The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

This is the temple of the Three Windows is obvious because it has 3 windows. It only has three walls and used to have a roof.

It lead to speculation that Machu Picchu’s original name was Tampu-Tocco, the place where the first Inca was born. This is because of a story that the first Inca “ordered works to be executed at the place of his birth; consisting of a masonry wall with three windows, which were emblems of the house of his fathers whence he descended.” However Tampu-Tocco was supposed to be by lake Titicaca, and the temple of the three windows actually originally had 5 windows but the outer two were filled in. You can see one in the left of this picture.

The stones are irregular shapes, smoothed and fitted together, instead of rectangular blocks. Therefore it must have either been built earlier or been less important than the Temple of the Sun and the Main Temple.

This stone in front of the temple and its shadow form an Incan cross on the ground when the sun hits it just right.

The temple of the sun is the most elaborately carved temple on the site. It is also one of the only Incan structures that has a curved wall.

It is called the temple of the sun because the window lines up with the sun on the solstice.

It was built upon large chunks of natural rock.

The little nubs outside of the windows probably supported some kind of instruments to assist with solar observations.

The natural rock was carved so that the rectangular blocks would fit into it securely.

The back wall of the temple of the sun connects to an adjoining building, which was probably a priest’s house. The priest’s house used slightly lower quality stones. You can see the transition from the poofier stones used for the priest’s house to the smoother, flatter ones used for the Sun Temple.

Underneath the temple of the sun is a cave which sunlight only enters for a few days before and after the winter solstice. Therefore they think it was used as part of the winter solstice celebrations.

The curved wall and shiny white rocks really stand out from the surrounding buildings.

Machu Picchu was built out of rocks quarried from the mountain it was built on.

Ledges were carved into the base rocks for the carved stones to sit on.

This is a place where they made a mistake and started to put the wall in the wrong place.

The rocks were chipped a bit with a hard stone (usually meteorite) or metal tool, and then a wooden wedge was inserted. This was soaked in water and allowed to slowly expand. This would cause the stone to split along the crystal lines, usually at 90 degree angles.

The least important (and oldest) buildings just had randomly sized chunks of rock, roughly fit together.

Nicer buildings had the stones carefully carved to perfectly fit into each other, like puzzle pieces.

But the best buildings had stones carved into perfect rectangles. They were probably also polished to a shine originally.

Some buildings have puzzle pieces at the bottom but get more rectangular near the top. This might be because building styles changed as the building was under construction.

A lot of the time big natural rocks were incorporated into the walls.

Some of the doorways were very short.

But there were also tall ones.

There were also staircases so narrow that Kerri would have to go down sideways.

This spider also built his home at Machu Picchu.

The wall along the main trail into the city was well fortified.

They keep several llamas on site to cut the grass.

They work very hard.

Note: In order to deal with slow internet connections, Machu Picchu has been divided into 16 parts. This is part 1.

Machu Picchu is the most famous Incan site.

It is located in a very scenic but inaccessible valley.

It was built in about 1450 and abandoned in 1572 for unknown reasons.

Because it was abandoned before the Spanish showed up to destroy the temples and steal the stones, the Spanish never found it.

Therefore it is the most complete Incan site that we know of.

It was officially rediscovered in 1911 by an American. Though when he found it two or three native families were already farming the terraces, and he found it by asking the locals if there were any interesting ruins nearby. In his notes on the excavation the next year he complains about spending two days cleaning recent charcoal graffiti off of the ruins.

It contains about 200 buildings. And over 100 stairways. It was probably home to about 1000 people at its peak.

No one knows what Machu Picchu was used for.

A lot of the theories about what Machu Picchu was used for involve the inhabitants being 80% women. This is based on a study from 1912 in which the skeletons from tombs around the site were examined, and 80% of them were female.

But when the same remains were re-examined in 2006 they found a 50-50 split. They think the 1912 study must have based the gender almost entirely on body size, so short men were assumed to be female.

They have a booth where you can get your passport stamped with Machu Picchu. We are worried that we will run out of pages in our passports, but Kerri really wanted a stamp.

After surviving the Inca Trail we got our tourist picture on the brink of Machu Picchu. Luckily few other tourists were around.