Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price

Author:Weston A. Price [Price, Weston A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Cuzco, the capital, is reported to have housed about two hundred thousand people at the time of the Spanish Conquest. It is situated on a branch of the Urabamba River in a beautiful valley surrounded by fertile mountain sides and towering snow-capped pinnacles. The Urabamba River drains a large area of the plateau lying to the south of Cuzco and has cut a magnificent gorge through the southern range of the Andes where it passes from the plateau to the eastern watershed and thence to the Amazon. A little to the south of Cuzco the eastern and the western ranges of mountains approach and combine in a cluster of magnificent pinnacles and intervening valleys and gorges, that are to be equalled by no mountain scenery in the world. Today, almost all travel from the Andean Plateau north of this region, as well as from all areas along the coast, must proceed to the coast, thence down the coast by boat to the port of Mollendo which is often dangerous or impossible of approach because of the heavy seas. The journey is made by train up through Arequipa and over the western Cordillera Range of the Andes into the plateau country and from there northward to Cuzco. So great is this natural barrier that the detour requires many days, and the crossing of several divides ranging from fourteen to sixteen thousand feet above the sea. This was not necessary for the Incas who had built roads and suspension bridges through these mountains from Cuzco to all parts of the great empire. It is in this mountain vastness that the Inca rulers had constructed their most superb fortresses. While the early Spanish conquerors of the country knew that the nobility had great defenses to which they might retreat, the location of the fortresses was not known. Their greatest fortress was discovered and excavated by Professor C. W. Bingham of Yale, under the auspices of Yale University and the American Museum of Natural History. This fortress and retreat is now world famous as Macchu Piccu, and probably represents the highest development of engineering, ancient and in some respects modern, on the American continent.

We are particularly concerned with the type of men that were capable of such great achievement, since they were required to carry forward their great undertakings without the use of iron or the wheel. While the great Inca culture dominated the Sierras and the coast for several centuries prior to the coming of the Spanish, and while they had their seat of government and vast agricultural enterprises in the high Sierras, it is of special interest that many of the most magnificent monuments remaining today in stone were not constructed by the Inca culture, but by the Tauhuanocan culture which preceded the Inca. The Incas were a part of the Quechu linguistic stock, while the Tauhuanocans were a part of the Aymara linguistic stock. The Incas had their capital in the high plateau country about the center of Peru. The earlier

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