Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [28]
“Notice how the usnu bisects those two peaks,” John said as he paced back and forth, GPS in hand, taking measurements. “Right down the middle, that’s the winter solstice line.” This particular usnu was also famous as the spot where former first lady Eliane Karp-Toledo’s helicopter landed on her visits to the site, which was a pet project of hers. (Though her husband was out of office and she had moved on to teach at Stanford, Karp-Toledo was still a favorite subject of wild rumors in Peru. One I heard repeatedly at Choquequirao was that she and “the French” were plotting to build a five-star hotel there.) There were perhaps five other visitors at the site, and guests were outnumbered at least two-to-one by the eager young workers from the INC.
John had something of a love-hate relationship with the INC. In Cusco, he had ranted about how they politicized everything, lost important artifacts and allowed developers to destroy Inca ruins in the name of progress. By stringing together John’s various complaints, I was able to deduce that he had offered to share his research with the INC on more than one occasion, and that these offers had not been appreciated—or worse, hadn’t been acknowledged. At Choquequirao, he griped about how the INC had clumsily reconstructed some buildings. He had a point. While Inca engineers were far ahead of the rest of the world in many respects, it is safe to assume that they did not install the poured-concrete lintels that now held up a few doorways. In the most recently rebuilt section of the site, the stonework bore a striking resemblance to my grandmother’s flagstone fireplace.
Still, each of the dozen or so times I saw John interact with an INC employee out in the field, the same thing happened. The INC worker would approach asking to check our ticket stubs, and within five minutes was asking John questions and staring at his photos, which he kept in a small plastic album with Snoopy on the cover. Inside were pictures of some of the wonders John had seen during his years of rambling: pre-Inca settlements, lost trails, sacred rock formations. He’d stashed several boxes of his little blue notebooks, each crammed with firsthand observations, measurements and GPS readings, along with more than one hundred thousand photographs and four hundred hours of videotape in a storage room he rented outside of Cusco. (He kept the rest of his collection at his mum’s house in Australia.) John had read virtually everything that had been published on the Incas and had formulated his own theories, seasoned with years of firsthand observations. These he freely shared.
“Don’t you ever worry that someone’s going to steal your ideas?” I asked him.
“I only do it so that maybe they’ll do something to save these Inca sites.”
Word about John tended to spread quickly. Which is why, on our second day at Choquequirao, we were visited in our cook tent by Julio, the assistant chief archaeologist at the site. “Would you care to join me on a visit to the llamas?” he asked.
The llama is the unofficial mascot of Peru, a camel-like fuzzball with a reputation for spitting and kicking. For the Incas, llamas were a one-stop shop, a source of wool as well as pack animals that could easily negotiate the vertical Andean terrain. Their dung was burned as fuel, and they were sacrificed in religious ceremonies. By one estimate, 95 percent of the meat consumed at Machu Picchu came from llamas or their close relative, the alpaca. All of which explains why llamas are a common theme in Inca artifacts. But no homage can equal the one found at Choquequirao in 2005. On the far side of the mountain ridge on which the ruins sit are row after row of agricultural terraces, staircasing hundreds of feet down toward the Yanama River like the side of a Babylonian ziggurat. Bricked into their gray stone faces are huge decorative mosaics of more than two dozen white llamas, most taller than a man. No one knows if more are hiding; the terraces are nowhere close to being fully excavated. I’d always assumed that nothing worth discovering remained hidden