Ben van Kerkwyk

So the son would inherit and he'd make his own panaca, his own people.

He'd also have his own palace.

You couldn't live, like the son couldn't live in the house of the father.

So they would build another spot in Cusco, in this city.

Cusco is a crazy city.

It's like megalithic, Inca, colonial Spanish, modern, all piled up on each other.

It's an amazing city.

But if you actually look at where these, uh, these courts were like starting with Manco Capac, the first sort of high Inca around 1200 AD, you have the first seven or eight of these high Inca when they would build their structures and their palaces, they would rebuild like a megalithic courtyard.

It'd be these big massive stones or they'd inhabit and they'd repair it.

They'd have these huge, big megalithic courtyards.

But as soon as they, as soon as they switched from, I think the eighth to the ninth or the seventh to the eighth, it's all small cobblestones.

It's just all of their courtyards, like their palaces, were made from small local stones stuck together with mud mortar.

It's like, well, hang on.

If you say that the Inca built all of this stone, then all of a sudden you're saying, well, between one generation and the next, you lost all of this capability to do the fancy stuff, the big stuff.

which doesn't make any sense.

It's much more likely what they did was they found an abandoned, ruined megalithic city, they rebuilt it, and they ran out of megalithic courtyards to renovate for their next king.

That's what happened.

So the first bunch of these high-inkers have these megalithic courtyards, and then the next, right up to the end, they're made from small local cobblestones.

It's like...

Were they just not special enough for the big special stonework?