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Capping the top of the terrace was a layer of topsoil about 1 metre (3.3 ft) thick. The result was a terrace providing "well-drained rich soil and a level surface for growing crops." [9] At prestigious or royal sites, such as Machu Picchu, finely cut stone was used as the outer (visible) face of the retaining wall. The planting surface of an ...
Machu Picchu [a] is a 15th-century Inca citadel located in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru on a mountain ridge at 2,430 meters (7,970 ft). [9] Often referred to as the "Lost City of the Incas", [10] it is the most familiar icon of the Inca Empire.
The Incas are renowned for their precision in stone masonry. The architecture was a means of bringing order to untamed areas and the people of the Andes region. Machu Picchu, located in the Sacred Valley, is an example of the Incas adapting building strategies that acknowledge the topography of the area.
Agricultural Andenes or terraces in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, close to Pisac, Peru.. Inca agriculture was the culmination of thousands of years of farming and herding in the high-elevation Andes mountains of South America, the coastal deserts, and the rainforests of the Amazon basin.
The Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu [2] is a protected area in Peru covering over 35,000 hectares. It includes the natural environment surrounding the Machu Picchu archaeological site, located in the rugged cloud forest of the Yungas on the eastern slope of the Peruvian Andes and along both banks of the Urubamba River, which flows northwest in this section.
Machu Picchu, a mountainous settlement that was inhabited during the time of Tahuantinsuyu. In later periods, much of the Andean region was conquered by the indigenous Incas , who in 1438 founded the largest empire that the Americas had ever seen, named Tahuantinsuyu , but usually called the Inca Empire. [ 6 ]
The terraces were built to make the most efficient use of shallow soil and to enable irrigation of crops by allowing runoff to occur through the outlet. [ 9 ] The Inca people built on these, developing a system of canals , aqueducts , and puquios to direct water through dry land and increase fertility levels and growth. [ 10 ]
Machu Picchu contains nearly 130 outlets in the center that moved the water out of the city through walls and other structures. The agriculture terraces are a feature of the complicated drainage system; the steppes helped avoid erosion and were built on a slope to aim excess water into channels that ran alongside the stairways.