We have a low retaining wall made from railroad ties in our front yard that is deteriorating and needs replacing. We’re thinking of stonework this time, and I’m thinking we’ll want to find some Incas to do it for us. I mean, look at the work they do:
Photo by Alexander Fiebrandt at Wikipedia
They may not have discovered the wheel (and for good reasons), but their building skills astounded the city slickers from Europe:
At the heart of the new [ca. 1463] Qosqo was the plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by 550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific and raked daily by the city’s army of workers. Monumental villas and temples surrounded the space on three sides, their walls made from immense blocks of stone so precisely cut and fit that Pizarro’s younger cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported “that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints.” —Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 79.
By the way, 1491 is a wonderful, eye-popping read. It will change the way you think about the “New World” and everything you learned in school about virtually empty continents waiting to be populated and developed.
I still need to borrow that book from you. Do you feel like mailing it to Quito? I can pop down to Machu Picchu and read it there in the flesh. 🙂
I have been to several Inca structures in Peru & Bolivia. The ones around Cuzco and Machu Pichu are the most incredible. The most amazing thing about them is that the tools used in the construction has never been found. There is not a single stone cutting tool in any of those museums and when you ask the curater about it, he shrugs his shoulders and say. ‘No conocermos’. . .we don’t know. If it was copper hammers and chisels. . .why was not one found, besides copper is softer than the granite and would not have lasted for one hour. I have seen plumb-bobs made out of copper and some out of ‘chompe’ which is a mix of gold and copper to shoot a straight vertical wall. Additionally many of those blocks weigh several tons each.
Truely one of the world’s premier wonders, we must give them the credit.