Across the old Inca empire, Spanish priests hunted down a specific kind of stone. They called them idols and smashed nearly every one they found, carved granite pillars the Inca used to track the sun at the solstices and equinoxes. Only one of any real size survives intact today, and it survives because the Spanish never found the city it stands in.
The Intihuatana stone sits on a terrace above Machu Picchu, carved directly from the mountain’s own bedrock around 1450 under the Inca ruler Pachacuti. Its name translates roughly to hitching post of the sun. On the equinox, the stone casts almost no shadow at solar noon, a level of astronomical precision that took generations of observation to achieve without a single written record, since the Inca kept no written language at all. Machu Picchu itself was abandoned within a century, likely during the Spanish conquest, and sat hidden above the Urubamba River until 1911, when it was shown to the wider world.
In 2000, a film crew shooting a beer commercial dropped a crane and chipped a piece off the stone’s corner, the first damage the Intihuatana had suffered in five hundred years of surviving empires, weather, and conquest.
Makes you wonder what else the Inca built to that same precision that the Spanish did find and destroy before anyone thought to write it down.
Astronomical instrument, or something the Inca never meant outsiders to understand?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
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