Machu Picchu Described as Pilgrimage Site

June 8, 2009 -- Machu Picchu, the "lost city of the Incas," was not a true city but rather a pilgrimage center symbolically connected to the Andean vision of the cosmos, an Italian study has concluded.

According to Giulio Magli, professor of archaeoastronomy at Milan's Polytechnic University, Machu Picchu was the ideal counterpart of the Island of Sun, a rocky islet in the southern part of Lake Titicaca.

"This island had a very important sanctuary which was a destination of pilgrimage. An apparently insignificant rock was believed to be the place of birth of the sun, and therefore of the Inca civilization," Magli told Discovery News.

The Inca, who ruled the largest empire on Earth by the time their last emperor, Atahualpa, was garroted by Spanish conquistadors in 1533, believed that the sun god was their ancestor.

Surrounded on three sides by the gorges of the Urubamba River (also called the Vilcanota River), and tucked between two massive mountain peaks -- the Huayna Picchu and the Machu Picchu -- the Inca city features about 200 stone structures and was probably inhabited by no more than 750 people. It is perched some 8,000 feet in the clouds.

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After its abandonment at the time of the Spanish conquest, it was lost to the jungle for nearly 500 years, and was then discovered by Hiram Bingham, an American explorer, in 1911 (although recent studies claim that it was actually discovered 40 years earlier by an obscure German entrepreneur).

Theories about the city's function abound. Machu Picchu has been wrongly identified as the traditional birthplace of the Inca people, their final stronghold, and a sacred center occupied by virgins devoted to the sun god.

Another recent interpretation, based on archival research published in the mid-1980s, and widely supported by scholars, suggests the spectacular site was a private estate of the emperor Pachacuti, who built it around 1460 A.D.

"Any interpretation is doomed to remain speculative. Machu Picchu remains a mystery. We do not know for sure what the Inca called it, we do not know when and why it was constructed, or why it was abandoned," Magli said.

Published on the Cornell University physics Web site arXiv.org, Magli's study examined Machu Picchu's urban layout, its ancient access ways, and the position of the site in relation with the cycles of celestial bodies during the Inca's reign. He then compared these aspects to a well-documented Inca pilgrimage site on Lake Titicaca, located on the border of Bolivia and Peru.