By Liliana Usvat
Blog 336-365
Percy Fawcett’s younger son, Brian Fawcett, reports the following story,
told to him by a friend:
Some years ago, when I was working in the mining
camp at Cerro de Pasco (a place 14,000 feet up in the Andes of Central Peru), I
went out one Sunday with some other Gringos to visit some old Inca or Pre-Inca
graves – to see if we could find anything worth while. We took our grub with
us, and, of course, a few bottles of pisco and beer; and a peon – a cholo – to
help dig.
Well, we had our lunch when we got to the burial place,
and afterwards started to open up some graves that seemed to be untouched. We
worked hard, and knocked off every now and again for a drink.
I don’t drink
myself, but others did, especially one chap who poured too much pisco into
himself and was inclined to be noisy. When we knocked off, all we found was an
earthenware jar of about a quart capacity, and with liquid inside it.
‘I bet its chicha!’ said the noisy one. ‘Let’s try it
and see what sort of stuff the Incas drank!
‘Probably poison us if we do,’ observed another.
‘Tell you what, then – let’s try it out on the peon!’
They dug the seal and stopper out of the jar’s mouth,
sniffed at the contents and called the peon over to them.
‘Take a drink of this chicha,’ ordered the drunk. The
peon took the jar, hesitated and then with an expression of fear spreading over
his face thrust it into the drunk’s hands and backed away.
‘No, no, senor,’ he murmured. ‘Not that. That’s not
chicha!’ He turned and made off.
The drunk put the jar down on a flat-topped rock and
set off in pursuit. ‘Come on boys – catch him!’ he yelled. They caught the
wretched man, dragged him back, and ordered him to drink the contents of the
jar. The peon struggled madly, his eyes popping. There was a bit of a
scrimmage, and the jar was knocked over and broken, its contents forming a puddle
on the top of the rock. Then the peon broke free and took to his heels.
Everyone laughed. It was a huge joke. But the exercise
had made them thirsty and they went over to the sack where the beer-bottles
lay.
About ten minutes later I bent over the rock and
casually examined the pool of spilled liquid. It was no longer liquid; the
whole patch where it had been, and the rock under it, were as soft as wet
cement! It was as though the stone had melted, like wax under the influence of
heat.
In an interview in 1983, Jorge A. Lira, a Catholic
priest who was an expert in Andean folklore, said that he had rediscovered the
ancient method of softening stone. According to a pre-Columbian legend the gods
had given the Indians two gifts to enable them to build colossal architectural
works such as
Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu. The gifts were two plants with
amazing properties. One of them was the coca plant, whose leaves enabled the
workers to sustain the tremendous effort required.
The other was a plant which,
when mixed with other ingredients, turned hard stone into a malleable paste.
Padre Lira said he had spent 14 years studying the legend and finally succeeded
in identifying the plant in question, which he called ‘jotcha’. He carried out
several experiments and, although he managed to soften solid rock, he could not
reharden it, and therefore considered his experiments a failure.
Aukanaw, an Argentine anthropologist of Mapuche
origin, who died in 1994, related a tradition about a species of woodpecker
known locally by such names as pitiwe, pite, and pitio; its scientific name is
probably Colaptes pitius (Chilean flicker), which is found in Chile and
Argentina, or Colaptes rupicola (Andean flicker), which is found in southern
Ecuador, Peru, western Bolivia, and northern Argentina and Chile.
If someone blocks the entrance to its nest with a
piece of rock or iron it will fetch a rare plant, known as pito or pitu, and
rub it against the obstacle, causing it to become weaker or dissolve. In Peru,
above 4500 m, there is said to be a plant called kechuca which turns stone to
jelly, and which the jakkacllopito bird uses to make its nest.
A plant with
similar properties that grows at even higher altitudes is known, among other
things, as punco-punco; this may be Ephedra andina, which the Mapuche consider
a medicinal plant.
There is an ancient tradition that the buildings at Great Zimbabwe in Africa
were constructed ‘when the stones were soft’. This expression is also found
among the Maoris. One possible interpretation is that it refers to
a method of temporarily softening the stone.
Modern ‘experts’ scoff at anecdotes and traditions such as these. They argue
that the quarries where the Incas cut their stones are known, and stones can be
found there in all stages of preparation. However, the fact that some stones
were cut with ordinary tools does not necessarily mean that they all were. A
variety of techniques may have been used.
The proper scientific attitude would
be to put these traditions to the test instead of mindlessly dismissing them.
After all, it is no secret that certain plants (e.g. in the Alps) that are
ecologically adapted to life in rock crevices secrete acids to soften the rock.
In the 1930s, while studying mining and construction techniques, engineer
J.L. Outwater examined a temple at Mitla, in Oaxaca, Mexico. This temple is
ornamented by about 30,000 thin, flat pieces of stone.
These tile-like pieces
were derived from trachyte, a dense, durable rock that does not split easily
like slate. He discovered a huge stone cauldron near a quarry and wondered
whether the Maya had soaked stones in some chemical to soften them before
making their tiles.
Researcher Maurice Cotterell, too, believes that
pre-Inca and Inca stonemasons possessed the technology to soften and pour stone
We can do this today but only in one direction, from soft to hard; we
call it concrete. It seems that the Incas and the Tiahuanacos could take the
process one step further, from hard to soft again, using igneous rocks.
At
first this seems incomprehensible, but given the molecular structure of matter
it is simply a question of overcoming the covalent bonds that bind atoms
together. We can do this to ice, when we turn it to water, and we do it again
when we turn water into steam.
This explains how the Incas and Tiahuanacos
assembled stones with such perfect precision.
Close examination of the rounded
edges of the stones suggests that the stone material has been ‘poured’, as
though it were once contained within a sack or bag which had long since rotted
and disappeared.
If softened stone had been placed in ‘bags’ that were left to rot, some
trace of them would surely have been found.
Some plants that are ecologically adapted to life in rock crevices (and this is a common phenomenon among alpine plants) secrete
acids to soften the rock. Thus they gain a greater foothold in their niche. It
may well be possible that the Peruvians knew of a few such plants from
observation.
Links
http://www.bio.net/mm/plantbio/1995-February/005233.html
https://www.flickr.com/photos/chilebosque/5510161431/
