Open Veils · Answer
Who built Manchu picchu?
The Inca construction attribution is well-documented, but the deeper question is whether Pachacuti's builders were working with far older foundations, astronomical alignments, and stonework techniques that exceed what a 15th-century state could transmit in a single generation. Researchers like Brien Foerster and Christopher Dunn argue the precision polygonal masonry at Machu Picchu and nearby Ollantaytambo reflects a lost pre-Inca tradition. Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson place this tradition in the post-Younger Dryas horizon, suggesting Andean highlands preserved technical memory from a catastrophe-era civilisation.
Evidence
- The standard record is clear enough on the surface: Yale anthropologist Richard Burger's 2021 AMS radiocarbon study pushed occupation back to approximately 1420 CE, predating even the Rowe-derived 1450 estimate, and suggests construction spanned two rulers — Pachacuti and Túpac Inca Yupanqui.
- Christopher Dunn, the precision engineer who analysed Egyptian megalithic sites, has noted that the same tooling anomalies — perfectly flat faces, micro-precision corners — appear at Ollantaytambo and Sacsayhuamán, structurally related sites in the Cusco orbit.
- Graham Hancock, in 'Fingerprints of the Gods' and subsequent work with Randall Carlson, frames the Andean highlands as a potential refuge zone during the Younger Dryas Impact events (~12,800–11,600 BP), suggesting surviving technicians seeded stoneworking knowledge that persisted into Inca statecraft millennia later.
- The Inca themselves credited earlier beings — the Viracocha and the 'giants' of Tiwanaku — with the original masonry traditions, a mythological acknowledgement that even their own oral history did not claim sole authorship of the technology.
- Foerster argues this lower stratum predates the Inca by an unknown margin and was simply incorporated into their building program.