Principal Doorway of the Long Palace at Rosaspata
Another Doorway in the Ruins of Rosaspata
Most interesting of all is the structure which caught the attention of Ocampo and remained fixed in his memory. Enough remains of this building to give a good idea of its former grandeur. It was indeed a fit residence for a royal Inca, an exile from Cuzco. It is 245 feet by 43 feet. There were no Page 243windows, but it was lighted by thirty doorways, fifteen in front and the same in back. It contained ten large rooms, besides three hallways running from front to rear. The walls were built rather hastily and are not noteworthy, but the principal entrances, namely, those leading to each hall, are particularly well made; not, to be sure, of “marble” as Ocampo said—there is no marble in the province—but of finely cut ashlars of white granite. The lintels of the principal doorways, as well as of the ordinary ones, are also of solid blocks of white granite, the largest being as much as eight feet in length. The doorways are better than any other ruins in Uilcapampa except those of Machu Picchu, thus justifying the mention of them made by Ocampo, who lived near here and had time to become thoroughly familiar with their appearance. Unfortunately, a very small portion of the edifice was still standing. Most of the rear doors had been filled up with ashlars, in order to make a continuous fence. Other walls had been built from the ruins, to keep cattle out of the cultivated pampa. Rosaspata is at an elevation which places it on the borderland between the cold grazing country, with its root crops and sublimated pigweeds, and the temperate zone where maize flourishes.
On the south side of the hilltop, opposite the long palace, is the ruin of a single structure, 78 feet long and 35 feet wide, containing doors on both sides, no niches and no evidence of careful workmanship. It was probably a barracks for a company of soldiers. Page 244
The intervening “pampa” might have been the scene of those games of bowls and quoits, which were played by the Spanish refugees who fled from the wrath of Gonzalo Pizarro and found refuge with the Inca Manco. Here may have occurred that fatal game when one of the players lost his temper and killed his royal host.
Our excavations in 1915 yielded a mass of rough potsherds, a few Inca whirl-bobs and bronze shawl pins, and also a number of iron articles of European origin, heavily rusted—horseshoe nails, a buckle, a pair of scissors, several bridle or saddle ornaments, and three Jew's-harps. My first thought was that modern Peruvians must have lived here at one time, although the necessity of carrying all water supplies up the hill would make this unlikely. Furthermore, the presence here of artifacts of European origin does not of itself point to such a conclusion. In the first place, we know that Manco was accustomed to make raids on Spanish travelers between Cuzco and Lima. He might very easily have brought back with him a Spanish bridle. In the second place the musical instruments may have belonged to the refugees, who might have enjoyed whiling away their exile with melancholy twanging. In the third place the retainers of the Inca probably visited the Spanish market in Cuzco, where there would have been displayed at times a considerable assortment of goods of European manufacture. Finally Rodriguez de Figueroa speaks expressly of two pairs of scissors he brought as a present to Titu Cusi. That no such array of European artifacts has been turned Page 245up in the excavations of other important sites in the province of Uilcapampa would seem to indicate that they were abandoned before the Spanish Conquest or else were occupied by natives who had no means of accumulating such treasures.
Thanks to Ocampo's description of the fortress which Tupac Amaru was occupying in 1572 there is no doubt that this was the palace of the last Inca. Was it also the capital of his brothers, Titu Cusi and Sayri Tupac, and his father, Manco? It is astonishing how few details we have by which the Uiticos of Manco may be identified. His contemporaries are strangely silent. When he left Cuzco and sought refuge “in the remote fastnesses of the Andes,” there was a Spanish soldier, Cieza de Leon, in the armies of Pizarro who had a genius for seeing and hearing interesting things and writing them down, and who tried to interview as many members of the royal family as he could;—Manco had thirteen brothers. Ciezo de Leon says he was much disappointed not to be able to talk with Manco himself and his sons, but they had “retired into the provinces of Uiticos, which are in the most retired part of those regions, beyond the great Cordillera of the Andes.”[1] The Spanish refugees who died as the result of the murder of Manco may not have known how to write. Anyhow, so far as we can learn they left no accounts from which any one could identify his residence. Page 246
Titu Cusi gives no definite clue, but the activities of Friar Marcos and Friar Diego, who came to be his spiritual advisers, are fully described by Calancha. It will be remembered that Calancha remarks that “close to Uiticos in a village called Chuquipalpa, is a House of the Sun and in it a white stone over a spring of water.” Our guide had told us there was such a place close to the hill of Rosaspata.
On the day after making the first studies of the “Hill of Roses,” I followed the impatient Mogrovejo—whose object was not to study ruins but to earn dollars for finding them—and went over the hill on its northeast side to the Valley of Los Andenes (“the Terraces”). Here, sure enough, was a large, white granite boulder, flattened on top, which had a carved seat or platform on its northern side. Its west side covered a cave in which were several niches. This cave had been walled in on one side. When Mogrovejo and the Indian guide said there was a manantial de agua (“spring of water”) near by, I became greatly interested. On investigation, however, the” spring” turned out to be nothing but part of a small irrigating ditch. (Manantial means “spring”; it also means “running water”). But the rock was not “over the water.” Although this was undoubtedly one of those huacas, or sacred boulders, selected by the Incas as the visible representations of the founders of a tribe and thus was an important accessory to ancestor worship, it was not the Yurak Rumi for which we were looking.