Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (37 page)

The only other cave containing anything of post-Columbian origin was about five hundred yards from the camp in a southerly direction and a little above the level of the Rock-Sheltered Terrace. It lies fairly near, if not actually in, Cemetery No. 3, where many of the chief people of Machu Picchu were buried. This cave contained two peach stones and a beef bone, ‘a fragment from the shaft of a bovine tibia’, as Dr Eaton describes it. In view of the complete absence of beef bones in any other cave I am inclined to assume that the peach stones and the bone were the remains of some visitor’s lunch. Machu Picchu was reported to exist as an interesting archaeological site as early as the unsuccessful attempt of Wiener to find it in 1875. We know that Lizarraga had been treasure hunting on these forest-clad slopes at least ten years before our visit to the cave. It is also significant that neither at this cave nor at another whose location is recorded in the same general terms and which was probably close to it, did our workmen find any pottery, bronzes, or other artifacts of commercial value. It seems possible that their absence may be attributed to the successful treasure hunter who brought the peach stones and the beef bone. Except for the bead of fused green glass, none of the burial caves near the city or in Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2 contained any evidence that the persons buried there had had any contact with the Spanish conquerors. It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the last occupants of the city perished without having been visited by any Europeans.

A careful count of the skeletal material found in the various caves and graves seems to show the remains of one hundred and seventy-three individuals, of whom perhaps one hundred and fifty were women, an extraordinary percentage unless this was a sanctuary whose inhabitants were the Chosen Women of the
Sun. In view of the size and importance of the city and the very large number of persons who must have been employed as agricultural labourers, hewers of wood, and drawers of water, in and around the sanctuary, it is possible that only persons of high rank or priests or the Chosen Women themselves were permitted to be buried in the caves near the city. It is doubtful whether any except members of the family of the Inca and the attendants in the great sanctuary were even permitted to enter the city gate. That appears to have been the ancient custom. This would account for the absence of the bones of husky workers.

In the graves we found pieces of about three hundred and fifty dishes and jars. The cemetery containing the largest number of pots per person is the one nearest to and most accessible from the ruins of the city. About twice as many were found here. The reason for this might be that many of these potsherds represented the garniture of burials which had taken place so long ago that all the bone material had disintegrated. This hypothesis is borne out by the fact that in the rocky region south and south-west of the Sacred Plaza, probably an ancient burial ground from which nearly all the skeletal material had disappeared, a very large number of potsherds were found, from which we have been able to identify five hundred and twenty-one different pots, including specimens of every one of the principal types known to Machu Picchu. Although nearly all the burial caves contained pieces of pottery, only one of them yielded a fragment of a three-legged brazier. Probably the people whose bones were found in the caves did not use the braziers, the metal workers being undoubtedly men.

The art of trepanning seems to have been rather widely practised in ancient Peru. Consequently there is considerable food for reflection in the fact that none of the burial caves opened on the sides of Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu contained a single ‘trepanned’ skull. Yet practically all the large burial caves which we opened in the valley within a distance of thirty miles contained a number of ‘trepanned’ skulls. Evidently the warriors whose wounds required this treatment did not live at Machu Picchu. It should be noted, however, that many of the so-called
‘trepanned skulls’ are claimed by competent surgeons to show more evidence of disease than of surgery. The bones of the men who built Machu Picchu have disappeared. Some may have been buried elsewhere. Of those who died in this immediate vicinity probably all vestige has been lost.

Patient and systematic excavation was carried on in the city. With few exceptions the interior of the houses yielded little or no results; but certain localities gave us quantities of valuable material. The most fruitful digging was on the ridge south of the little plaza on which stood the Temple of the Three Windows, between it and the City Gate. This region is dotted with a considerable number of very large rocks. Possibly it was the quarry from which some of the building stone was taken but where blocks too large for the purpose of the stonemasons and too difficult to be broken up into desired size without the use of blasting materials were left in place. The result of the quarrying left a small area which was not worth terracing; stone quarries naturally do not make good gardens.

A few rods north-west from the top of the main stairway, Mr Erdis discovered a huge boulder or ledge on the top of which several figures of snakes had been carved. We called it Snake Rock. It may have been the centre of the original cemetery long before the last occupation. Under the rock he found a cave which contained fragments of a skull and jaw-bone but none of the larger bones of the skeleton. That the burial here included persons or a person of importance is shown by the artifacts found under the rock. Among them are two bronze mirrors with pierced square handles, two bronze knives, a very fine unusually long bronze shawl-pin, a drinking cup, two discs of green chloritic schist, half a dozen chips or counters of the same material, a broken knife of chalcedony and a piece of red paint, not to mention numerous pebbles and potsherds. Why small pebbles were brought up from the river bed and put in the grave with such valuable bronzes is a puzzle. However, as we have seen, Father Cobo, the Jesuit, saw guinea pigs cooked by the Aymara in Bolivia with ‘smooth pebbles from the river, of the kind called
calapurca
, the Aymara word for belly-stones, so called because
placed in the belly of the cuy’. It is amusing to imagine that one of the persons of importance who was buried here under the great Snake Rock was an Aymara damsel, one of the Chosen Women of the Sun, who had been brought all the way from the country around Lake Titicaca to minister to the happiness of the Inca and had brought with her the knowledge that guinea pigs cooked with
calapurca
were particularly toothsome!

Not far from the Snake Rock was unearthed an artistic little bronze knife with a fisherboy and his catch, a unique design, which was regarded by Dr W. H. Holmes as one of the finest examples of the ancient art of working in bronze ever found in America. Unquestionably it is a remarkable example of a mature creative art which took delight in expressing well-known scenes in an artistic manner. It is now in the Yale Museum.

Near the Snake Rock are the very irregular foundations of houses or huts that in design are unlike anything else in the city, and underneath some of the large boulders are small caves which at one time might have served as shelters.

In the process of his patient digging within the limits of the city Mr Erdis made the discovery that in the vicinity of these boulders, artifacts were likely to be found 2 or 3 feet underground. In this part of the city, quite a number of little bronzes, two stone dishes, and some artifacts were found which did not occur in any of the digging in other parts of the city nor in the excavations in burial caves on the slopes of the ridge. It would seem to be obvious that this part of the site represented a much earlier occupancy than most of the ruins.

Very little skeletal material was found within the city, though a female skull was discovered under a boulder about 250 feet south of the Principal Temple. We did find, near the Sacred Plaza, several caves which had probably contained mummies at one time or another, and a stone-lined, bottle-shaped grave, but all were empty. It is impossible to say whether they were despoiled by the first treasure seekers who visited the city in the nineteenth century or whether they were emptied long before that. I incline to the latter view because of the extreme
unlikelihood of treasure seekers caring to remove every single bone, and the fact that in this humid sub-tropical climate mummies and mummy wrappings would not last long enough to make them commercially valuable, as they are when found in the cemeteries of the arid Peruvian coastal desert.

For four months Mr Erdis and his carefully selected Indian assistants excavated and prospected within the walls and on the terraces of Machu Picchu. The zeal of the Indian assistants was kept at high pitch by a sliding scale of bounties and gratuities. No part of the city was neglected in their efforts to find significant traces of the past. One might have supposed that the pieces of broken pottery would be fairly well distributed among the different houses, or at least among the different quarters of the city, but such was not the case. Digging inside the walls of the houses rarely produced anything, whereas certain fairly well-defined rubbish piles yielded good results. Some quarters of the city had almost nothing, others had an extraordinary amount.

The north-east quarter, containing a larger number of dwellings than any other quarter of the city, had relatively little, sherds of only one hundred and sixty-one pots being found in the excavations here. As these houses are much like those found at Choqquequirau and Qquente it seems fair to say they were among the last to be built and were ‘late Inca’.

The north-west quarter includes the Principal Temple, the Sacred Plaza, and the Temple of the Three Windows. It contained a surprisingly small amount of material. There was practically nothing on Intihuatana Hill and nothing in the buildings on the plaza, a fact which was most disappointing. It should not be forgotten, however, that this group of buildings adjoins the so-called Snake Rock Cemetery, most prolific of all localities.

The south-east quarter of the city was at a considerably lower level than any other and contained rather poorly built houses, so that one would not expect to find much there. Yet we did find remains of some seventy-five pots. The south-west quarter of the city, from the City Gate to the Stairway of the Fountains, contain the finest dwellings, the Royal Mausoleum and the real
centre of the city life, the main thoroughfare and the water supply. It was not strange, therefore, to find thousands of sherds in this quarter. They represent some five hundred and fifty-eight examples of Inca pottery. More than fifty jars were found near the City Gate in a rubbish pile on the north side of the main street. Pieces of more than one hundred jars were found near the very best compound, where the Inca himself may have lived.

On top of the ridge Mr Erdis and his faithful workers found quantities of curiously shaped little stones of a type of which very few specimens have ever found their way into any museum. They vary greatly in size. Some of them are in the shape of poker chips, others are carved into fantastic shapes. Although their use is problematical they seem to me to be counters or record stones.

Many of them are made of a green micaceous or chloritic slaty schist, a small quantity of which exists at the foot of one of the precipices on Machu Picchu Mountain. These ‘record stones’ form one of our most interesting finds. They include one hundred and fifty-six stone discs, of which only three were found in caves containing skeletal material, and they may therefore have belonged to an earlier culture than that represented by the majority of the burials. On the other hand it may be said that they belonged to some occupation in which the Chosen Women were not allowed to participate. There are more small discs than large ones, half of them being about an inch in diameter. One might say that the large portion of small ones was due to the necessity of providing digits, the lesser number of medium-sized ones to the smaller necessity of providing counters for 10’s and so on up. In the language of the poker table, ‘they needed more white chips than blue ones’. Yet there is nothing to determine where the line could be drawn since all are of the same colour and there are no actual designs on their surfaces.

Possibly the largest two discs, which seem out of all proportion to the others, may have been intended as covers for
chicha
jars. Indeed, eight or ten of the larger discs could easily have been so used. It seems to me probable, however, that the relative infrequency of large discs was due to their having been used as counters. We may suppose the large counters signified a large number.

The two largest discs are rough hewn, partially ground and polished. Most of the large discs, in fact, are roughly made, but a few are nicely rounded, ground, and polished to a fairly consistent thickness. Only one was incised, the largest of the regular series, measuring about 5½ inches in diameter. It has a single cross incised on one side in the centre of the disc, the bars of the cross being about 2 inches in length.

Four of the discs were perforated and the edges of one disc were notched with four small incisions. A careful examination of the smaller discs, or counters, shows that practically all were carefully ground and polished, a large number being nicely rounded. Nearly all still show scratches made in the grinding and polishing. A few were ground so thin as to be translucent.

A group of exceedingly well-made smaller discs, sixteen in all, besides a discoidal stone pendant of similar size, was found in one hole near the Snake Rock. All of them are carefully ground and polished and all bear in addition to the marks of grinding and polishing, suspicious scratches, yet even here there is no certainty that they bore tally marks.

While there are suspicious scratches on perhaps a dozen of the discs and occasional markings that resemble tallying, there seems to be no regular rule about them. Since the green micaceous schist is soft and easily scratched, it was quite suitable for being marked with tallies if it was so desired, and the tally could easily have been erased later by a slight amount of grinding and polishing. If that had taken place, however, I believe that we should be in no doubt about the marking, and that more of them would have been found to contain clear tally marks such as actually do exist on the baked-clay cubes to be described later.