The Incas were great architects. They had an absolute craving for carving rock. They made models of their fortresses and palaces in blocks of hard stone, some of these being of remarkable perfection in their detail.
The pottery, red earthen vessels with geometrical designs upon them, was most interesting, especially the large jars which must have been used for fermenting wine. Those jars of a typical shape must have rested on a pedestal of wood, as they ended in a point at the bottom, which prevented their standing up on a flat surface. Two handles were attached to the lower part of those jars, and also to the great bottles in which they kept wine.
The Incas used tumblers, enamelled in red and green, and of most graceful shape.
They were fond of ornamenting their bottles and vessels with representations of human heads, reproduced with considerable artistic fidelity. Other bottles represented strange gnawing faces, with expanded eyes and a fierce moustache.
Judging from the representations of figures on their jars, the people in those days wore their hair in little plaits round the head. Heads of llamas sculptured in stone or else modelled in earthenware were used as vessels.
The Incas made serviceable mortars for grinding grain, of polished hard rock, mostly of a circular shape, seldom more than two feet in diameter.
The matrimonial stone was interesting enough. It was a double vessel carved out of a solid stone, a perforation being made in the partition between the two vessels. It seems, when marriages were performed, that the Incas placed a red liquid in one vessel and some water in the other, the perforation in the central partition being stopped up until the ceremony took place, when the liquids were allowed to mingle in emblem of the union of the two lives. Curious, too, was the pipe-like arrangement, called the kenko, ornamented with a carved jaguar head, also used at their marriage ceremonies.
Lake Titicaca.