page_title: Inca architecture
section_title: Masonry and construction methods
hierarchical_section_title: Inca architecture / Masonry and construction methods
caption_attribution_description: Reconstruction of painting on walls of Room 42, Tambo Colorado, adapted from a photo-textured laser scan. Thanks to favorable environmental conditions, many walls at Tambo Colorado, both internal and external, retain enough residual colored paint to accurately reconstruct what the original wall painting would have been like. Color here was often applied in horizontal strips of red, black, white, and yellow ochre atop stucco, and variation in color would accentuate architectural features such as niches. Room 42, the third court encountered from the entrance of the Northern Palace structure, contains niches of two recesses and distinct painting.
context_page_description: Inca architecture is the most significant pre-Columbian architecture in South America. The Incas inherited an architectural legacy from Tiwanaku, founded in the 2nd century B.C.E. in present-day Bolivia. A core characteristic of the architectural style was to use the topography and existing materials of the land as part of the design. The capital of the Inca empire, Cuzco, still contains many fine examples of Inca architecture, although many walls of Inca masonry have been incorporated into Spanish Colonial structures. The famous royal estate of Machu Picchu is a surviving example of Inca architecture. Other significant sites include Sacsayhuamán and Ollantaytambo. The Incas also developed an extensive road system spanning most of the western length of the continent and placed their distinctive architecture along the way, thereby visually asserting their imperial rule along the frontier.
context_section_description: Water engineer Ken Wright estimates that 60 percent of the Inca construction effort was underground. The Inca built their cities with locally available materials, usually including limestone or granite. To cut these hard rocks the Inca used stone, bronze or copper tools, usually splitting the stones along the natural fracture lines. Without the wheel the stones were rolled up with wood beams on earth ramps. Extraordinary manpower would have been necessary. The Inca Empire employed a system of tribute to the Inca government in the form of labor, called Mit'a that required all males between 15-50 to work on large public construction projects.
  Hyslop comments that the 'secret' to the production of fine Inca masonry “…was the social organization necessary to maintain the great numbers of people creating such energy-consuming monuments.” It is speculated that the stones were swung into place using friction to create perfectly convex and concave sides. Visible marks of facture like stone bosses were made using rope; these elements demonstrated the artistic value of labor and the power of Inca rule.
  Usually the walls of Incan buildings were slightly inclined inside and the corners were rounded. This, in combination with masonry thoroughness, led Incan buildings to have a peerless seismic resistance thanks to high static and dynamic steadiness, absence of resonant frequencies and stress concentration points. During an earthquake with a small or moderate magnitude, masonry was stable, and during a strong earthquake stone blocks were “ dancing ” near their normal positions and lay down exactly in right order after an earthquake.
  Another building method was called "pillow-faced" architecture. The Incas would sand large, finely shaped stones which they would fit together in jigsaw like patterns. Pillow-faced architecture was typically used for temples and royal places like Machu Picchu.
  Ashlar masonry was used in the most sacred, elite Inca structure; for example, the Acllawasi ("House of the Chosen Woman"), the Coricancha ("Golden Enclosure") in Cuzco, and the Sun Temple at Machu Picchu. Thus it seems that ashlar may have been more greatly valued by the Inca, perhaps considered more difficult than polygonal ("pillow-faced") masonry. Though polygonal masonry may be aesthetically more impressive, the facture of ashlar masonry tends to be unforgiving to mistakes; if a corner is broken in the process it can be reshaped to fit into the mosaic of polygonal masonry whereas you cannot recover a damaged rock in ashlar masonry.
caption: Digital reconstruction of original Inca painting on Room 42 wall, Tambo Colorado; this late Inca period fortress/palace is still largely intact despite being constructed of adobe and located in an earthquake-prone area of Peru.  Remaining traces of the original paint guided this 2005 reconstruction. Laser scan data taken from a CyArk/University of California research partnership
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