
Ghosts of Machu Picchu
- Year:
- 2010
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High in the Peruvian Andes, there's
an ancient city called Machu Picchu.
lt is a ruin that defies explanation.
Who were the mysterious people who built
it and why did they build it here?
With no defensive wall,
it doesn't look like a fortress.
instead, there are fountains
and small pools...
temples...
and strange altars cut from granite...
...but little else
to explain how a people
who didn't have iron tools or the wheel
could have created
such a masterpiece...and why.
Now, new research
in the bodies and bones
of the people who once lived here...
To me this is the type of injury
more indicative of a weapon...
possibly of warfare.
There are clues far below the city...
and underneath it...
...and in the stories
of the mummies of kings.
Will all these revelations finally
lay the ghosts of Machu Picchu to rest?
Perched at 2,450 meters
on a narrow ridge in the high Andes
Machu Picchu is a remote
and mysterious ancient wonder.
Spread across the top of this ridge
are more than 200 structures
each built with exquisitely cut stone.
Some appear to be homes...others temples.
They surround a hectare green...
and all are fed
by open waterways and fountains.
It is a lost city, whose doorways and
passages hint at the ghosts of its past.
A place that is
at once beautiful and baffling.
There are no written clues in the city...
no carvings to suggest a purpose.
At its highest point,
the mystery only deepens.
There,
a beautifully carved pillar stands,
a graceful riddle to cap the site.
From this lofty height, the views
leave one stunned, but also curious.
How did the builders
get all this stone up here
and then cut it so finely
that they didn't even need mortar
And why did they build it
in this impossible place?
Even more perplexing,
why did they abandon it?
Throughout the city,
stones seemed to be on the verge
of being placed when work came to a stop.
Now, as never before, clues are emerging.
Some at the site
itself in new excavations.
Others at the lower
reaches of Machu Picchu
for the very first time.
These mysteries have long
obsessed Fernando Astete,
director of the Machu Picchu
Archaeological Park.
There is such an important cultural legacy
here, not just for Peruvians,
but a legacy forthe entire world.
Making sense of that legacy is Astete's
challenge-along with getting to work.
He has one of the most precarious
commutes of anyone on the planet.
His path was built by a people
who were sure-footed with little fear
of heights
the Inca.
They rose to power in the mid-1400s in
part because they built such good roads.
Much of their 16,000 kilometer
network is still visible today.
They left other evidence that they
were master engineers and builders.
Their terraces, canals and stone
cities rival those of ancient Rome.
But unlike the ancient Romans,
they did all of this without the wheel,
without iron and without
a written language.
The Inca did have a calculating system
using knotted strings called khipu,
but it left no record
of their lives or their history.
So, much of what
we do know comes from the Spanish
who conquered them in the 1500s.
These accounts carry
the bias of conquerors.
an Inca artist named Guaman Poma.
Poma was born shortly after the Spanish
arrived in Peru so he was
an observer who bridged both worlds.
He produced hundreds of simple
drawings about farming techniques,
royalty and the Inca history of conquest.
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"Ghosts of Machu Picchu" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2022. Web. 30 Jun 2022. <https://www.scripts.com/script/ghosts_of_machu_picchu_8945>.
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