The Terraced City

Summary

This is an abstract from the "How Did the Inca Construct Cuzco?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Standing architecture is an important and impressive part of Inca Cusco, but comprises only a portion of the pre-Columbian built environment. Developing a sense of the grand plan of Cusco involves forgetting our fascination with the standing architecture and concentrating on recreating the three-dimensional form of the terraces that formed the surface of the city. The common representation of Cusco as a flat gridded city not only misrepresents the actual form of the capital, but also obscures its unique qualities. Harvesting the necessary data to form a three-dimensional model that accurately represents the topography and the genius of Inca planning and construction requires the use of aerial photography, historic maps and photographs, present (modern and colonial) building form and elevations, ground inspection of visible remains, and an understanding of basic construction methods of Inca terracing. In this format a series of large-scale basic urban design canons become evident and provided insight into the manner that the city was conceptualized and designed. Specifically, this research supports and expands on the historic claims that the capital was remade early in the imperial career of the Incas, and in that process certain elements of its pre-imperial form were preserved and transformed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• How Did the Inca Construct Cuzco?   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25076