{"it":{"id":"SAM-014","kind":"site","sub":"South America","name":"Tambomachay","place":"Peru","lat":-13.481,"lon":-71.965,"nfacts":0,"tags":["Andes"],"sum":"Spring water still runs through three stone waterfalls at Tambomachay, just outside Cusco, as it did for the Incas.","why":"How the Incas tied water engineering to ritual is still studied; nobody is sure what this place was for.","src":[392,629],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Bath, fort or shrine: what do you think Tambomachay was really for, and what evidence would change your mind?","rel":["SAM-006","SAM-010"],"hook":"Two Inca channels at Tambomachay still carry spring water all year. What the site was for is disputed."},"S":{"392":["Wikipedia: Tambomachay","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambomachay"],"629":["Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura de Cusco: Parque Arqueológico de Saqsaywaman (includes Tambomachay)","https://www.culturacusco.gob.pe/parques/saqsaywaman/"]},"rec":{"id":"SAM-014","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-13.48083333","lon":"-71.96472222","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0027 deg (~0.30 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/83145489"},"src":[{"id":"S0611","t":"Wikipedia: Tambomachay","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambomachay"},{"id":"S2630","t":"Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura de Cusco: Parque Arqueológico de Saqsaywaman (includes Tambomachay)","u":"https://www.culturacusco.gob.pe/parques/saqsaywaman/"},{"id":"VSAM-014-3","t":"MINCETUR Peru: tourism resource inventory record 905","u":"https://consultasenlinea.mincetur.gob.pe/fichaInventario/index.aspx?cod_Ficha=905"},{"id":"VSAM-014-4","t":"Apuntes de Arquitectura Digital: el sitio arqueológico de Puca Pucara (2019)","u":"http://apuntesdearquitecturadigital.blogspot.com/2019/05/el-sitio-arqueologico-de-puca-pucara-y.html"},{"id":null,"t":"“Sitio arqueológico de Tambomachay, Cusco,” Historia Peruana blog (2016), summary of the 1974 COPESCO excavation and the Cobo chronicle.","u":"https://arqueohistoriaperuana.blogspot.com/2016/11/sitio-arqueologico-de-tambomachay-cusco.html"}],"sum":"Above the famous fountain at Tambomachay, in a rock higher on the slope, there is a small cave. It is not remarkable for its size. What the anthropologist John Rowe noticed about it, writing in 1981, was where it points: directly toward Huanacaure, one of the most sacred mountains of the Inca world. In Quechua, mach'ay means cave. The name of this famous water site may have come not from its water at all, but from that modest hollow in the hill.\n\nTambomachay stands on a hillside just outside Cusco, at about 3,700 m, beside the old road to the Antisuyu, the eastern quarter of the Inca empire. Peru's tourism inventory puts it about 8 km north-east of the city, a fifteen-minute drive; a Cusco archaeologist's study gives 3.5 km, presumably measured another way. It lies within the Saqsaywaman Archaeological Park, which covers 2,997 hectares and holds 96 archaeological sites, about 1 km from the ruin called Puca Pucara. Its popular Spanish name is El Baño del Inca, \"the bath of the Inca.\"\n\nThe architecture is compact and precise. Four stepped walls are set against the hill, built of irregular many-sided blocks of cut stone fitted tightly together, forming three parallel terraces. On the top terrace stands a thick wall 15 m long and 4 m high with four trapezoidal niches, each about 2 m tall. Visitors enter through doorways of the double-jamb design, a frame stepped back twice, which the Incas used to mark an important place. A round tower once stood in front, probably for defence and signalling. The site covers only 437 square metres.\n\nThe water is the reason anyone comes. Two channels carved in the rock carry a steady flow of clear water all year from a higher pool down into a small stone basin, as they did for the Incas. Wikipedia describes three waterfalls rather than two channels, fed by nearby springs, one of them a spring said to boil on the bank of the Timpuc River. The fountain closely resembles the Bath of the Princess at Ollantaytambo, with finely fitted stones, a carved rim and drainage channels. It is open to the sky today, but its foundations suggest it was once a closed room.\n\nWhat was it for? The inventory offers three answers at once. It calls the site, apparently, the Inca's favourite bathing place, and at the same time one of the pillars of the Cusco valley's defences, guarding the road east. It also ties the care lavished on the water to a cult of water as the source of life, and suggests the basin was a ritual fountain where the Inca honoured water with the great lords of the empire. Wikipedia adds that sacred fountains stood at almost every major Inca temple, from Pisac to Machu Picchu. According to a published summary, a 1974 test excavation by Peru's COPESCO project, with UNESCO support, found the original floor, guided the rebuilding of the first two terraces and the tower area, and recovered pottery that placed the site in the Inca period.\n\nThe deepest puzzle is in the written record. In 1653 the Jesuit chronicler Bernabé Cobo compiled a list of the shrines, or huacas, arranged along sacred sight lines, called ceques, radiating from Cusco. On the first ceque of the Antisuyu road, the ninth shrine was called Tambomachay. Cobo describes it as a house of Inca Yupanqui where he lodged when he went hunting, set on a hill near the road, where they sacrificed everything except children. The eighth shrine was a spring near Tambomachay whose water seemed to boil; the tenth, Quinua Puquiu, was a fountain beside Tambomachay made of two springs. According to Rowe, the earlier shrine lists of Polo de Ondegardo, in 1571, and Cristóbal de Albornoz, in 1582, also name this place Tambomachay.\n\nHere the names slip. Rowe argued that Cobo's Tambomachay, a hunting lodge, fits the ruin now called Puca Pucara, 900 m away, better than the fountain; the name, he noted, is now given to a monumental Inca fountain, but in the shrine list it meant something else. The Cusco archaeologist Dunia Sánchez Marmanillo agrees. She points out that \"Puca Pucara,\" red fortress, appears in none of the chronicles she consulted, that its remains do not look like the fortresses the chronicles describe, and that the name appeared only in the twentieth century. On her reading, Puca Pucara is the old Tambomachay, and the fountain we now call Tambomachay is Cobo's Quinua Puquiu, the shrine of two springs. If she is right, two neighbouring ruins have swapped names, and the familiar \"bath of the Inca\" was, to the Inca, a holy spring.\n\nNone of that diminishes the engineering. The inventory admits that no one has yet found the source of the spring that feeds the fountains. Some think the gentle slope above cannot hold enough water to supply them, and that it may start on the far side of the river. Seen from the river, two thick walls cut across the main retaining wall; one has two large niches, and the other has a double-jamb door leading to a small room where water can be seen rising from the ground. A pure, abundant spring that never fails, with its source hidden, is just the kind of place the inventory's cult of water would have honoured.\n\nThe park's official history places the start of its great building works under the ruler Pachakuteq, and Cobo makes Inca Yupanqui the owner of the lodge. Bath, fort, lodge or shrine, the choice may be a false one. An Inca water site could be practical and sacred at once, and the people who built this one clearly understood both their stone and their mountain.\n\nGo through that narrow double-jamb door and stand in the little room off the retaining wall. Water rises out of the ground at your feet, clean and steady, from a source somewhere inside the hill that nobody has yet traced.","qs":["Bath, fort or shrine: what do you think Tambomachay was really for, and what evidence would change your mind?","If Cobo's \"house of Inca Yupanqui\" was really Puca Pucara, what does that do to the fountain's story?","Could a site be a working waterworks and a shrine at once, or does that blur two questions?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Tambomachay%2C_Cuzco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-31%2C_DD_89.JPG/1280px-Tambomachay%2C_Cuzco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-31%2C_DD_89.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tambomachay,_Cuzco,_Per%C3%BA,_2015-07-31,_DD_89.JPG","title":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Perú, 2015-07-31, DD 89.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Diego Delso","cap":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Peru"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Tambomachay%2C_2023_%2808%29.jpg/1280px-Tambomachay%2C_2023_%2808%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tambomachay,_2023_(08).jpg","title":"Tambomachay, 2023 (08).jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Draceane","cap":"Tambomachay"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Tambomachay%2C_Cuzco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_14.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tambomachay,_Cuzco,_Per%C3%BA,_14.jpg","title":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Perú, 14.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Leon petrosyan","cap":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Perú,"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Tambomachay%2C_Cuzco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_16.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tambomachay,_Cuzco,_Per%C3%BA,_16.jpg","title":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Perú, 16.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Leon petrosyan","cap":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Perú,"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Tambomachay%2C_Cuzco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_17.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tambomachay,_Cuzco,_Per%C3%BA,_17.jpg","title":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Perú, 17.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Leon petrosyan","cap":"Tambomachay, Cuzco, Perú,"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/SAM-014.webp","w":1280,"h":731,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Tambomachay%2C_Cuzco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-31%2C_DD_89.JPG/1280px-Tambomachay%2C_Cuzco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-31%2C_DD_89.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}