Cusco, the navel of the world
Posted by admin at Jun 3rd, 2008 in Peru, South America
The Cusco Valley and the Incas are synonymous in most people's minds, but the area was populated well before they arrived on the scene and they simply built their empire on the toil and ingenuity of generations of previous cultures. The Killki culture, for instance, whose members learned to work the hard diorite and andesite stones that abound here and, although primarily agriculturists, built stone structures, dominated the scene around 700-800 AD. Some of these structures still survive, while others were incorporated into later Inca constructions - the sun temple of Koricancha, for example, seems to have been built on the foundations a Killki sun temple. Early Inca pots, too, are stylistically close to Killki-produced items, while classical Inca pots demonstrate strong similarities to ceramics produced around 1000 AD by the Lucre culture, whose main site was at Choquepugio, 35km from modern Cusco.
Machu Picchu was built in a classic Inca architectural style of polished dry-stone walls. Its primary buildings are the Intihuatana, the Temple of the Sun and the Room of the Three Windows located in what is known by archaeologist as the Sacred District of Machu Picchu. There are concerns about the impact of tourism to the site as its visitors reached 400,000 in 2003. On September 2007, Peru and Yale University reached an agreement regarding return of artifacts removed from Macchu Picchu in the early 20th century by Hiram Bingham. 