The Inca were the best planners of the South American pre-Columbians and were builders par excellence. By far, the most impressive work left behind by the Inca was their fine stone-fitted architecture.
In this they were innovators and had no equal in Latin America. Instead of using adobe brick, as did the Moche, the Chimu and the Nazca, they constructed everything of stone - immense, extremely heavy, smoothly shaped gray-blue stone, precisely cut from large boulders and painstakingly hauled to the construction sites.
The means by which they build the trapezoidal walls for their living quarters, storage facilities and temples with stone which individually weighed up to 50 metric tons, and measured 20 feet square, is yet to be fully explained.
How these were transported is not exactly known, nor how they were set in place, nor how they fitted one stone to another, so precisely that s sheet of paper cannot be inserted between them - all this without the use of mechanical lifting devices and without mortar.
The capital of the Inca world was Cuzco, which in the Quecha language means the navel, or in a manner of speaking, the center of the universe. It was actually a hub for the famous network of Inca roads.
Cuzco today is a functional Andean city, 12,000 feet above sea level, with all of the Inca structures standing and with some of them converted to modern use.
The Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, is in the heart of the city and upon its Inca stone foundations the Spaniards build a cathedral which has stood for 500 years and is still in use. The city was built in the form of a jaguar with the fortress of Sacsahuaman as its head.
Now, 500 years after the conquest of the Inca empire, the Quecha-speaking people of Cuzco still celebrate the arrival of the summer solstice. Each year, in the early cold morning hours of the 21st of June, the men, women and children of Cuzco and its surrounding areas, dressed in colorful alpaca wool ponchos and knitted earflap hats, gather together at Sacsahuaman.
(This fortress) covers a vast plain which served the Inca as an arena and the setting for the many religious ceremonies ordered by the emperor and supervised by the priests. The main entrance through the walls of Sacsahuaman was constructed with a trapezoidal doorway set into the huge stones, beneath which the people passed on their way to the observation areas.
Invariably the sun arrives at 6:00 A.M. and it appears right in the middle of the trapezoidal entrance way. The Inca precisely calculated the construction of the doorway at the exact spot above the astern horizon where the sun makes its dramatic appearance.
It rises quickly, bursting above the stone doorway, sends its rays over the entire floor of Sacsahuaman and then climbs and paints the facing of the stones, lighting up the colorful garments of the people, the platforms decorated with flowers and dried corn, and brightly reflecting off brass musical instruments.
Soon, one of the elders places a large conch shell to his lips, and blows three, loud, mournful notes, calling for the start of the ceremonies - the sun has been reborn.
Reprinted with permission from the book, Who Were the Pre-Columbians? by Bernard Barken Kaufman, New World Art, Inc., P.O. Box 3486, NC 28374.
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