The Lost City of Machu Picchu

Release Date: 2019

Watch Date: May 21 – May 22, 2023

 

    The city of Machu Picchu is an engineering marvel, and one that we will never fully understand the purpose behind – but this documentary does a fairly good job of trying to provide plausible explanations for both it’s creation, use, and eventual abandonment.

    The Inca did not write in the traditional sense, using a form of knots tied in ropes as their main means of expressing information to one another, and while that is very cool, it doesn’t give archaeologists a lot to work with when it comes to actually discovering the purposes behind certain rituals or locations. They have to instead, make a lot of hypotheses and try to find the evidence to prove them, real, hard, science and they are doing an incredibly admirable job of it – as is proven in this documentary.

    What I particularly enjoyed, beyond the extremely plausible theories – which you do not always get in popular specials about ancient cultures (there was nary a reference to ancient aliens) – was the fact that it showed the entire spectrum of research when it comes to the site. They show scientists exploring the surrounding valley, other local towns that would have interacted closely with Machu Picchu at it’s height, reexamining remains found at the site originally to confirm the theories proposed back when it was first discovered. The Incan civilization is taken as a whole, and Machu Picchu is put into that context, without trying to extrapolate just from the city itself.

    It is also extremely informative about the purpose of each feature of Machu Picchu, how it was engineered, and why. The drainage and water system the Incans utilized, while not possessing any traditional tools to speak of, breaking rocks with other rocks, is nothing short of astounding. Every aspect of Machu Picchu was meticulously planned, meant to last through the millennia, and was clearly extremely successful at it.

    Our last archeological special was Stonehenge, and that was goofy, the reenactments hokey, barely about Stonehenge itself, and the theories proposed for it’s use felt as if they were just some man’s fanfic, even if they were founded in science they weren’t shown or explained in a way that made it feel that way.

    So if you are a fan of learning about ancient civilizations, or ancient sites, for which there is very little information, and you have to pick between Stonehenge Decoded and this one, I would suggest you pick this one every time. But it was a solid special even without that comparison, and one that I would highly recommend if you have any interest in the topic at all.