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January 2001    CIVIL ENGINEERING  MAGAZINE
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Machu Picchu's unique geography presented Inca engineers with a number
of
challenges related to water supply, drainage, and foundations.

REDISCOVERING 

THE LOST CITY

Ninety years have passed since the discovery of Machu Picchu, the
celebrated "lost city" of the Inca hidden in the mountains of Peru.
But only recently an American water engineer uncovered some of its
most fascinating secrets. 

Jeff L. Brown
______________________________________________________________________

Kenneth R. Wright

W ith bright eyes, Ruth Wright recalls her second visit to Machu
Picchu. She had traveled there with her husband, Kenneth R. Wright, to
search for the spring that supplied water to the Inca people who lived
there some 450 years ago. A local Quechua Indian led them through the
dense forest to the spot where the water emerged from the ground. The
Wrights knew they had found what they were looking for when the man
showed them a carved stone foundation, tapping it with the handle of
his machete. "Inca," he told them. "Inca."

The city of Machu Picchu, once the royal estate of a powerful Inca
emperor, lay hidden in the mountains of Peru until 1911, when Hiram
Bingham, a professor of history at Yale, discovered its ruins. Since
then, it has become perhaps the most important archaeological site in
the Americas. Most people know Machu Picchu not for its history, but
for its breathtaking beauty. For years, few even within the scientific
community recognized that it also represents a remarkable achievement
of civil engineering.

Then came Ken Wright.

Were it not for his wife's curiosity, Wright-the president of Wright
Water Engineers, of Denver-might never have visited Machu Picchu. Ruth
visited Machu Picchu in 1974 and of course showed Ken the photographs
from her trip-and told him about the fountains and other structures
the Inca had built to handle water. But Machu Picchu sits on the top
of a mountain ridge, and Ruth asked, Where did the Inca get their
water?

Ken Wright decided to find out. After all, who better to study the
Inca water supply than a water engineer?

But one problem stood in his way: Not just anyone can go to Peru and
start digging things up-especially an American engineer with no
archaeological experience. Wright spent the next 20 years seeking
permission from the Peruvian government to study water engineering at
Machu Picchu. Finally, he enlisted the help of Timothy Wirth, a U.S.
senator from Colorado who later became the undersecretary of state for
global affairs under President Clinton. At last the Peruvian
government took notice, and in April 1994 the cultural authorities in
Peru gave Wright a permit to work there. Soon afterward, Wright began
his research at Machu Picchu. For the next six years, he would go
there one to three times a year-while still working full-time for his
own company.

Of course, the real feat of engineering at Machu Picchu is the work
not of Wright but of the Inca themselves. The names of the Inca
engineers will never be known because the Inca had no written
language. Yet by the time they built Machu Picchu, Wright discovered,
they had accumulated a practical knowledge of hydrology, hydraulics,
drainage, and foundation engineering.

In 1450 the Inca came to this site-a 2,440 m high mountain ridge in
the Andes-with one goal in mind: to build an estate for their emperor,
Pachacuti. "They had a perfect site," notes Wright, but its
suitability would have been apparent only to a trained engineer. The
slopes were steep; how would buildings be prevented from sliding
downhill in a heavy rain? How would drinking water be made accessible?
And from what source would the water come?

Machu Picchu's agricultural terraces play a key role in stabilizing
slopes and controlling erosion. A quarry, upper right, provided
granite for construction.

Wright's research revealed that the Inca must have planned the city
carefully before building it. First, the Inca engineers had to
determine the exact location of the spring and whether it would meet
the needs of the anticipated population. The Wright team found that
the spring, on a steep mountain slope to the north of Machu Picchu, is
fed by a 16.3 ha tributary drainage basin. After conducting an
inflow-outflow evaluation, the team also concluded that the spring
draws on drainage from a much larger hydrogeologic catchment basin.

The Inca enhanced the yield of the spring by building a spring
collection system set into the hillside. The system consists of a
stone wall about 14.6 m long and up to 1.4 m high. Water from the
spring seeps through the wall into a rectangular stone trench about
0.8 m wide. Water from a secondary spring enters the canal about 80 m
west of the primary spring. The Inca also built a 1.5 to 2 m wide
terrace to allow easy access for operating and maintaining the spring
works. The condition of the spring works surprised Wright. "The spring
works was still intact and still working," he says. "It was still
yielding a water supply after all these centuries of abandonment."

Before the city could be built, however, the Inca engineers had to
plan how to convey the water from the spring-at an elevation of 2,458
m-to the proposed site on the ridge below. They decided to build a
canal 749 m long with a slope of about 3 percent. Within the city
walls, the water would be made accessible through a series of 16
fountains, the first of which would be reserved for the emperor. Thus
the canal design, says Wright, determined the location of the
emperor's residence and the layout of the entire city of Machu Picchu.

The Inca built the water supply canal on a relatively steady grade,
depending on gravity flow to carry the water from the spring to the
city center. They used cut stones to construct a channel that
typically ranged from 10 to 16 cm deep and 10 to 12 cm wide at the
bottom. Wright's team concluded that the nominal design capacity of
the channel was about 300 L/min, or more than twice the typical 25 to
150 L/min yield of the primary and secondary springs.

The canal descends the mountain slope, enters the city walls, passes
through the agricultural sector, then crosses an inner wall into the
urban sector, where it feeds a series of 16 fountains known as the
stairway of fountains. The fountains are publicly accessible and
partially enclosed by walls that are typically about 1.2 m high,
except for the lowest fountain, which is a private fountain for the
Temple of the Condor and has higher walls. At the head of each
fountain, a cut stone conduit carries the water to a rectangular
spout, which is shaped to create a jet of water suitable for filling
an aryballo-a typical Inca clay water jug. The water collects in a cut
stone basin in the floor of the fountain, then enters a circular drain
that delivers it to the approach channel for the next fountain.

Wright and his team studied the fountains in detail, conducting
hydraulic flow tests and measuring the channels and outlets. They
concluded that the Inca designed the fountains to operate optimally
with a flow of about 25 L/min, but the fountains would operate with
flows as low as 10 L/min and could handle a maximum flow of 100 L/min.
The team found water control points at two places along the canal
where excess water would have spilled onto the agricultural terraces
or into Machu Picchu's main drain before reaching the fountains.

The water supply canal ends in a series of 16 semiprivate fountains,
the first of which was for
the use of the Inca emperor Pachacuti.

Wright's study of Machu Picchu's hydrology and hydraulic engineering
led him to conclude that the Inca understood the importance of pure
drinking water. The surface drainage system generally directed
agricultural and urban storm water runoff away from the water supply
canal. Wright also notes that the Inca apparently did not use the
fountains for bathing. The emperor, for example, had a bathing room
with a separate drain, so that bathing water did not reenter the water
supply.
In 1998 Wright's team discovered another, previously unknown series of
fountains on the eastern side of the ridge, downhill from Machu
Picchu. These fountains received their water not from the canal but
from intercepted groundwater drainage. While elaborate spring works
were not necessary here, Wright says, the Inca would have had to
identify the dry-weather groundwater flow locations to concentrate the
flow for use in the fountains. Adjacent to some of the fountains, an
important trail, which Wright's team also discovered, connected Machu
Picchu to the Urubamba River in the valley below. After clearing away
the dense forest undergrowth, the team restored the water flow to this
second series of fountains for probably the first time in 450 years.

How successful were the Inca in planning their water supply? Observers
have advanced several theories to explain why the Inca abandoned Machu
Picchu; some suggested that a water shortage forced the Inca to leave.
Wright says his research puts that theory to rest.

A hydrological analysis showed that the yield of the primary spring
was related to rainfall. To determine rainfall levels during the time
the Inca occupied Machu Picchu-from 1450 to about 1540-Wright analyzed
ice core data from a glacier that lies 250 km to the southeast. The
analysis suggested that Machu Picchu received nearly 2,000 mm of
rainfall annually and that in the final decade of occupancy rainfall
actually increased.

Wright determined that a flow of 10 L/min to the fountains during the
dry months would have been enough to meet the needs of the
population-estimated to have varied from 300 to 1,000 when the emperor
was in residence. In the winter of a dry year, Wright says, the Inca
may have experienced a temporary water shortage. But his discovery of
the trail leading down to the Urubamba River seemed to confirm that
the Inca would have used the river as a secondary water source.
Therefore, Wright concluded, a water shortage does not explain the
abandonment of Machu Picchu.

Wright originally planned to spend three years studying Machu Picchu's
hydrology and water supply. In only one and a half years, he and his
team had completed that project. But the more he learned, the more
questions arose. Archaeologists had studied Machu Picchu for 90 years,
but Wright began to realize that one important area had been
overlooked: civil engineering.

The primary component of Machu Picchu's drainage system is the main
drain, which divides the agricultural and urban sectors of the city.

"No one has looked at the engineering. Nobody," Wright says. Yet all
around him, he saw canals, foundations, drainage systems-evidence that
the Inca planned their cities carefully and had learned from
experience how to build for the long term. He knew then that he had
found a new area of exploration.

A clear gap existed in the knowledge about Machu Picchu. Wright was
able to step in and fill the gap-first of all, because of persistence:
he had sought an excavation permit for 20 years before his application
was finally accepted. "Once we got the permit, everything just opened
up," says Wright. But his success was also due to his ability to forge
good working relationships with officials and archaeologists in Peru.
For the six years he has been working in Peru, Wright has collaborated
closely with Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, a Peruvian archaeologist who
has studied Machu Picchu for much of his professional life. They work
well together, says Valencia Zegarra, who speaks highly of Wright's
contribution.

Wright frequently expresses his appreciation for Valencia Zegarra's
work, crediting him with providing much-needed cultural and historical
context. "We are able to speak with certainty about these things
because of him," he says. The two recently collaborated on a book,
Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel, which summarizes Wright's
research. ASCE Press published the book in October.

"One of the reasons I have been successful at Machu Picchu is that I
haven't ventured into becoming an amateur archaeologist or
anthropologist," says Wright. "I tell people, 'Look, I'm here as an
engineer. I'm leaving the archaeology up to the archaeologists.' I
don't step into their field." In another culture, he says, stepping on
someone else's professional turf would be a serious mistake: "You'd be
destroyed."

For a water engineer, the next logical subject to investigate was
drainage. Machu Picchu contains numerous signs of drainage
engineering, yet the subject had gone almost entirely unnoticed in the
technical literature, says Wright. For example, previous architectural
analyses had not even mentioned drainage outlets, he says, even though
the Inca integrated about 130 of them into walls and other structures
throughout the city.

At Machu Picchu, drainage was a serious problem. The site rested on
top of a ridge with a roughly 50 percent slope and received almost
2,000 mm of rainfall. For their city to endure, the Inca had to find a
way to keep it from sliding down the mountain.

Perhaps the most visually striking features of the drainage system are
the agricultural terraces. Machu Picchu includes 4.9 ha of
agricultural terraces, which are held in place by stone retaining
walls. In addition to maximizing the land available for farming, the
terraces also protected the agricultural sector from erosion. Wright
conducted soil analyses that showed that the Inca constructed the
terraces with subsurface drainage in mind. They layered each terrace
for efficient drainage, with a layer of stones at the bottom, followed
by gravel, sandy material, and topsoil.

The terrace structures also promote good surface drainage, Wright
found. The slope of the terraces generally directs water toward a
system of drainage channels that are integrated with stairways and
other structures. These channels direct the drainage water to a large,
east-west main drain that runs through the center of Machu Picchu,
separating the agricultural and urban sectors. Gravity flow carries
runoff into the main drain from both sectors, taking it safely away
from the city.

Terrace wall offsets suggest the Inca may have experienced a landslide
during construction. Later they built a channel to carry surface
runoff to the main drain. Just below the channel, the water supply
canal crosses the terraces as it enters the city.

In one instance, the Inca apparently experienced a landslide while a
part of the terrace area was under construction. Wright notes that in
this area, close to the main drain, the terraces are offset by 1 to 2
m. Wright speculates that after the landslide, the Inca stabilized the
terraces and continued to build the walls but did not attempt to
correct the offset. The Inca engineers realized, however, the
importance of controlling surface runoff in this area. Just uphill
from the place where the water supply canal crosses the terraces, they
built a north-south interceptor drain. This 42 m long channel carries
runoff from the land above into the main drain.

In the urban sector, the Inca took equal care to address drainage.
Wright's excavations found that the Inca constructed their plazas in
the same way as their terraces, with a deep subsurface layer of rock
chips. The plazas received runoff from other areas of Machu Picchu,
and the subsurface layer of rocks helped the water to penetrate the
ground quickly.

To understand the problem of urban surface drainage at Machu Picchu,
it is important to remember that the city appeared much different in
the 15th century than it does today. The buildings in the urban sector
would have been covered with thick thatched roofs. Because of the
density of these buildings with impermeable roofs, Wright estimated
that about 60 percent of the water yield from the urban area would
have occurred as surface flow.

To deal with the runoff problem, the Inca incorporated about 130
drainage holes into the walls and other structures at Machu Picchu.
They also integrated numerous drainage channels into stairways,
walkways, and building interiors to carry runoff to the main drain.
One especially carefully constructed channel drains water away from
the entrance to the emperor's residence. To direct water away from
building foundations, the Inca carved channels that would collect the
water that dripped from the roofs.

Based on their measurements of the urban drainage outlets, Wright's
team calculated rough Inca drainage criteria. They determined that the
Inca placed one outlet for a tributary area of about 200 m2, and the
design flow per outlet was about 500 L/min. The typical outlet size
was 10 by
13 cm. The Inca departed from this scheme, however, when other means
were available to remove runoff. At the Temple of the Condor, for
instance, they built only one drainage outlet for an area of 0.045 ha,
apparently because they understood that a system of subterranean caves
beneath the temple was sufficient to handle the runoff.

Machu Picchu's well-designed drainage infrastructure is one of its
most remarkable secrets. It is also one of the keys to its longevity,
says Wright: "They built for permanency. They didn't do anything
halfway." Perhaps the greatest testimony to their success is that the
city still exists in such good condition.

Wright hopes his staff at Wright Water Engineers are learning from
that success. Much of the manpower for his research at Machu Picchu
comes from his own employees, who volunteer their time and expertise.
To Wright, it is a valuable opportunity for employee development.
"They learn a lot from the archaeologists," he says. "Discipline,
focus, documentation." Perhaps they also learn from the Inca-the value
of engineering for long-term sustainability and of exercising a high
standard of care.

Wright's company is the sole source of funding for the research. He
sees the pro bono research expeditions as a natural outgrowth of the
company mission. "The reason it works is that it's the same kind of
work we do for clients," he says. Every week, the staff used to have
public relations planning meetings. "We don't do that anymore," Wright
says. The company's paleohydrological work at Machu Picchu, he says,
generates so much interest from clients that it renders additional
public relations work unnecessary.

Like all good research, Wright's analysis of Machu Picchu continued to
raise more questions than it answered. He found himself returning
again and again, to study other aspects of Inca engineering, such as
agricultural planning and construction methods.

Ruth Wright, who has accompanied her husband on too many trips to
count, tells of some of the obstacles to studying a site so close to
the hearts of the Peruvian people. On one return trip to the United
States, the Wrights had to bring home some unusual luggage: 70 small
bags of soil for analysis. Upon seeing the material in the X-ray
machine, one Lima airport official was suspicious.

"What is that?"
"It's soil."
"From where?"
"Machu Picchu."

Imagine a foreign visitor in a US airport trying to take home 70
pieces of copper chipped from the Statue of Liberty, and you may begin
to have an idea of the official's reaction. Fortunately, the Wrights
had with them their letter of permission from the Instituto Nacional
de Cultura, in Cuzco, Peru.

The soil samples were part of an agricultural study that attempted to
answer several questions that have often been asked about Machu
Picchu: Were the crops irrigated or was rainfall sufficient to support
the agriculture? Did the terraces produce enough food for the
population?

Wright's analysis of the annual rainfall and crop requirements
determined that the rainfall was sufficient to supply the crops. This
finding corroborated his study of the water supply and drainage
infrastructure, which showed no evidence that the Inca irrigated their
crops. The water supply canal crosses the agricultural sector but
includes no turnouts to irrigate the terraces. In addition, Wright
found no evidence that surface runoff was used for irrigation; it was
simply directed into the drainage system.

The study did show, however, that the crops grown on the agricultural
terraces-probably mostly corn and potatoes-would not have been enough
to feed the resident population. Therefore, he concluded, the Inca
must have imported food to Machu Picchu.

Not limited to water and agriculture, Inca engineering also extended
to the buildings themselves. Even a casual observer may notice
numerous stones the Inca carved to serve special functions, such as
large lintel beams and stone rings over doorways. The Inca had no iron
or steel, so they shaped each stone with only bronze tools and hammer
stones. Wright has distinguished at least 18 types of stone wall
construction at Machu Picchu. Yet he estimates that about 60 percent
of the Inca construction effort was actually underground.

Machu Picchu lies on a ridge between two peaks in the Andes Mountains,
with access to the Urubamba River in the valley below.

The Inca had "at least a rudimentary knowledge of slope stability
technology," says Wright. In addition to planning a complex drainage
infrastructure, they took great care in site preparation and
foundation building. Wright's excavations showed that the Inca
typically prepared to build a wall foundation by placing small rocks
at the bottom, then placing larger and larger rocks as the foundation
reached the ground surface. But their building methods also reflect a
remarkable variety depending on site conditions and on the intended
function of the structure. In some places-perhaps most dramatically at
the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Condor-they incorporated
large in situ rock formations into their building foundations. In this
way they achieved a rare harmony between the buildings and the natural
environment. "They built with aesthetics in mind," observes Wright.

When the Inca left Machu Picchu, they abandoned some construction work
that was in progress. At one temple site, a large stone still sits at
an angle, apparently waiting to be finished and moved into position.
Wright was especially intrigued by an unfinished canal-a 40 m stretch
over which are scattered partially carved stones in various stages of
completion. The workers, he speculates, had planned a branch canal
that would perhaps have extended the main water supply canal to a new
series of fountains.

Wright is already planning his next trip-probably later this year-when
he will study more closely the unfinished construction at Machu
Picchu, as well as geotechnical aspects of the landslide that occurred
on the agricultural terraces. In the meantime, he has expanded his
paleohydrological research to other sites. Last fall he began a
hydraulic study at a second Inca site in Peru called Tipon, which
contains what he describes as a water garden-an intricate system of
channels and fountains. He and his staff have also completed two
projects, and are now working on a third, for the National Park
Service at Mesa Verde National Park, all dealing with Native American
structures that Wright has determined to be reservoirs.

As his ever-expanding interests draw him to new sites, this
paleohydrological pioneer is forced to admit that it may be time to
move on from Machu Picchu. Still, mysteries remain-especially with
regard to several areas adjacent to the site that have never been
excavated-and Wright will return. "We're finished, really, with our
work at Machu Picchu, with everything that we intended to do. It's
just hard to let go, because it's a magical place."

Copies of Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel may be ordered by
calling (800) 548-ASCE or by visiting (www.pubs.asce.org). The list
price is $49; the price for ASCE members is $36.75. Please inquire
about international prices. 
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