The Claim
An unknown ancient technology was used to build a huge stone fortress, and no one has any idea what it was.
Saksaywaman is a huge stone structure that sits on the outskirts of the city of Cusco in Peru. Going by quite a few names which are all variations of the spelling, the ruins are believed to have been used as a fortress by the Inca empire, who took over construction after the Killke culture began works in the area around the year 1100 CE.
The Inca’s arrived towards the end of the 1200’s and turned the initial works into what can be seen today. A series of walls made up of hundreds of massive stones, some of which weigh as much as 200 tons.
The use of the site as a fortress is reasonably well documented, with Spanish explorers and soldiers seeing the area occupied by the Inca’s and describing in some detail the layout of the complex. A man named Francisco Pizarro, who was the Spanish conquistador that led the campaign to conquer the Inca empire, set foot in the fortress when it was in operation by the Incas. His brother, Pedro Pizarro described the experience as below:
“on top of a hill they had a very strong fort surrounded with masonry walls of stones and having two very high round towers. And in the lower part of this wall there were stones so large and thick that it seemed impossible that human hands could have set them in place…they were so close together, and so well fitted, that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints. The whole fortress was built up in terraces and flat spaces.” The numerous rooms were “filled with arms, lances, arrows, darts, clubs, bucklers and large oblong shields…there were many morions…there were also…certain stretchers in which the Lords travelled, as in litters.”
The Incas had various sites around their territory that were all very impressive, which is what makes Saksaywaman so unique, as no one has any idea how they built it.
The heaviest individual pieces of stone weigh around 200 tons and the whole construction has been had without using any mortar. The stones just rest on top of one another and use their weight to hold themselves in place, but the really odd thing is that they are cut perfectly.
The stones sit so tightly together that its said you cant even put a piece of paper between the stone. They also appear to be fixed to each other some how, and not just through weight. The joins between the stones seem to have been heat fused somehow, as if they were all welded into one massive piece.
This was featured on an episode of “Ancient Aliens” were the guy with weird hair talked at length about how it couldn’t have been done by humans, as people haven’t had the technology to weld stone together until very recent times.
Though the idea of aliens is a bit far fetched, no one has been able to come up with a reasonable explanation as to how this structure was made. Another odd thing is that this type of building method isn’t seen anywhere else in the world, at least nothing even close to the scale of this one.
The stone has been confirmed as being from the local area, and apart from the method of construction there isn’t anything else unusual about this place. However it would be nice to know how they did it, as this type of heat-fixing stone together so perfectly hasn’t been seen anywhere else.
Today the site is used to host a yearly Inca festival, and has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.
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