Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of PeruBingham, Hiram
History
Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of Peru
Bingham, Hiram
Incas; Peru -- Antiquities; Peru -- Description and travel
We left Lucma the next day, forded the Vilcabamba River and soon
had an uninterrupted view up the valley to a high, truncated hill,
its top partly covered with a scrubby growth of trees and bushes,
its sides steep and rocky. We were told that the name of the hill was
"Rosaspata," a word of modern hybrid origin--pata being Quichua for
"hill," while rosas is the Spanish word for "roses." Mogrovejo said
his Indians told him that on the "Hill of Roses" there were more ruins.
At the foot of the hill, and across the river, is the village of
Pucyura. When Raimondi was here in 1865 it was but a "wretched hamlet
with a paltry chapel." To-day it is more prosperous. There is a large
public school here, to which children come from villages many miles
away. So crowded is the school that in fine weather the children
sit on benches out of doors. The boys all go barefooted. The girls
wear high boots. I once saw them reciting a geography lesson, but I
doubt if even the teacher knew whether or not this was the site of
the first school in this whole region. For it was to "Puquiura" that
Friar Marcos came in 1566. Perhaps he built the "mezquina capilla"
which Raimondi scorned. If this were the "Puquiura" of Friar Marcos,
then Uiticos must be near by, for he and Friar Diego walked with
their famous procession of converts from "Puquiura" to the House of
the Sun and the "white rock" which was "close to Uiticos."
Crossing the Vilcabamba on a footbridge that afternoon, we came
immediately upon some old ruins that were not Incaic. Examination
showed that they were apparently the remains of a very crude Spanish
crushing mill, obviously intended to pulverize gold-bearing quartz on a
considerable scale. Perhaps this was the place referred to by Ocampo,
who says that the Inca Titu Cusi attended masses said by his friend
Friar Diego in a chapel which is "near my houses and on my own lands,
in the mining district of Puquiura, close to the ore-crushing mill of
Don Christoval de Albornoz, Precentor that was of the Cuzco Cathedral."
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FIGURE
Pucyura and the Hill of Rosaspata in the Vilcabamba Valley
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One of the millstones is five feet in diameter and more than a foot
thick. It lay near a huge, flat rock of white granite, hollowed
out so as to enable the millstone to be rolled slowly around in a
hollow trough. There was also a very large Indian mortar and pestle,
heavy enough to need the services of four men to work it. The mortar
was merely the hollowed-out top of a large boulder which projected
a few inches above the surface of the ground. The pestle, four feet
in diameter, was of the characteristic rocking-stone shape used from
time immemorial by the Indians of the highlands for crushing maize or
potatoes. Since no other ruins of a Spanish quartz-crushing plant have
been found in this vicinity, it is probable that this once belonged
to Don Christoval de Albornoz.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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