It has been sought for centuries, but remained a mystery. Now an expert has pinpointed a site that could be Atahualpa’s resting place: the last Inca emperor’s tomb.
“This is an absolutely important find for the history of Ecuador’s archeology and for the [Andean] region,” Ecuadoran Patrimony Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa said, referring to the ruins found by historian Tamara Estupinan.
The Inca empire, in the 1400s and early 1500s, spanned much of South America’s Andean region — more than 1,600km — from modern-day Bolivia and Peru to Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia. It included dozens of ethnic groups with different languages, cities, temples, farming terraces and fortresses.
Photo: AFP
Atahualpa was the last of his dynasty. During the Spanish conquest he was taken captive in what is now Cajamarca, Peru.
He had been pressed to convert to Christianity and then the Spanish executed him by strangulation. After his death in 1533, the empire began to fall apart.
This year Ecuador’s state Cultural Patrimony Institute will start work on a promising archeological site and Estupinan will be front and center to raise the curtain on a massive complex sprawling over a ridge at 1,020m.
It was back in June 2010 that Estupinan, now a researcher with the French Institute for Andean Studies (IFEA), found what she describes as an “Inca archeological site” high on the Andes’ eastern flank amid plunging canyons. Nearby are a small local farm and a facility for raising fighting cocks.
However, in the area called Sigchos, about 72km south of Quito, up on a hill dotted with brush, there is more — much more: She found a complex of walls, aqueducts and stonework that lie inside the Machay rural retreat. Machay means burial in the Quechua language.
“This is a late imperial design Inca monument that leads to several rectangular rooms that were built with cut polished stone set around a trapezoidal plaza,” Estupinan said.
Archeologist Tamara Bray, of Wayne State University in Michigan and a colleague of Estupinan, confirmed that the site boasts “an Inca edifice that is phenomenally well preserved and quite important scientifically.”
Inside the facility, a walled walkway starts at the Machay River and one can see the shape of an ushno, essentially stairs that form a pyramid believed to be the emperor’s throne. Meanwhile, a tiny cut channel of water would spout out a small waterfall nicknamed “the Inca’s bath.”
Georges Lomne, the director at the Lima-based IFEA, said the find appears to confirm that the Incas were active and present in a lowland area well outside what their best-known area of operations were: Andean highlands.
“Malqui-Machay is part of a broader complex that also would have included the Quilotoa lagoon and the area called Pujili [Cotopaxi],” he said.
“All of this belonged to Atahualpa. It was his personal fiefdom in the way that French [and other] kings had royal domains,” he added.
Bray also said that “very few such Inca sites have been found in this type of tropical lowland. I think that the Incas used it as a sort of getaway.”
Estupinan has some more specific ideas.
She believes Malqui-Machay is Atahualpa’s final resting place. The tomb of the last capac of Tahuantinsuyo, the trans-Andean empire.
While many experts have other theories, Estupinan believes that when Atahualpa was killed, his remains could have been brought by his most loyal man, Ruminahui, to Sigchos for burial, to a place where Ruminahui based his fight for survival against the European intruders.
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