The Inca Said They Didn't Build Sacsayhuamán. So Who Did?

When the Spanish reached Cusco, they climbed the hill above the city to Sacsayhuaman and found walls built from stones of up to 125 tons, quarried about three miles away across hills and valleys. They asked the Inca whether they had built them, and the Inca told them the walls were already standing when they arrived.Brien Foerster heard a different answer on his first day in Peru, twenty years ago. Standing on a side street in Cusco in front of a wall so tightly fitted that paper will not slide into the joints, he asked his guide who made it and was told the Inca had, with bronze chisels. He has been visiting the sites that prompted that question ever since.In the fourth episode of the Lost Civilizations Podcast, Matthew LaCroix sits down with the researcher he credits with opening the field to him, and the two walk the Andes site by site through Sacsayhuaman, Ollantaytambo, Ñaupa Huaca, the Qorikancha and Machu Picchu. At every one they find a megalithic core of hard, precisely fitted stone with cruder Inca work and clay mortar built over it or patched into it. The granite at Ollantaytambo came from a quarry at the summit of the mountain, while the rock at Ñaupa Huaca is harder than granite and carries no tool marks. Brien explains why a bronze chisel bends on its first strike against stone like this, and neither man has heard a plausible account of how Bronze Age tools could have done the work.Their own explanation is that an acoustic or vibrational technology softened and lifted the stone, and they present it plainly as their reading of the evidence. Along the way Brien covers the false doorway at Amaru Muru and the elongated Paracas skulls he believes were born that shape.Matt then turns to a symbol he has tracked across several continents, a three-level step pyramid with a wide flat top that he calls the composite step pyramid. It appears at Ñaupa Huaca and Machu Picchu, beneath Viracocha on the Gate of the Sun at Tiwanaku, and on a relief from the Van region of eastern Turkey, where reversing one sequence of carvings produces the same form. He reads it as part of the grammar of an ancient knowledge system.The two disagree about how those builders were connected. Brien thinks several advanced civilizations rose and fell at different times, perhaps unaware of each other, whereas Matt argues they were linked nodes of a single mother civilization, and he makes that case before the close.GUESTBrien Foerster has spent about twenty years exploring megalithic sites full time. He lives in Peru and has visited Machu Picchu more than a hundred times, Egypt more than ten times and the sites of Bolivia dozens of times. He has published 37 books and more than 4,500 videos.Find out more from Brien here: hiddenincatours.com/MATTHEW LACROIXthestageoftime.comBOOKShttps://thestageoftime.… ANCIENT CODE DATABASEthestageoftime.com/acd-iTHE LOST CIVILIZATIONS PODCASTthestageoftime.com/podcast