Ann Kordas; Ryan J. Lynch; Brooke Nelson; Julie Tatlock

A panoramic photo of ruins of a city on a mountainside with large mountains in the background. In the front left of the image the ruined, dark gray, connected, long stone buildings sit on six steps with walls left depicting rooms and no roofs. Below the last step a flat, green grass filled space shows more stone walls with rooms outlined and roofs missing. Going down the mountain in front of the bottom tier are more ruined stone buildings and a thick forest of green trees. More ruins of maze-like buildings are seen in the background along with a pyramid shaped structure in the back left of the image. The bottom left corner shows beige steps in the mountain with people depicted at the top. In front of those steps are large greenish steps and some rocks. In the bottom right of the image a road can be seen with people standing. — Figure 8.1 Machu Picchu. Nestled between two peaks high in the Andes Mountains, the Inca fortress of Machu Picchu was built in the fifteenth century CE and once looked out over an expansive empire. (credit: modification of work “Machu Picchu” by Roger Canals/Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0)

Chapter Outline

Introduction

The stunning ruins of Machu Picchu, situated in the Andes Mountains between two sharp peaks almost eight thousand feet above sea level, continue to attract visitors from around the world (Figure 8.1). Once a palace and royal retreat for the conquering Inca ruler Pachacuti Yupanqui, the complex was begun in the mid-fifteenth century CE and remained occupied until shortly after the Spanish arrived in the following century. Under Pachacuti Yupanqui, from their Andean home city of Cuzco, the Inca extended their control and built a large empire in Peru. Later rulers continued this expansion, bringing much of western South America under their rule. While the Inca Empire was impressive and politically, religiously, and technologically sophisticated, it was merely the last of many Andean civilizations and cultures stretching back thousands of years. Indeed, these South American civilizations were part of an even larger number of cultures, empires, and architectural traditions that spanned the entire Western Hemisphere and were built by the descendants of migrants who reached the Americas several thousand years ago.