Lima, PERU, March 18 (SPECIAL FROM TIEMPO DEL MUNDO) -- The legend of a lost city belonging to the millennial Incan culture became reality with the discovery of an impressive Inca site with more than 100 structures in ruins in the mountains southeast of Peru in the Vilcabamba region, according to information from an expedition conducted under the auspices of the National Geographic Society.
The village was found on the craggy side of an Andean peak. It has circular dwellings, ceremonial platforms, funeral towers, roads, water canals, terraces, a dam and a truncated pyramid.
The village, which had a population of a thousand inhabitants, is located in a region that was the final bastion of the Incan resistance to Spanish conquest before the indigenous population was finally beaten in 1572.
The town extends more than 6 square kilometers and is approximately 11,000 feet (3,300 meters) high in rugged -- but startlingly beautiful, natural -- terrain. A dense cloud forest obscures part of the town, the result of more than 32 million hectares of cloud forests that exist in Cusco.
The team that directed the excavations reported finding Incan pottery vessels belonging to two distinct periods, human remains and a variety of stone tools that were found on the peak of Mount Victoria.
The expeditionary team was comprised of nine members -- American, English and Peruvian explorers -- and was directed by Peter Frost, a specialist in the Incan civilization, the Peruvian archeologist Alfredo Valencia Zegarra and the American explorer Scott Gorsuch.
Frost reported that the village appeared to have been sacked but no scientific investigation has yet been conducted.
"The site turned out to be far more extensive than we expected," he said.
The town is surrounded by peaks 18,000 feet (5,400 meters) high, and the terrain is rugged.
"I think that they chose this spot for two reasons," said Frost. "I believe that it was a combination of silver mines they could work nearby and the site's ceremonial significance. It's the only place in the area that has a superb view of all the nearby snow peaks. They were probably holding religious ceremonies in worship of these peaks and celestial and solar observations on these platforms to keep the Inca calendar."
Some of the dead of the community had been interred on the land in small cylindrical stone structures. The expedition found a number of these towers that may have been used for select members of the community or for people of another ethnic group who shared the village. The funerary towers had been sacked by gold seekers and were vacant, but the skeletons were found in subterranean tombs in the village.
Besides human remains, explorers found ceramic vessels of the early "formative Inca" period that had particular importance, said Frost. The pottery indicates that the Incans were able to inhabit the zone much earlier than was previously thought.
"This is one of the most important sites to be located in the Vilcabamba region since the Inca abandoned it over 400 years ago," said the archeologist Johan Reinhard, an explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society. "It promises to provide new insights into the Inca occupation of this remote area."
The expedition, which was in place in June 2001, shows the hardiness of the team. The village is a four-day trip on foot from the closest road, and the team had to cross the Apurimac canyon 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) deep and a series of mountain peaks in the Andes to arrive. Water was transported during the two-hour mule climb. Two indigenous families were found living in the village, in a place called Corihuayrachina.
The ruins had been sighted in 1999 by Frost and Gorsuch while they were climbing in the remote region.
"We spotted what appeared to be a sacred platform on one of the peaks -- it caught the first rays in the morning and the last ones at night," said Gorsuch, from Santa Barbara, Calif. The group worked two years to overcome the logistics needed to arrive at the village.
The region of Vilcabamba in Cusco is one of the places least understood and most important in the history of the Incan civilization, which is considered the final great empire in America. Five hundred years ago the Incas established an imperial state in the Andes for the middle of its complex religious, social and military administrative system. Although they did not have the use of the wheel or a system of writing, they constructed thousands of kilometers of roads, promoted agriculture, and eliminated hunger with a food storage system.
Later, when the Spanish arrived, they sacked the region in search of gold and descended on the Incas with bloody battles. When the Incan monarch, Manco Inca, led a rebellion in 1536 that almost vanquished the Spanish, it was the region of Vilcabamba to which he and his followers fled. There they resisted invaders for 36 years, maintaining traditional customs until 1572.
The town is the largest and most important Incan village to be discovered since the explorer Gene Savoy explored "the old Vilcabamba," another village in the region, in 1964. He found it 22 miles (35 kilometers) to the southeast of Machu Picchu, the most well-known Incan city, which was discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911. Frost, a 56-year-old English writer, photographer and authority on the Incan culture, said that this is the first significant Incan discovery that he made in 30 years of work and exploration.
According to Frost, "This site may ultimately yield a record of Inca civilization from the very beginning to the very end, undisturbed by European contact -- an unparalleled opportunity."
(Distributed by United Press International.)
(Accompanying pictures are available via www.upi.com/photos. Please look for photo numbers: WAX2002031803; WAX2002031804; WAX2002031805; and WAX2002031806.)
