Ready for a blog post that has tons of close up pictures of masonry walls? Good. This is the definitely the post for you!
Building with masonry, or small units of material generally stacked on top of one another, is a technique that most human societies mastered early on in their development. As soon as man was able to gather or quarry stone or make bricks out of mud or clay or any other material conducive to being formed into block-like shapes, he started building structures more permanent than grass or wood or whatever else was used before building with masonry was discovered.
The tradition of masonry building goes back centuries upon centuries and takes many, many forms. Giant stone Gothic cathedrals all over Europe; stone walls dividing farmlands into plots (or separating the Romans from the future Scots) in Great Britain; mud walls to shelter Masai tribes from the African elements (and wildlife); giant pyramids in the Yucatan peninsula; the list could go on and on and on.
Some of these walls and structures are designed as monuments to form simple barriers and are not so concerned about keeping the weather out; the masonry in these walls or buildings is sometimes loose laid, which makes construction easier and quicker but does no good for making a comfortable interior environment. Other walls are designed to be waterproof and need to be sealed, so the gaps between the masonry units are filled with mortar or covered with a thin layer of applied material like stucco; the mortar or surface application has the added benefit of generally making the walls themselves stronger.
Mortar is the stuff that allows masonry construction to be a practical endeavor for buildings today. Not only does it seal out the exterior environment and make the wall stronger but it allows the mason to work around imperfections in material manufacture or in craftsmanship. There's no realistic way to set stones on top of one another fitting together perfectly and sealing the building envelope without mortar. It makes a loose laid pile of stones or bricks or blocks into a building. Walls that have any sort of permanence just don't work the way they are supposed to without mortar.
Unless, that is, you are an Inca.
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| Calle Awaqpinta, Cusco. |
One of the great unsolved historical mysteries is how the Incas built their walls. Because while the rest of the world was off using mortar to compensate for material imperfections and less than precise workmanship from craftsmen, the Incas were doing something different. They were building mortarless walls without gaps between the blocks on an astounding scale.
Not impressed by masonry in the cover photo of this post from Machu Picchu? Good! You weren't supposed to be. I was sort of setting you up. Just because the Incas could build walls with perfectly fitted joints between blocks of stone, doesn't mean they always did. There was definitely a time and place to pull out all the stops and build a perfect looking wall. I assume it took a whole lot more effort than the alternative and maybe (and I'm totally speculating here) only certain masons could lay the best walls.
I came to Peru half ready to be blown away by the skill of these workers and half prepared to be supremely disappointed. I mean I've seen some pretty amazing craftsmanship, masonry and otherwise, in my day job as an architect. Surely some walls built 500 or more years ago by people who didn't have metal tools (gold, silver and copper don't count; the metal isn't hard enough to really make crisp edges on stone blocks) wouldn't be that fascinating.
I was wrong. These walls are really very impressive. We started the Inca portion of our trip in Cusco and there are Inca walls all over the place in that city. The Spanish generally tore down every significant structure in Cusco when they took over the place but they didn't knock down the Inca foundations; they recognized how well built they were and just decided to erect their own buildings on top of the existing walls. The first day we were there we found a pedestrian street called Calle Awaqpinta with old Inca walls on both sides of the street: one a rough uneven stone wall and one of the finest Incan masonry work.
The side of the street with the finer masonry work (which used to be Cusco's Temple of the Sun) was pretty incredible. The blocks are so uniform and smooth and there is literally nothing between the stones themselves. They are perfectly fitted together and I wouldn't be surprised if the wall was perfectly plumb. I did not carry a level with me to Peru so I couldn't check; but my money's on plumb.
So what's the big deal, right? What's so special about this whole Incan stonework thing? Surely someone working long enough at a craft could be able to do this, especially if they made it their life's work, right? So it was 500 years ago. Who cares?
All those are good thoughts. And sure, I guess if someone whittled away at a piece of stone long enough they could get them close to perfectly rectangular, although they aren't quite that way in the photograph above, which actually makes it harder to fit together because each stone's neighbor needs to be just non-rectangular enough to match up with the adjacent block (it's complicated, right? we'll get back to that idea). Still, I can see it being done. To me, that's not the most impressive part.
These walls are generally built from quarried granite. Granite is pretty darned hard. To cut, carve, shape and polish granite, you generally need a material harder than granite (this applies to all materials, not just granite) and the Incas didn't have one. No tungsten carbide, no diamonds, no hardened steel. Nothing. We were told that the builders at Machu Picchu drove wood wedges into cracks of the rocks and then used water to swell the wood to split the rock. That all sounds good but did that technique really produce rocks that were almost perfectly rectangular and of the same size that would stack perfectly? Seems doubtful to me. We were also told at Machu Picchu that sand was used to polish the individual stones to the smooth surfaces that most have today. How long did this take? Seriously? Sand?
So what we were told about the structures at Machu Picchu was that with somewhat primitive techniques and no materials harder than the stones themselves being carved that the Incas could produce relatively uniform and geometrically perfect blocks which could be stacked on top of each other perfectly and stand in place for centuries. Sounds farfetched.
But you know what? I can buy it. Even with all the doubt I just sowed, I'm on board. We were told the Incas used interlocking blocks for stability rather than just stacking rectangles of loose laid stones on top of one another and we saw an example at Cusco's Inca Museum (shown below) of the type of shapes these stones were made to make these Incan walls. And you know what? They are big but not enormous. I can believe a team of workmen might be able to spend enough time getting that kind of a surface on a block and then laying it (along with hundreds of others like it) in place to make a finished, perfectly assembled wall.
I can even get behind the idea that these same workmen could pull off something like Machu Picchu's Temple of the Three Windows, which uses less regularly shaped stones but with few enough that with enough time and sufficient motivation, a team of Inca workmen could have made it work.
And then we went to Chinchero. And it blew everything away that we had seen in the whole week.
Chinchero is a small town in the Sacred Valley of the Incas about a 45 minute drive north and west from Cusco. Today at first glance it looks like a typical Inca town taken over by the Spanish hundreds of years ago: some farming terraces, some walls that are obviously Inca era, a church right in the center of town and paved streets with troughs or gutters (the Incan aqueduct) for the distribution of fresh water.
On second glance though, Chinchero doesn't look anything like a typical Inca town. The whole place is laid out with its major planning axes oriented directly east-west and north-south and at the top of a hill with tremendous views to all sides. This place looks and feels important. And when I say east-west and north-south I mean exactly; we checked on the iPhone and it was spot on.
It is thought today that Chinchero used to be a royal retreat or country home for the emperor Tupac Yupanqui who was the son of Pachacuti, the emperor thought to have built Machu Picchu. It makes total sense given the siting of the place. And in a place this important, you better believe the Incas were building their best walls. And they did. They are absolutely spectacular.
At Chinchero you will not find stacked stones of similar size. In fact, you may not be able to find any stone identical to any other. These blocks are all custom cut and fit in such intricate patterns that all my acceptance of stories of quarrying, cutting, polishing and fitting are overcome by what you are faced with. I cannot even begin to explain how these things were put together.
Our guide, Paul, however did take a shot at this. First, he let us know that he didn't believe the whole wood wedges in rock cracks story we'd been told over at Machu Picchu. He also didn't let us blame the whole thing on aliens (we tried; believe me, we tried) or introduce a now extinct race of people who had metal tools capable of carving and shaping rock precisely like I have read in some accounts since I returned from Peru.
So story number one is that the Inca were gifted from the gods two plants that allowed them to manipulate stone. He even tried to show us a stone that was "bent" rather than carved as proof of this theory. I didn't buy it. Nor did I buy the second theory that said that once upon a time there was a bird in Peru that had a beak so sharp that it was able to cut stone easily and did so for the Incas. Although honestly, the second theory is way more fun and lacking any other credible explanation, I'm inclined to believe that one rather than nothing at all.
Just take a look above at the ridiculousness that is the Incan walls in Chinchero. How did they make these things? They are like jigsaw puzzles made of blocks of granite that weigh up to probably 300 or 400 pounds or more. Not something that any old regular person can pick up with one hand or two. And the joints are so precise and tight; I've actually seen real jigsaw puzzles that fit together worse than these walls and jigsaws are generally cut out of a single sheet of cardboard.
Find me two blocks in the wall above that are identical. You can't, right? Some of these things have seven sides and fit perfectly with their neighbors. It's an amazing construct. I can't imagine some workmen 500 or 600 years ago putting these things together in the field after hammering away (or whatever they really did to get stones shaped this way) in a super precise fashion to get these stones just the way they wanted them.
Want to be more impressed? Some of these things turn the corner. Yep, not only do you have to get one face of a stone block fitted perfectly to the stones around, above and below each block, now you have to make sure the sides of the stones match too.
I have nothing here. We walked around these things for 30 minutes or so trying to figure out how this was done. We were even able to see the backs of the walls and they were in most spots as perfect as they were on the front sides. It's honestly beyond my powers of comprehension to figure out how this was accomplished. If I can put aside all my doubts about the walls in Cusco and believe they were constructed by master craftsmen with skills beyond what modern science can explain, I can't do it with the walls in Chinchero.
Before I wrote this blog post, I tried to do some research into what the scientific community had to say about all this. The most credible explanation I found was that the Inca used byproducts of their mining operations to separate the stones when placed and that somehow this layer of iron mineral melted the edges of the blocks after placement so that they fit perfectly without appearing to have any material between each piece. I guess maybe that's a logical explanation but honestly it sounds to me no less farfetched than the bird with the sharp beak theory (which I still love).
If the Spanish that took over the Incan empire ever knew how these walls were built, they sure as heck never wrote it down. Who knows, maybe they were too preoccupied with conquering the Incas that they never thought that they would have anything to add to the history of construction or anything else. Their legacy is a series of walls all over the country that nobody can say for sure how they were actually put in place.
We can replicate Incan walls today. I'm sure of it. I'm also sure that we'd have the wall cut out by tools controlled by computers off a model that would be built specifically for the purpose of each wall. I'm also not sure that the walls we'd build to day would withstand at least five centuries of earthquakes in an area of the world with significant seismic activity. These walls are impressive at Machu Picchu and Cusco. They are mind-blowing in Chinchero. Very cool stuff.
Not impressed by masonry in the cover photo of this post from Machu Picchu? Good! You weren't supposed to be. I was sort of setting you up. Just because the Incas could build walls with perfectly fitted joints between blocks of stone, doesn't mean they always did. There was definitely a time and place to pull out all the stops and build a perfect looking wall. I assume it took a whole lot more effort than the alternative and maybe (and I'm totally speculating here) only certain masons could lay the best walls.
I came to Peru half ready to be blown away by the skill of these workers and half prepared to be supremely disappointed. I mean I've seen some pretty amazing craftsmanship, masonry and otherwise, in my day job as an architect. Surely some walls built 500 or more years ago by people who didn't have metal tools (gold, silver and copper don't count; the metal isn't hard enough to really make crisp edges on stone blocks) wouldn't be that fascinating.
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| Inca walls at Machu Picchu. The Temple of the Sun is at the top of the hill. |
The side of the street with the finer masonry work (which used to be Cusco's Temple of the Sun) was pretty incredible. The blocks are so uniform and smooth and there is literally nothing between the stones themselves. They are perfectly fitted together and I wouldn't be surprised if the wall was perfectly plumb. I did not carry a level with me to Peru so I couldn't check; but my money's on plumb.
So what's the big deal, right? What's so special about this whole Incan stonework thing? Surely someone working long enough at a craft could be able to do this, especially if they made it their life's work, right? So it was 500 years ago. Who cares?
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| Check out those joints!!! |
These walls are generally built from quarried granite. Granite is pretty darned hard. To cut, carve, shape and polish granite, you generally need a material harder than granite (this applies to all materials, not just granite) and the Incas didn't have one. No tungsten carbide, no diamonds, no hardened steel. Nothing. We were told that the builders at Machu Picchu drove wood wedges into cracks of the rocks and then used water to swell the wood to split the rock. That all sounds good but did that technique really produce rocks that were almost perfectly rectangular and of the same size that would stack perfectly? Seems doubtful to me. We were also told at Machu Picchu that sand was used to polish the individual stones to the smooth surfaces that most have today. How long did this take? Seriously? Sand?
So what we were told about the structures at Machu Picchu was that with somewhat primitive techniques and no materials harder than the stones themselves being carved that the Incas could produce relatively uniform and geometrically perfect blocks which could be stacked on top of each other perfectly and stand in place for centuries. Sounds farfetched.
But you know what? I can buy it. Even with all the doubt I just sowed, I'm on board. We were told the Incas used interlocking blocks for stability rather than just stacking rectangles of loose laid stones on top of one another and we saw an example at Cusco's Inca Museum (shown below) of the type of shapes these stones were made to make these Incan walls. And you know what? They are big but not enormous. I can believe a team of workmen might be able to spend enough time getting that kind of a surface on a block and then laying it (along with hundreds of others like it) in place to make a finished, perfectly assembled wall.
I can even get behind the idea that these same workmen could pull off something like Machu Picchu's Temple of the Three Windows, which uses less regularly shaped stones but with few enough that with enough time and sufficient motivation, a team of Inca workmen could have made it work.
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| Inca stone, maybe? At the Museo Inka, Cusco. |
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| Temple of the Three Windows, Machu Picchu. |
Chinchero is a small town in the Sacred Valley of the Incas about a 45 minute drive north and west from Cusco. Today at first glance it looks like a typical Inca town taken over by the Spanish hundreds of years ago: some farming terraces, some walls that are obviously Inca era, a church right in the center of town and paved streets with troughs or gutters (the Incan aqueduct) for the distribution of fresh water.
On second glance though, Chinchero doesn't look anything like a typical Inca town. The whole place is laid out with its major planning axes oriented directly east-west and north-south and at the top of a hill with tremendous views to all sides. This place looks and feels important. And when I say east-west and north-south I mean exactly; we checked on the iPhone and it was spot on.
It is thought today that Chinchero used to be a royal retreat or country home for the emperor Tupac Yupanqui who was the son of Pachacuti, the emperor thought to have built Machu Picchu. It makes total sense given the siting of the place. And in a place this important, you better believe the Incas were building their best walls. And they did. They are absolutely spectacular.
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| Chinchero. |
Our guide, Paul, however did take a shot at this. First, he let us know that he didn't believe the whole wood wedges in rock cracks story we'd been told over at Machu Picchu. He also didn't let us blame the whole thing on aliens (we tried; believe me, we tried) or introduce a now extinct race of people who had metal tools capable of carving and shaping rock precisely like I have read in some accounts since I returned from Peru.
So story number one is that the Inca were gifted from the gods two plants that allowed them to manipulate stone. He even tried to show us a stone that was "bent" rather than carved as proof of this theory. I didn't buy it. Nor did I buy the second theory that said that once upon a time there was a bird in Peru that had a beak so sharp that it was able to cut stone easily and did so for the Incas. Although honestly, the second theory is way more fun and lacking any other credible explanation, I'm inclined to believe that one rather than nothing at all.
Just take a look above at the ridiculousness that is the Incan walls in Chinchero. How did they make these things? They are like jigsaw puzzles made of blocks of granite that weigh up to probably 300 or 400 pounds or more. Not something that any old regular person can pick up with one hand or two. And the joints are so precise and tight; I've actually seen real jigsaw puzzles that fit together worse than these walls and jigsaws are generally cut out of a single sheet of cardboard.
Find me two blocks in the wall above that are identical. You can't, right? Some of these things have seven sides and fit perfectly with their neighbors. It's an amazing construct. I can't imagine some workmen 500 or 600 years ago putting these things together in the field after hammering away (or whatever they really did to get stones shaped this way) in a super precise fashion to get these stones just the way they wanted them.
Want to be more impressed? Some of these things turn the corner. Yep, not only do you have to get one face of a stone block fitted perfectly to the stones around, above and below each block, now you have to make sure the sides of the stones match too.
 |
| Turning the corner. Not difficult enough to match one face perfectly? Try it with two. |
Before I wrote this blog post, I tried to do some research into what the scientific community had to say about all this. The most credible explanation I found was that the Inca used byproducts of their mining operations to separate the stones when placed and that somehow this layer of iron mineral melted the edges of the blocks after placement so that they fit perfectly without appearing to have any material between each piece. I guess maybe that's a logical explanation but honestly it sounds to me no less farfetched than the bird with the sharp beak theory (which I still love).
If the Spanish that took over the Incan empire ever knew how these walls were built, they sure as heck never wrote it down. Who knows, maybe they were too preoccupied with conquering the Incas that they never thought that they would have anything to add to the history of construction or anything else. Their legacy is a series of walls all over the country that nobody can say for sure how they were actually put in place.
We can replicate Incan walls today. I'm sure of it. I'm also sure that we'd have the wall cut out by tools controlled by computers off a model that would be built specifically for the purpose of each wall. I'm also not sure that the walls we'd build to day would withstand at least five centuries of earthquakes in an area of the world with significant seismic activity. These walls are impressive at Machu Picchu and Cusco. They are mind-blowing in Chinchero. Very cool stuff.
How We Did It
Our trips to Cusco and Machu Picchu were arranged for us by our favorite tour company in the world, G Adventures. I am sure you can do both on your own. If you get stuck, I'm sure you can get a little help here and there from any number of tour companies.
We went to Chinchero on our own, which is to say that we engaged the services of Inkayni Peru Tours to drive us there and provide us with a guide to take us around Chinchero and two other sites (more on one of those two other ones to come later) on their Maras-Moray-Chinchero half day tour. We found these guys through Viator but there's no reason you need to go through that website. Just save the cost of the service charge you'll pay to Viator or better yet, tip your guide or driver or both a little extra.
Based on our one day (or half day I guess) experience with these guys I'd highly recommend their service. The best part about this tour is that it's private so you don't have to share it with anyone else. There is an entrance fee for Chinchero which is not covered in the cost of the tour which is 70 Soles (about $21 US as of this writing). That entrance fee gets you into Chinchero and Moray (which was also on our tour) along with sites at Pisaq and Ollantaytambo if you choose to get to those some other way.
Our trips to Cusco and Machu Picchu were arranged for us by our favorite tour company in the world, G Adventures. I am sure you can do both on your own. If you get stuck, I'm sure you can get a little help here and there from any number of tour companies.
We went to Chinchero on our own, which is to say that we engaged the services of Inkayni Peru Tours to drive us there and provide us with a guide to take us around Chinchero and two other sites (more on one of those two other ones to come later) on their Maras-Moray-Chinchero half day tour. We found these guys through Viator but there's no reason you need to go through that website. Just save the cost of the service charge you'll pay to Viator or better yet, tip your guide or driver or both a little extra.
Based on our one day (or half day I guess) experience with these guys I'd highly recommend their service. The best part about this tour is that it's private so you don't have to share it with anyone else. There is an entrance fee for Chinchero which is not covered in the cost of the tour which is 70 Soles (about $21 US as of this writing). That entrance fee gets you into Chinchero and Moray (which was also on our tour) along with sites at Pisaq and Ollantaytambo if you choose to get to those some other way.
I think I know how they did this, please visit: raprosimulations.co.uk
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