The city of Machu Picchu, which comes from the Quechua language, has been abandoned by the Incas of Cusco for over three-hundred years. It also stands in the Andes Mountains and lingers over the Urubamba River. It’s elevated 10,000 feet and has walls that not even a credit card can not slide through, puzzling archaeologists for many years (Schreiber 1). Machu Picchu, located in Peru, is a place filled with amazing artifacts and ruins. The buildings’ architecture and underground waterway infrastructures have baffled many scientists and archaeologists, especially the way the Incas irrigate their crops. This has perplexed archaeologists because the tools and methods the Incas used was way ahead of its time and it …show more content…
In fact, in 1527 the leader of the Incas, Huayna Capac, was killed, and set a heated broil between his sons and the Spanish Conquistadors ( Meinking 6). May 13, 1532, after the Spanish landed on the Coastal Tumbes, a beach northwest of Peru, they took one of Huayna sons as prisoner and executed him in a panic (Meinking 6). Consequently, after the thirty-six long year battle, historians say “Pachacuti, another name for Machu Picchu and named after the ninth ruler of the Cusco Kingdom, was built as a kind of retreat” (The Inca 3). All things considered, Bingham was scientifically studying bones and found syphilis and malaria, two potential disease killers, in a skeleton of a rich woman that bore signs of them (Meinking 8). By the evidence the archaeologist found, they can conclude that during the war with Spanish Conquistadors and Inca soldiers may have transmitted diseases to the soldiers that may have brought it back home to their community to their …show more content…
The Spanish coming to conquer South America in the 1400’s brought diseases that may have wiped out the Inca tribe of Machu Picchu. Archaeologists finding artifacts during a war and remains of bones may also conclude to the place being a place of worship. Both theories are likely to be true, but no one really knows what caused the place to become vacant, but one quote that can sum up the mysterious place of Machu Picchu is, “life is like a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you’re gonna get” - Forrest