The Inca Were Weirder Than You Think

In 1999, climbers found a girl curled on her side at 6,739 metres on the volcano Llullaillaco, her textile wrap and braids still intact, her face looking like sleep rather than death. She is the centerpiece of a story that takes apart nearly everything the word Inca usually brings to mind. We follow archaeologists Johan Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti to that summit, then back down into the empire that put her there: the Qorikancha and its forty-two ceque lines recorded by Bernabé Cobo, the forty thousand kilometres of the Qhapaq Ñan, the still-rewoven Q'eswachaka rope bridge, and the khipu knotted cords that Harvard's Gary Urton and St Andrews' Sabine Hyland have spent decades trying to read. We trace Pachacuti's mortarless walls at Sacsayhuamán through a 1950 earthquake, the royal mummies the Spanish magistrate Polo de Ondegardo hunted down in 1559, and the 2013 isotope study of the Maiden's own hair that reconstructed her final year. The popular picture is a blood-soaked empire of routine human sacrifice, crushed overnight by a handful of conquistadors. The chroniclers and the forensic evidence tell a stranger story: capacocha was rare, reserved for genuine emergencies, and the empire ran on tools no textbook credits it with. So how exactly did a state with no wheel, no coined money and supposedly no writing move an army and an order across six countries faster than most of Europe could manage with horses? CHAPTERS 0:00 No Wound, No Struggle 1:08 An Empire With No Wheels 3:03 Lines Cut Into Rock 4:33 A Bridge Rebuilt Every Year 5:47 Fish in a Day 7:47 Knots That Speak 9:28 The Man Who Rebuilt Cuzco 10:28 The Wall the Earthquake Spared 12:37 The King Who Never Left 13:38 Hunting Dead Kings 15:12 An Honor, Not a Punishment 16:32 Coca Leaves in Her Hair 18:33 Surgery Without Anesthesia 20:04 A Disease Ahead of the Spanish 21:37 One Hundred Sixty-Eight Men 23:13 Melting Back Into View SOURCES Cieza de León, P. 1553. Crónica del Perú. [primary source, chasquis and roads] Garcilaso de la Vega, I. 1609. Comentarios Reales de los Incas. [primary source, royal mummies] Wilson, A. et al. 2013. Archaeological, Radiological, and Biological Evidence Offer Insight into Inca Child Sacrifice. PNAS 110: 13322-13327. Hyland, S. 2017. Writing with Twisted Cords: The Inscriptive Capacity of Andean Khipus. Current Anthropology 58: 412-419. UNESCO. 2014. Qhapaq Ñan, Andean Road System. World Heritage List. — https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1459 If you had to guess, what do you think the knots on a khipu were actually recording — numbers, words, or both? Subscribe for a new strange civilization every week:    / @weirderthanhistory   All footage and photographs in this video are real: archaeological film, museum photos and maps. No AI-generated pictures or video. #AncientHistory #IncaEmpire #Archaeology