The Temple of the Condor at Machu Picchu

The Temple of the Condor is one of at least seven shrines at the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru that are broadly associated with the Inca practice of astronomy. The Temple of the Condor shrine (called huaca in the Quechua language) is configured in a beautiful and odd way; it records a peculiar set of astronomical events; and it was located in a uniquely restricted sector of Machu Picchu. Wright and Valencia Zagarra's excellent guidebook to Machu Picchu calls the Condor huaca "almost theatrical."

The Temple of the Condor lies in the central eastern part of Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu covers an area of about 25 acres and features temples, shrines, plazas, aqueducts, fountains, and residential structures. It was constructed likely as a royal estate and pilgrimage site in the Andes mountains of Peru and was in active use between ca. 1420-1532 CE. Machu Picchu lies at approximately 2,400 meters (7,800 feet) above sea level, perched between two peaks and surrounded on three sides by the Urubamba River. The mountains and the river themselves are reported by ethnographic sources and oral history to have been sacred to the Inca people, whose kings declared themselves children of the sun.

• For more information about Machu Picchu, see Machu Picchu as seen through the eyes of excavator Fernando Astete.

The Physical Configuration

At the center of the Temple of the Condor huaca is a flat, distinctively carved rock or altar in the shape of a condor's head and ruff; a small pool underneath the condor's beak collects rainwater. Above and behind the carved rock are two slabs of bedrock jutting skyward in opposite directions, which appear to represent the condor's wings. The Inca built several walls and structures surrounding, supporting, and enhancing the imagery. Atop the left wing, they constructed a wall with three large trapezoidal niches, leading explorer Hiram Bingham (1930) to call this sector the "Unusual Niches Group."

At the base of the wings and behind the condor's head platform is the entrance to three caves, excavated by Peruvian archaeologist Alfredo Valencia Zegarra and American businessman and amateur archaeologist James Westerman in 1995. The caves can only be accessed through subterranean passageways, and some of them are blocked today. Under the right wing is a small entranceway leading downward. Under the left wing a passageway leads to a cave tall enough to stand up in.

The Inca perceived the world in three domains: the upperworld, symbolized by the condor; the earth where people live, symbolized by the puma, and the underworld, symbolized by the serpent. Ziegler and colleagues (2013) suggest that the elements of the Temple of the Condor are an explicit reference to all three worlds.

• Getty Museum images of the Temple of the Condor
• A short video of the temple Megalithic Marvels of the Temple of the Condor

Astronomical Focus of the Temple of the Condor

For a few days surrounding sunrise on April 26th and again on August 18th each year, sunlight pours across the condor's head and into the caves. Those dates roughly coincide with maize planting (in mid-August) and harvest (in mid-April).

These dates also coincide with the antizenith, although archaeologists are somewhat divided as to whether that was intentional or not. In astronomical terms, the zenith refers to that period when the sun at noon is immediately overhead, such that gnomens throw no shadows. In the latitudes where Machu Picchu lies, that happens twice a year (February 14th and October 29th). The anti-zenith (or nadir) occurs at midnight and it is when the sun passes immediately underneath the viewer's feet. That passage also occurs twice a year, six months after the zenith (April 26th and August 18th), but it is a celestial event which is invisible to users, although the moon is said to be brighter at that time. One strong proponent of the Incan interest in the timing of the anti-zenith passage was Dutch ethnographer R. Tom Zuidema, who noted that August 18th was the date of a major festival in Cusco associated with planting, when 1,000 guinea pigs were brought into the city to be sacrificed.

While it is possible to calculate when the anti-zenith occurs (six months after the zenith), some archaeologists (e.g., Bauer and Dearborn 1995) remain skeptical about the immediate connection. It seems plausible that the Inca builders simply noticed that the beams of the sun entered the subterranean caves on dates marking the start and end of the planting season, and decided to modify the environs to celebrate that. Among the modifications was two buildings located in a position so as to narrow the sunbeam to hit just the caves on the anti-zenith days. There is ample evidence that the Inca used knotted string khipu to maintain a calendar of events (e.g., De la Puente 2019).

The Sector of the Temple of the Condor

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Condor huaca is that it lies within a sector in Machu Picchu that was quite deliberately set apart and restricted. During the Inca period, access to the sector was only possible through a single double-jamb doorway--a door within a door that could be locked. That may have limited visitors to say, the ruler and/or priests or yancas, the Quechua word for the astronomer/specialists, one or more of whom may have resided within the sector.

Buildings in the sector in addition to the Temple of the Condor huaca include at least one residence, a large building in which the ground floor was used for raising guinea pigs, and a private fountain. There are numerous niches in many of the walls and rooms of the sector; in fact, excavator Hiram Bingham called the sector "the Unusual Niches Group." Some of the niches were large enough to have held people or mummies. Some niches contain small inner niches, one placed on the back wall and one each on the side walls. Carved knobs and holes are placed in or near the niches, which may have been used to tie ropes to secure whatever was in the niche.

Another name for the sector is the "Prisoner's Group," but how it got that name is a mystery. Bingham's 1952 book on Machu Picchu refers to a building which might have been used to hold prisoners, but that building is in Choqquequirau. Otherwise, the term "Prisoner's Group" shows up on later maps, and it is unlikely that this was the purpose of the Condor group.

About Those Guinea Pigs

Guinea pigs were domesticated in South America about 7,000 years ago, and were used primarily as a food source. On Zuidema's evidence, August 18th was a major festival elsewhere in the Inca empire, and directly associated with mass guinea pig sacrifices. Ziegler and Malville (2013) point out that whether the anti-zenith was recognized as a celestial occurrence or not, the Temple of the Condor might well have been the location of the planting festival attested elsewhere. It's also possible that the guinea pigs simply provided food for the inhabitants of the sector.

Project Takeaways

You'd think, wouldn't you? that the Temple of the Condor, or really, anything in Machu Picchu, would have nothing more to tell us archaeologically, given that the site was excavated well before modern archaeological techniques. After all, Bingham just had his field crew — the local people either paid or conscripted by politicians to work on his project — remove all that messy dirt in the way of his getting a good look at the walls. However, technology in the form of improved mapping, radiocarbon dating, and decoding the quipu have produced a range of data. Ongoing studies including excavations from several international groups are being conducted on satellite sites, in close connection with Peruvian researchers at the National Archaeological Park of Machu Pichu and the Ministry of Culture.

In terms of the Staring into Space project, the huaca at the Temple of the Condor is an example of a location where people developed a calendrical device based on the movements of the sun to help celebrate and kick off scheduled planting and harvest of crops. Archaeological studies by Alfredo Valencia Zegarra into Machu Picchu's agricultural terraces have revealed that the farmers grew corn, potatoes, and some kind of legume.

Figure Credits

• Machu Picchu Temple of the Condor by Upload Wizard
• Tour guide scatters coca leaves on the condor head platform Ed Nellis, all rights reserved.
• Google Earth image of the Temple of the Condor at Machu Picchu. Image Credit:Google Earth
• Condor Group Schematic. Image Credit: K. Kris Hirst. Compass rose from Brosen, Base map from Bingham 1930, data compiled from Wright and Valencia Zegarra (2004) and Gullberg (2020)
• Guinea pigs Peruvian Guinea Pig Hutch by R. Kessenich, CC 3.0 Share Alike Unported.
• Agricultural terraces at Machu Picchu. Image Credit: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Sources

• Bauer, Brian S. and David S. P. Dearborn. Astronomy and Empire in the Ancient Andes : The Cultural Origins of Inca Sky Watching. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1995.
• Bingham, Hiram. Machu Picchu: A Citadel of the Incas. Report of the Explorations and Excavations Made in 1911, 1912 and 1915 under the Auspices of Yale University and the National Geographic Society. Yale University Press, 1930. Memoirs of the National Geographic Society.
• Bingham III, Hiram. Lost City of the Incas: The Story of Machu Picchu and Its Builders. Phoenix, 1952.
• de la Puente, José Carlos. "Calendars in Knotted Cords: New Evidence on How Khipus Captured Time in Nineteenth-Century Cuzco and Beyond." Ethnohistory, vol. 66, no. 3, 2019, pp. 437–64, doi:10.1215/00141801-7517868
• Gullberg, Steven R. "Orientations in and Surrounding Machu Picchu." Astronomy of the Inca Empire: Use and Significance of the Sun and the Night Sky, Springer International Publishing, 2020, pp. 251–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48366-1_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-48366-1_9
• Gullberg, Steven R. and J. McKim Malville. "Caves, Liminality and the Sun in the Inca World." Culture and Cosmos, vol. 21, no. 1 & 2, 2017, pp. 193–214.
• Hemming, John and Edward Ranney. Monuments of the Incas. Little, Brown, 1982.
• Kościuk, Jacek and José M. Bastante. "In a Search for Inca Construction Process Logistics. Case Studies of Four Structures from the Llaqta Machu Picchu." Machu Picchu in Context: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Human Past, edited by Mariusz Ziółkowski et al., Springer International Publishing, 2022, pp. 555–81. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92766-0_17 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-92766-0_17
• Valencia Zegarra, Alfredo. "Recent Archaeological Investigations at Machu Picchu." Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas, edited by Richard L. Burger and Lucy C. Salazar, translated by Richard L. Burger, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 71–84.
• Wright, Ruth M. and Alfredo Valencia Zegarra. The Machu Picchu Guidebook: A Self-Guided Tour. Revised ed., Johnson Books, 2004. https://archive.org/details/machupicchuguide0000wrig/mode/2up
• Ziegler, Gary R. and J. McKim Malville. Machu Picchu’s Sacred Sisters: Choquequirao and Llactapata: Astronomy, Symbolism, and Sacred Geography in the Inca Heartland. Johnson Books, 2013.
• Ziółkowski, Mariusz and Jacek Kościuk. "Astronomical Observations at Machu Picchu: Facts, Hypothesis and Wishful Thinking." Machu Picchu in Context: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Human Past, edited by Mariusz Ziółkowski et al., Springer International Publishing, 2022, pp. 167–236. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92766-0_5 https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-030-92766-0_5.pdf
• Zuidema, R. Tom. Inca Civilization in Cuzco. translated by Jean-Jacques Decosster, University of Texas Press 1990.

This article is part of the Staring into Space project.
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