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Who lived at Machu Picchu at its height? A new study, published in Science Advances, used ancient DNA to find out for the first time where workers buried more than 500 years ago came from within the lost Inca Empire.Researchers, including Jason Nesbitt, associate professor of archaeology at Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, performed genetic testing on individuals buried at Machu Picchu in order to learn more about the people who lived and worked there...It was once part of a royal estate of the Inca Empire.Like other royal estates, Machu Picchu was home not only to royalty and other...

(links set to start at 2:22, skipping the short initial remarks and the Magellan TV ad)Potatoes and History | The History Guy:History Deserves to Be Remembered15:36 | 1.18M subscribers | 358K views | 2 years ago

An international team of anthropologists and bioarchaeologists has found the primary ingredients of ayahuasca — a plant-based drink that is reported to induce hallucinations and altered consciousness — in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle from a rock shelter in the Bolivian Andes.

Today's hipster creatives and entrepreneurs are hardly the first generation to partake of ayahuasca, according to archaeologists who have discovered traces of the powerfully hallucinogenic potion in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle buried in a cave in the Bolivian Andes. Led by University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist Melanie Miller, a chemical analysis of a pouch made from three fox snouts sewn together tested positive for at least five plant-based psychoactive substances. They included dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and harmine, key active compounds in ayahuasca, a mind-blowing brew commonly associated with the Amazon jungle... Miller's analysis of a scraping from the fox-snout pouch and...

Relatively speaking, the Incas are recent history. One unfortunate consequence of the fame of the Incas is that they tend to crowd out the long and rich history of the region with its many kingdoms and civilizations that went before. Some pre-Inca cultures were incorporated into the Inca Empire, while others were ancient history by the time the Incas appeared on the scene. The oldest city now known in the Americas is that of Caral. It flourished at around the same time as the Egyptian pyramids were being built. The ruins of 'Sacred City of Caral-Supe' or simply 'Caral,' is...

Researchers excavating 500-year-old graves in southern Peru have unearthed 192 human spines threaded onto reed posts. Describing this remarkable discovery in the journal Antiquity, the authors say this unusual assemblage of human vertebrae may have provided a means for indigenous people to reconstruct dead bodies damaged by European grave robbers. The skewered spines were recovered from burial sites in the Chincha Valley, where the local community was decimated by famine and disease epidemics following the arrival of Europeans. According to the researchers, the Chincha population declined from over 30,000 households in 1533 to just 979 half a century later, and...

Archaeologists from the Decentralized Culture Directorate in Cusco (DDC Cusco) have discovered samples of cave art in a sector of the Qhapaq Ñan or Great Inca Trail that crosses the Archaeological Park of Machu Picchu in Peru.This information was provided by Francisco Huarcaya, the person responsible for the sector of the Inca Trail that crosses the aforementioned park.Huarcaya reported that said discovery occurred in early September this year at the 87th kilometer of the railway that leads to the Inca citadel, on the left side of the Vilcanota River.Said samples consist of a set of images painted on different parts...

<p>The ancient Incan city we know as 'Machu Picchu' should probably be called 'Picchu' or 'Huayna Picchu', according to a new analysis of historical documents.</p><p>In 1911, when the White American historian and explorer, Hiram Bingham, was first led to the ancient Incan ruins, he asked a local landowner to write down the name of the site in his field journal.</p>

The year 2021 ended with a major ‘peel’ for the site as LiDAR-equipped drones helped find 12 previously unknown small structures in Machu Picchu National Park which help identify the caretakers of the complex back in the 15th century. The LiDAR also revealed previously unknown canals that show how the Incas controlled water – a feat they believed was a ‘superpower’ granted to them by the gods. As described in a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team of researchers from the Center for Andean Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Wroclaw (Poland) University...

Machu Picchu, the famous 15th-century Inca site in southern Peru, is up to several decades older than previously thought, according to a new study led by Yale archaeologist Richard Burger.Burger and researchers from several U.S. institutions used accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) — an advanced form of radiocarbon dating...Historical sources dating from the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire indicate that Pachacuti seized power in A.D. 1438 and subsequently conquered the lower Urubamba Valley where Machu Picchu is located. Based on those records, scholars have estimated that the site was built after A.D. 1440, and perhaps as late as A.D. 1450,...

Prior research has suggested that during the Late Horizon, a period of Inca history, the Inca rounded up people living outside of the Inca Empire and forced them to relocate to places inside the empire as a means of bolstering the population and thus the economy. Unfortunately, to date, evidence for such forced migrations has been scant. In this new effort, the researchers conducted a thorough investigation of the remains of six people buried in a cemetery in what was once a part of the Inca empire during the Late Horizon -- they suspected that all six were people who...

Construction of Machu Picchu was interrupted around 1450 by a powerful earthquake, leaving damage still evident today and prompting the Inca to perfect the seismic-resistant megalithic architecture that is now so famous throughout Cusco, according to a major new scientific study revealed by Peru’s state-run news agency Andina... The Cusco-Pata Research Project determined that a temblor of at least magnitude 6.5 struck during the reign of the 9th Inca Pachacutec while he was building his now iconic summer estate atop the saddle-ridge between two craggy mountain peaks. As a result, the Inca moved away from using smaller stones, assembled in...

Archaeologists in northern Peru say they have found evidence of what could be the world’s largest single case of child sacrifice. The burial site, known as Las Llamas, contains the skeletons of 140 children who were aged between five and 14 when they were ritually sacrificed during a ceremony about 550 years ago, archaeologists said on Friday. The site, located near the city of Trujillo, also contained the remains of 200 young llamas apparently sacrificed on the same day. The burial site was apparently built by the Chimú empire. It is thought the children were sacrificed as floods caused by...

Moray is an agricultural terrace complex northwest of Cuzco, south of the Sacred Valley... Temperature differences between the lower and higher levels are higher than you might think! The difference between the lowest and the highest levels can be up to 15 ºC (59 ºF). This is equal to the difference between sea level temperature and 1.000 m (2,380.8 ft) height level temperature. The crater-like formations descend to a depth of approximately 150 m (492 ft). As a comparison, we could say that that's as deep as high a 50-story skyscraper is... The name of Moray wither comes from maize...

--snip-- we're taking a virtual journey down what was once more than 20,000 miles of road traversing some of the world's most challenging terrain — mountains, forests and deserts. The Inca road began at the center of the Inca universe: Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, said to be built in the shape of a crouching puma. It actually was not a single road but a network of royal roads, an instrument of power designed for military transport, religious pilgrimages and to move supplies.

Historians have uncovered documents and maps suggesting the city had been lost and found several times before the man who officially discovered the ruins, American Hiram Bingham, got there. Funded by the National Geographic Society and friends at Yale University, Mr Bingham discovered the Peruvian city of stone terraces in 1911, earning his place among the pantheon on the world's greatest explorers. After setting out from Cuzco, he followed directions from a local man to some Inca ruins, and became the first Westerner to set eyes on the crumbling citadel. Once there, he began removing thousands of artefacts, mummies, stone...

Incan fortresses built some 500 years ago have been discovered along an extinct volcano in northern Ecuador, revealing evidence of a war fought by the Inca just before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Andes. "We're seeing evidence for a pre-Columbian frontier, or borderline, that we think existed between Inca fortresses and Ecuadorian people's fortresses," project director Samuel Connell, of Foothill College in California, told LiveScience. The team has identified what they think are 20 fortresses built by the Inca and two forts that were built by a people from Ecuador known as the Cayambe. The volcano is called Pambamarca......

A rather unexpected voice just joined the chorus of the liberal media outcry over sex scandals among some Catholic clergymen: none other than Evo Morales, Bolivia’s socialist and neopagan president. A Neopagan Socialist... Indeed, Mr. Morales, leader of the Movement to Socialism, figured he should teach the Pope how things in the Church ought to be run. For those who may not know, he was inaugurated President of Bolivia in 2006 using indigenous pagan rituals.1 The Bolivian newspaper Los Tiempos, of Cochabamba (6/20/2006), described the ceremony: “Evo Morales assumed political power with a spectacular display of religious rituals alluding to...

A British team of archaeologists on expedition in the Peruvian Andes has hailed as "sensational" the discovery of some of the most sacred objects in the Inca civilisation -- three "ancestor stones", which were once believed to form a precious link between the heavens and the underworld... Dr Frank Meddens, research associate of Royal Holloway, who was also on the expedition, said they had "danced a little jig on top of the mountain" after discovering the objects that they had only read about in 16th-century Spanish documents.

A large tomb dating from ancient Inca times was found in the southern sector of Pueblo Alto of Kuelap fortress, located in the department of Amazonas, director of restoration and conservation Alfredo Narvaez announced. He told Andina that in the vicinity of the tomb, of which excavation ended on Monday, fine ceramic offerings from the Tahuantinsuyo (Inca Empire) were also found, which apparently were taken there from Cusco. "This tomb has an unusual dimension and was sealed by a thick stuffing. As we were cleaning, we run into materials that we had never found before in other structures of...