Inkas married the Earth

:The Inka Married the Earth: I felt that this reading was very interesting and refreshing. Looking into a culture that conforms to nature instead of destroying it is somewhat of a foreign idea, yet makes perfect sense. The Inka practice of grafting structures formed to the land allowed them to "become one" with their natural surroundings. Keeping in mind the Inka beliefs, it is quite easy to see and understand why this type of building system was important to the people. The ending results were not stagnant perfectly dimensioned buildings, but instead organic structures that seemed to flow with the surrounding land. The ingenuity of the Inka stonemasons who constructed the empire’s majestic buildings out of precisely cut and fitted stone is renowned even today. They are famous for their mortarless and earthquake-proof technique of fitting finely chiseled, jointed stone blocks into one another – so closely, in fact, that a razor blade could not be slide between them – and this highly detailed work was accomplished mainly with hammerstones. Many Inka monuments (including the empire’s capital, Machu Picchu) still stand testament to the quality of the workmanship of Inka engineers, but how, why, and where they built these give important insight into the significance that building technology held for the Inkas. Building activity, in the Inka world view, was an integration of nature into ordered human civilization. This concept is especially apparent where outcroppings of living rock have been used as the foundation for Inka structures, resulting in buildings that seem to rise up out of masses of bare rock. According to the Inka creation myth, the ancient Inka married Pachamama, ( Mother Earth) and the result of this union was human children. Building upon already existing rock outcrops signified a joining of natural and built environments, which are complementary to one another. In Quechua (the language spoken by the Inkas that is still alive today) the term