Cusco from Sacsayhuamán's Inca Walls, Peru, 1960s

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Cusco from Sacsayhuamán's Inca Walls, Peru, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Cusco from Sacsayhuamán's Inca Walls, Peru, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-184497

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Someone hauled a camera up to Sacsayhuamán specifically to get this view, and the view cooperated: Cusco laid out below in a grid the Spanish imposed on top of a city the Inca had already planned better. The polygonal stones in the foreground were cut and fitted centuries before anyone in Europe owned a tape measure, and they have outlasted every empire that has tried to stand on top of them since.

On the far hillside someone has spelled out a slogan in whitewashed stone, the mid-century civic habit of writing patriotism onto a mountain because a plaque seemed insufficiently large. It reads as loyalty to the nation from a vantage point that predates the nation by four hundred years. The tourist with the camera did not seem to find this contradiction as funny as it now is.

By the 1960s Sacsayhuamán had become the obligatory overlook for anyone visiting Cusco, the walk up rewarded with exactly this composition: ancient stone in front, colonial roof tiles behind, and mountains that have been indifferent to both for considerably longer than either has existed.

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