrative or religious building one might expect to see in a town of comparable size. The ruins show precision-crafted buildings with the neat regular lines, beveled edges, and mortarless seams that characterize the best of Inca architecture. The spectacular setting combined with the exquisitely wrought buildings evoked much speculation and much romantic rubbish about the purpose of the city. The North American discoverer Hiram Bingham erroneously assumed that he had found Vileabamba, the holdout capital of the Inca Empire after the fall of Cuzco. Lacking an explanation, many people assume that the purpose must have been religious and thus have dubbed the place "the sacred city of the Incas." Others claim that it was built as a city to protect the noble women from the Spanish, or that it served as a monastery associated with the sacred coca plant, or as a cult center. None of this agrees with what we know about the Incas. Unlike the superstitious Aztecs, the Incas did not build large pyramids to perform massive blood sacrifices or pursue long wars to please their gods. Unlike the mystical Mayas, they did not build observatories to watch the endless patterns of the stars or write long, philosophical poems on the creation of the world. They displayed an austere practicality in every aspect of their lives, and they show little hint of religious fervor, no penchant for meditation, no tendency toward either the sentimental or the superstitious. The supposedly practical peoples of ancient Rome, traditional Germany, and the contemporary United States seem almost like mystics compared to the Incas, and ancient Sparta seems like the home of the frivolous. The Incas' practicality shows in the precise and very angular style they used to construct buildings, in EARLY ANDEAN EXPERIMENTAL AGRICULTURE / 65 contrast to the more haphazard and rounder style of their predecessors. This same practicality and passion for organization shows in their economic system, which lacked money, markets, or merchants and yet managed to avoid the famine that stalks so many great empires. In light of this practicality the very existence of Machu Picchu seems all the more puzzling. Why would the Incas build a city and line the mountain with terraces even though there was very little soil there? The builders used the best techniques known to them to make terraces that would last for eternity. Then the workers added layers of rock and clay as subsoil, and from the river below them they hauled up rich dirt over steep embankments half a mile deep. This task would be the equivalent of hauling dirt from the Colorado River to plant fields on top of the Grand Canyon. The Incas built hundreds of the terraces, all of them quite small for any kind of extensive agriculture. Some of them narrow to as little as six inches in width. Yet these terraces climb up and down the mountain to great distances, and the Incas even built small terraces high up on the facing peak of Huayna Picchu, an hour's steep climb from the city. Such an arrangement makes no more sense than if Americans today decided to start farming the face of Mount Rushmore with plots the size of large flower boxes. A hint of the possible function of Machu Picchu came to me while hiking around the area for two days with Charles Laughlin, a plant scientist from the University of Georgia. On one of our excursions, we returned to the ruined city by way of the Inca trail from the s~uth. This trail enters the city through Inti Punuc, the stone gate of the sun, perched high up in the saddle of the mountain dividing the Machu Picchu side of the mountain from a dry inland valley. Standing in the gateway one sees two worlds, the brown and lifeless valley to one side and on the other side the lush, emerald-green valley watered by the thick fogs and mists of the Urubamba River far below...

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