Sacsayhuamán

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The walls stand on the high ground north of Cusco, where the ground breaks upward from the valley floor and the air thins toward thirty-seven hundred meters. Three terraces of dressed stone run across the slope in a great saw-toothed line, each set back above the one below, and the stones at their base are larger than anything a person standing among them can easily take in: blocks the height of a tall man and then some, weighing as much as a hundred tons and more, laid dry against their neighbors with joints so close that the seam will not take a knife. No mortar holds them. Nothing holds them but their own cut faces, ground until each block locks to the next like a thing grown rather than built. Above the terraces the slope rounds off into a wide green esplanade, and across that open ground, on the bare rock outcrop the Quechua call the Rodadero, the polished planes and worn channels of the living stone face back toward the ramparts. The place is named Saksaywaman — in the old language, the sated falcon, the hawk grown full — and for almost five hundred years two readings of it have stood side by side without either driving the other off: the stronghold that held the high entrance to the capital, and the sanctuary whose plaza was the stage of the sun.

The hill above the capital

Cusco lies in a bowl among the mountains, the city the Inca built as the navel of the empire and the seat of the cult of the sun. Sacsayhuamán crowns the steep ground at its northern edge, looking down on the roofs and the central plaza a short climb below. The position is the first fact about the place and the hardest to escape: whatever else it was, it commanded the high approach to the capital, the one direction from which the bowl of Cusco opens out onto the rolling ground above.

The Inca did not see the city as a mere arrangement of streets. In the plan attributed to the ruler who rebuilt it in the fifteenth century, Cusco was laid out in the body of a puma, the great cat that ran through Andean cosmology as a creature of the middle world and of power. The rivers Tullumayo and Saphi made the flanks of the animal; the wedge of land where the two waters met, downstream of the center, was the tail, the place still called Pumaq Chupan, the puma’s tail. And the high stone complex on the northern height was the head. Read this way, the three zigzag walls become the bared teeth of the animal that guarded the capital — a piece of cosmology written across a whole city in stone and watercourse, with the Temple of the Sun set in the body and the falcon-named fortress as the crown. The reading is itself old, recorded by the chroniclers who knew the living city; how literally the builders held it, and how much is later interpretation laid over the plan, is among the things that cannot now be settled from the stones alone.

The three walls

The face the complex turns toward the city is its great work: three parallel ramparts, built in a continuous zigzag that runs for something over three hundred meters across the slope, the lowest and largest wall rising in places close to eighteen meters above its footing and several meters thick. The zigzag is not decoration. A straight wall presents a flat face to anything thrown or fired against it and a single line for an attacker to climb; a saw-toothed wall turns every salient angle into a corner that takes fire from two directions and offers no length of wall that cannot be covered from a flanking face. The same geometry that reads as a row of teeth from a distance is, close up, the geometry of a defended line.

The stones are the reason the place is famous. The lowest courses are the heaviest — limestone hauled from quarries in the valley, with harder green diorite and darker andesite worked into the complex as well — and the largest of them runs well past a hundred tons, standing nearly nine meters where it is set. The blocks are polygonal, many-sided, each cut to fit the irregular faces of the stones around it rather than squared to a common module. A given stone may meet a dozen neighbors, every joint ground until the curve of one face answers the hollow of the next. The fit is tight enough across the whole wall that the courses have ridden out the earthquakes of the Cusco basin — the shocks that have repeatedly cracked the colonial masonry built on top of Inca foundations — by letting the blocks shift against one another and settle back, a flexibility engineered into a structure of stone that has no give of its own.

How the work was done has its own literature. The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León, who saw the site in the years just after the conquest, set the labor at some twenty thousand workers drawn from across the provinces and the building at the better part of a lifetime of the empire’s reigns. What this account makes the central fact is organization: the Inca state’s power to summon, feed, house, and direct that quantity of labor under the rotational service obligation that ran the empire. The same polygonal mastery shows in the royal estate walls of Machu Picchu and the great unfinished blocks of Ollantaytambo, and it descends from a long Andean tradition of monumental stone — the andesite precision of Tiwanaku on Lake Titicaca, the highland building of Wari, the early temple stonework of Chavín — without any of those earlier cultures being a builder here. The walls are an achievement of mobilized people: ramps and levers and abrasives and accumulated craft, marshaled by a state that could summon twenty thousand to the task and direct them across reigns.

The summit and its towers

The terraces were the platform for what stood above. On the crown of the hill, behind and over the three walls, the complex rose into buildings and three great towers, set out, the chroniclers record, at equal distances so that they formed a triangle on the height. The central tower, Muyuq Marka, was round — concentric rings of fine masonry, by one early description more than thirty meters tall, with channels built to carry water up into its core, so that it served as much as a cistern and a finished residence as anything martial. Garcilaso de la Vega, the mestizo writer born in Cusco a generation after the conquest, described it as a royal work of the most polished stone, fit for the Inca himself; the two flanking towers, Sallaq Marka and Paukar Marka, were rectangular. The Spaniard Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, who entered Cusco with the conquistadors and wrote the first European account of the place, recorded the towers and the maze of fine chambers behind the ramparts, and confessed that the whole was beyond what he could convey — a fortress, he judged, that the Spain of his day could not have raised.

It is the summit that most resists the purely military reading. A round tower fed by its own water channels, set at the head of a sacred animal traced across the capital, fronting a great open plaza above the city of the sun — this is the architecture of a ceremonial center as much as a citadel, a place built to hold rites and the rulers who staged them. The towers are gone now, taken down to their foundations; the circular base of Muyuq Marka, with the lines of its three concentric walls and the runs of its water channels, is the clearest thing left of what stood on top.

Fortress or sanctuary

The two readings have never fully resolved, and the better understanding is that the question itself may be the wrong shape — that in the Inca order a stronghold and a sanctuary were not opposed kinds of building. The name carries the martial sense; the position commands the capital; the zigzag walls are a defensive geometry; and in 1536 the place was fought over as the key to Cusco. All of that holds. So does the other side: the great esplanade laid out for assembly, the round temple-tower, the falcon and puma symbolism, the alignment of the whole with the sacred topography of the basin and the festival calendar of the sun. The plaza below the walls could hold a host under arms or a city at worship, and in a polity where the ruler was the son of the sun and warfare was itself a sacral undertaking, the same ground served both. The scholarship now tends to read Sacsayhuamán as primarily ceremonial in conception, fortified in form — a temple that could be held, or a fortress built to be holy — rather than choosing between the two against the grain of how the Inca built. The disputed antiquity of the largest stonework, the recurring claim that the cyclopean lower courses must predate the Inca, runs alongside this and is answered the same way: by the dating of the organic material in the walls to the imperial fifteenth century, and by the demonstrated capacity of Inca quarrying to produce exactly this kind of stone.

The siege of 1536

For most of its built life Sacsayhuamán was the crown of a working capital. Its one great hour as a fortress came after the empire had already fallen. In 1532 the Spanish under Francisco Pizarro had seized the ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca and within a year executed him; Cusco fell in 1533. The Inca the Spanish set up as a client, Manco Inca Yupanqui, broke with them in 1536, escaped the city, and raised a great army across the highlands. In May of that year he laid siege to Cusco, tens of thousands of warriors against a Spanish garrison of a few hundred and their Andean allies, and from the heights of Sacsayhuamán the Inca host commanded the capital below — raining sling-stones and arrows and fire-tipped missiles down into the streets, and burning much of the thatched city.

The walls that had been built to hold the high approach now held it against the conquerors themselves. To break the siege the Spanish had to take the fortress, and the assault on it was among the hardest fighting of the conquest: a night attack up the terraces under the saw-toothed walls, ladders against the ramparts, the battle surging level by level across the three lines and into the towers. The Spanish commander’s brother Juan Pizarro was killed in the storming, struck in the head. The defenders were driven back into the upper towers for a last stand, and the most enduring memory of the battle attaches to one of them — an Inca noble, named in the later chronicles by several names, who held the central tower to the end and, rather than be taken, wrapped his face and threw himself from its height. The Spanish, who had been ordered to take him alive, marveled at the resistance even as they broke it. With Sacsayhuamán lost the siege failed; Manco withdrew north to Ollantaytambo, where his terraces would turn back a Spanish column the following year before he fell back into the forests of Vilcabamba. The fortress had done, against its makers’ heirs, exactly what it was built to do.

The quarry of colonial Cusco

What the siege left standing, the colonial city consumed. With the conquest secured, the Spanish in Cusco treated Sacsayhuamán as a stone yard. The fine dressed blocks of the summit buildings and the towers — already loosened by the battle, already cut and squared and ready to set — were carried down the hill to raise the churches and mansions and the cathedral of the new Spanish city below. Within a few decades the towers were gone and much of the upper complex with them, dismantled course by course to furnish a colonial capital built, like so much of Cusco, directly on and out of the Inca city it replaced. The only stones that survived this were the ones too large to move: the colossal lower courses of the three terraces, the blocks of a hundred tons and more, which no one in colonial Peru had the means or the reason to shift. That is why the place as it stands is a base without its crown — the cyclopean foundations of the ramparts intact, the finished buildings they carried stripped away to become the fabric of the city they once guarded.

The festival of the sun

The plaza that the walls front is the principal modern stage of Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun. In the Inca year the great solar festival fell at the June solstice, the turning of the southern winter, when the sun stood at its farthest and was called back toward the world; it was held in the heart of Cusco, on the central plaza, with the ruler and the cult of the sun at its center, and it marked the beginning of the Inca year. The Spanish suppressed it: in 1572 the viceroy Francisco de Toledo banned the rite outright, among the wider proscription of Inca observance, and the public festival passed out of the calendar even as its memory was kept in the chronicles — most fully in Garcilaso de la Vega’s account of the old ceremony — and in the practice of the highland communities.

In 1944 it returned to the open ground above the city. The Cusqueño writer and Quechua scholar Faustino Espinoza Navarro reconstructed the rite as a great theatrical pageant, scripting it from Garcilaso’s description and staging it for the first time on the esplanade of Sacsayhuamán on the twenty-fourth of June; Espinoza himself took the part of the Inca, and held it for years after. Since then the reenactment has been held on the hill every June, the largest of its kind in the Andes, drawing the day’s procession up from the Temple of the Sun and the central plaza to the broad ground below the ramparts, where the principal act is performed against the zigzag walls. It is a modern staging and is understood as one — a civic and cultural pageant rather than a continuation of the closed Inca cult — and it is also a living act of memory, the festival of the sun returned to a sun-temple’s plaza, performed by the descendants of the people who first kept it.

The study of the stones

The modern understanding of Sacsayhuamán rests on a small body of careful work set against a much larger one of speculation. The experimental archaeology of the quarry and the dressing yard is the indispensable part: Jean-Pierre Protzen’s field studies of Inca quarrying and stonecutting, published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in 1985 and extended in his later monograph on Inca architecture, dismantled the mystery of the joints by reproducing them — pounding stone with stone, fitting by repeated trial — and located the achievement in technique and labor rather than in any lost art. The synthetic accounts of Andean building, gathered in surveys such as the overview of Inca architecture maintained by the World History Encyclopedia, set the complex within the empire’s wider stonework and its system of corvée labor. For the documentary record, the early chroniclers remain the primary witnesses to what the summit held before the demolition: Pedro Sancho de la Hoz’s eyewitness report of 1534, Cieza de León’s description of the 1540s, and the fuller account of the Cusco-born Garcilaso de la Vega, whose Comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609) gave Europe its most detailed image of the three towers and of the festival of the sun. Garcilaso writes inside a mestizo Renaissance frame, his account colored by humanist learning and a Cusco childhood, and modern scholarship reads him as both source and artifact — an Indigenous-and-Spanish voice within the colonial archive rather than a transparent window onto the Inca past. Against this record runs the persistent pseudo-archaeology of lost super-civilizations and visitors from elsewhere, which the UNESCO documentation of the City of Cuzco and the controlled excavation of the site answer with the same finding: the dating, the quarries, and the demonstrated methods all point to the imperial Inca of the fifteenth century.

The site today

The complex is inscribed, as part of the City of Cuzco, on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1983, and the green expanse above the terraces is an archaeological park on the edge of a working city. The visitor’s path runs along the foot of the great walls and out across the esplanade to the worn outcrop of the Rodadero opposite, where the smoothed faces and channels of the carved rock — among them the seat-like forms cut into the stone and called, by long tradition, the throne of the Inca — show the same hand at work on the living mountain that dressed the blocks of the ramparts. The walls remain what they have always been at the eye’s first reach: the largest stones lifted and fitted anywhere in the pre-Columbian Americas, set against the sky at the head of the puma. The crown is gone and the towers with it, carried off to build the city below; what stands is the base the colonial demolition could not move. It holds the slope as it was set to hold it, and once a year the plaza behind it fills again for the sun.

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