Built at 2,430 meters above sea level, in the Andes, 80 kilometers from Cusco (Peru), the Machu Picchu complex is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world. Part of its appeal lies in the fact that its history is an enigma that has been slowly unraveled since the site was rediscovered for archeology by the American explorer and historian Hiram Bingham in 1911. Now, a new study, published by the journal ‘Science Advances’ has revealed that the common people who lived in what is known as the ‘lost city of the Incas’ did not form a closed community. On the contrary, it was a multi-ethnic group. The workers and servants who lived there came from all corners of the Inca Empire, some from as far away as the Amazon.
In their article, the international multidisciplinary team headed by Lucy Salazar, from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University (USA), explains that before this research, not much was known about the people who lived in Machu Picchu, ” where they came from or how they related to the inhabitants of the Inca capital of Cusco». This lack of knowledge was due mainly to the absence of references to the place in the texts of the Spanish chroniclers of the 16th and 17th centuries, “and to the failure of modern researchers to decipher the records of knotted ropes (quipus) that the Incas used to document their history.
The consensual interpretation between archaeologists and historians says that the place “formed part of a royal estate belonging to the lineage (or panaca) of Emperor Pachacuti”, and that it was used between 1420 and 1532 AD. The monumental architecture of the core of the complex actually corresponds to “the remains of a rural palace” located within the royal hacienda of this ruler, who turned the Inca state into a great empire, the Tahuantinsuyo.
Often, “these royal estates were created to commemorate conquests, and Machu Picchu may have been built to celebrate that of the lower Urubamba valley by Pachacuti.” The ruler and his family “resided only seasonally in the elaborate palaces built within these haciendas, but a permanent retainer of servants was left on them to maintain the facilities.”
To shed some light on what these people were like, Salazar and his collaborators have carried out an analysis based on “the genomic data of 34 individuals buried at Machu Picchu who are believed to have been servants or assistants assigned to the service of the Inca royal family”. .
Ordinary people
This study “does not tell us about elites and royalty, but about people of lower status,” explains Jason Nesbitt, one of the study’s co-authors, from the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University (USA). «It is about the servants and workers who stayed in it all year round. And when they died, they were buried here.” Their genes have revealed that all these people had very different origins.
This population gathered from Machu Picchu “was highly heterogeneous, with individuals showing genetic ancestries associated with groups from across the Inca Empire and Amazonia. The results suggest the existence of a diverse community at Machu Picchu, in which people of different genetic origins lived, reproduced, and were buried together,” the article concludes. Few of these individuals “shared DNA with each other, showing that they had been brought to Machu Picchu as individuals and not as part of a family or community group.”
