Ancient Peruvian aqueduct and open technology questions

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Twenty kilometers southwest of the Peruvian city of Cajamarca, there is a small town called Cumbé Mayo. This town is famous for the ruins of an unusual canal, built before the rise of the famous Inca Empire - around 1500 BC. Some of the bends that were made in the canal do not have the usual smooth shapes, but bends at 90 degrees.

The canal, like the town of Kumba Mayo itself, is located at an altitude of 3.3 kilometers above sea level. The total length of the ancient canal is 8 kilometers. The name of the town most likely comes from the phrase, which in translation from the Quechua language means "well-executed water channel." The canal itself, as archaeologists today suggest, was supposed to collect water from the Atlantic watershed and send them in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.

The most unusual thing about this channel is that in some places it has right-angle bends. Why the Incas needed to make such sharp turns for the water - this has not yet been figured out. Some suggest that the Incas simply seemed more beautiful in this form. Others believe that the ancient builders repeated the shape of the fracture of the rock, in some places only increasing the width.

But, oddly enough, not even this one is the most important question regarding the ancient Peruvian aqueduct at Cumba Mayo. Another more significant and still unsolved mystery is what technologies and tools should have been used by the ancient builders to create such precise and even edges in the rock? After all, even today's well-known technologies make it possible to create something similar with great difficulty. How could people who lived in South America several thousand years ago have tools that are more technologically advanced than those created now? At the same time, samples or at least some fragments of that ancient equipment were not found anywhere.

There is also controversy over the purpose of the aqueduct. After all, this area did not really need water. And since the peoples living in these territories treated water with worship, scientists are building theories about the use of the canal for some kind of ceremonial purposes. In any case, scientists continue to search for answers to the mysteries of the ancient Peruvian aqueduct. In addition, petroglyphs have been preserved on the walls of the canal itself and in nearby caves. So far, their meaning remains a mystery to archaeologists.

However, there is a version that at that time the rock was not yet in such a solid state as it is now. It was much more plastic and easily amenable to any kind of processing by any tools - even wooden ones. Accordingly, it was not difficult to create such a channel - it was only necessary to cut the rock into blocks and get them out. And in the intervals between the work process, the ancient builders were engaged in creativity - they decorated the walls of their creation with rock paintings.