The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Inca, under Pachacuti · an Inca royal estate on a mountain ridge, scored with its setting as one work: a settlement of some 200 buildings, as commonly counted, on a saddle between two peaks, Machu Picchu mountain to the south and Huayna Picchu to the north, above a loop of the Urubamba · an agricultural sector of terraces with their storehouses, the Guardhouse and the Funerary Rock at their head; a dry moat and wall with the main gate; an urban sector in an upper and a lower half about a long plaza, with the Temple of the Sun over its cave, the Royal Residence, the Sacred Plaza with the Principal Temple and the Temple of the Three Windows, the quarry, the Intihuatana on its built hill, the Temple of the Condor, the Sacred Rock and the compounds of dwellings; a spring, a canal and sixteen fountains beside the main stair, with drains under terraces, plaza and houses; the approach along the ridge from the Intipunku and the cliff path with the Inca Bridge · granite of the ridge, quarried on site and set dry in three grades, from fitted ashlar to rubble in clay; walls battered inward, openings trapezoidal; gabled roofs of timber and thatch, all lost · Cusco Region, Peru, where the Andes fall toward the cloud forest · about 1450, in the reign of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the ninth Inca, about 1438–1471; emptied in the sixteenth century · makers unnamed; built for Pachacuti, by the royal-estate reading, and held after him by his lineage · as it stands, roofless, cleared from 1912, its walls re-laid in part from 1934, its water running again; reached by Hiram Bingham on 24 July 1911; a World Heritage site since 1983
Mode
Royal estate as a settlement continuous with its ridge; a king’s country palace with its shrines, retainers’ quarters, storehouses and fields, scored with its setting as one work
Mythos
Cave, sun, mountain and spring made structural: the tower over the cave with its solstice window, the built hill with a stone at its summit, the water descending as a chain of basins, the dual plan set between an old peak and a young one
Phase
Built about 1450 under Pachacuti, the ninth Inca, and held by his lineage; emptied in the sixteenth century, by 1572 at the latest; reached by Bingham on 24 July 1911; cleared in 1912 and 1914–15; rebuilt in part from 1934; a World Heritage site since 1983
Presentation
Granite of the ridge set dry in three grades; terraces built as filters of soil, sand and chips; a spring, a canal and sixteen fountains; walls battered, openings trapezoidal, gables once thatched; some 200 buildings on a saddle above a loop of the Urubamba
Register
From a rubble terrace wall to the fitted curve of the Temple of the Sun, one granite and one trapezoid; grandeur and terror at once, the ridge composed, cloud filling the valley and clearing
Scale
One ridge and its two peaks; a king’s household of a few hundred, in season; five ceremonial foci and one spring
Governing Proposition
A king of Cusco set a country palace on a narrow saddle of ridge between two peaks, far above a river that loops round it on three sides, in a country of rain and slides, with one spring. The wager of the estate is that a settlement can be made as a continuation of its ground: the outcrops finished into temples rather than cleared, the terraces holding the slope before they feed anyone, the water led first past the Inca’s door and down sixteen basins to the last compound, so that field, house and shrine are one section of the mountain, and rank is lived daily as the order of the fountains.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The road from Cusco comes along the ridge from the south-east and crests it at the Intipunku, the Sun Gate, and from there the settlement first appears below, with the river’s loop far down on either hand. The site is in the Cusco Region of Peru, where the Andes fall toward the cloud forest, on a saddle between two peaks, Machu Picchu mountain to the south and Huayna Picchu to the north, the old peak and the young, with the Urubamba looping round the ridge on three sides. The road descends, the terraces rising on the left, to the Guardhouse at the head of the agricultural sector, a three-sided house beside a carved boulder, and from its platform the whole site composes in one picture with Huayna Picchu behind it. The makers built the platform the picture is taken from. Below it the main gate, a double-jambed trapezoid with the ring-stone and bar-holds of a door long gone, frames the peak as one passes through.
The traditional date is about 1450, in the reign of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the ninth Inca, whose reign is placed at about 1438 to 1471. The dating rests on the reading of the site as his estate: a document of 1568 lists lands called Picchu among the holdings of Pachacuti’s descendants, and the site is read as his private estate, held after his death by his panaca, the lineage that kept a dead Inca’s household and cult. It has also been read as a sacred centre and a seat of administration; radiocarbon dates published in 2021 would set the first occupation a generation before the chronicle date. Bingham’s own readings, that it was the last Inca refuge, the dynasty’s place of origin or a convent of the Virgins of the Sun, are not followed here. No Spanish visit is recorded. It was emptied in the sixteenth century, by 1572 at the latest, when the Inca state ended at Vilcabamba.
No architect or master mason is named in any record, and the name itself is contested: it may have belonged to the southern mountain rather than to the settlement. The work is the built site on its ridge with its setting: the terraces with their storehouses; the dry moat and wall that part field from house; the urban sector in its two halves about the plaza; the spring, the canal, the sixteen fountains and the drains; and the ridge as the makers used it, the Sun Gate, the cliff path with the Inca Bridge, the two peaks and the river loop. Every building was roofed in timber and thatch on gabled stone walls, and every roof is gone; what stands is walls, gables, terraces, stairs, channels and carved rock, with the stone pegs and eye-stones for tying the thatch still on the gables. A few roofs have been rebuilt on conjecture, the Guardhouse’s among them, and are not credited.
Movement II
The ridge has no water but one spring, on the north slope of Machu Picchu mountain. A canal carries it to the settlement on a gradient fine enough to run and not scour, and delivers it first to the Royal Residence and the Temple of the Sun, at the head of the main stair; from there sixteen basins step down the slope between the two halves, each cut so that it falls into the next, to the last compound of the lower half. The Royal Residence, a compound of fine masonry with its own terrace garden, stands where the water arrives. Remove the canal and there is no settlement. Keep it, and the order of the fountains is the order of the household, lived every day by whoever carried a jar: the Inca’s door first, the lower half last. The spring, canal and fountains were cleared in the 1990s, and the water runs again.
The terraces fall in flights down the southern and eastern slopes, with storehouses on them. Each is a stone face holding a fill of topsoil over sand and gravel over stone chips, so that the terrace is a filter: rain passes down through the layers and out through the face instead of building behind it. Outlets pierce the walls of terraces and buildings, the plaza is a long levelled green on a fill that drains, and channels run under the houses. Much of the making is below ground, and it has held a wet slope for five centuries. The terraces hold the ridge before they feed anyone; on the usual estimates they could not have fed the people who lived here, so part of their extent is display, and that excess is charged. Above them the dry moat and the wall part the fields from the town, with the main gate at the wall’s west end.
What the site compels, it states. The terraces say that in this polity to rule the land was to work it into order: a state that cut a mountainside into fields. The water says that a king’s house could be a claim on a landscape, and that rank could be built as a gradient. The law of the whole can be put in a sentence: nothing on the ridge is imposed on it. Water and stone are both led and not forced; every wall follows a contour or an outcrop; the grades of masonry are one scale from field to shrine, as the fountains are from the Inca’s door to the last basin. Take the most distant pair, a rubble terrace wall at the foot of the fields and the fitted curve of the Temple of the Sun round its boulder: both are the ridge’s own granite, battered inward, set dry, fitted to the rock beneath, with the same trapezoid wherever there is an opening.
Movement III
The Temple of the Sun, the Torreón, is a curved tower of fitted ashlar built on and around a granite boulder, with two windows. By the measurements made in the 1980s, the sunrise of the June solstice enters its north-east window and falls along a cut edge of the boulder inside, so that the turning of the sun is an event inside a room, the light meeting the rock. Beneath the tower the boulder shelters a cave, worked into stepped niches, which Bingham called the Royal Tomb. Cave below and sun above, in one stone: the tower is the clearest case of what the whole site does with its outcrops, which are not cleared to make room for building but finished into it, so that there is no seam between the cut and the natural.
North of it lies the Sacred Plaza. The Principal Temple is three-sided, of fitted ashlar, with an altar across its back wall; its north-east corner has subsided, a course splayed and dropped where the footing settled, a failure read here as the makers’ own. The Temple of the Three Windows opens east over the plaza through three trapezoidal windows in a wall of great polygonal blocks; Bingham tied the windows to the origin myth, the stone does not confirm it, and the tie is not credited. Beside the temples lies the quarry, boulders split and half-split, the work stopped where it stood. From the plaza stairs climb a terraced hill, built by the makers, to the Intihuatana, a granite outcrop carved to planes and a short upright against the sky: a mountain repeated, with a stone at its summit. The name was given by Bingham; the stone is said to cast no shadow at noon on the equinoxes, which is not held here as measured.
The central plaza runs the length of the urban sector between the upper half and the lower, and at its north end stands the Sacred Rock, a tall slab set on a plinth with three-sided shelters before it, its profile commonly read as the shape of the mountain behind it, though the intent is unproven; the path to Huayna Picchu begins there. In the lower half, the Temple of the Condor is two natural rock faces rising like spread wings over a floor-stone carved as a head and ruff, with niches and a cave below. Five ceremonial foci, then, where one plaza would serve: the Torreón, the Sacred Plaza, the Intihuatana, the Sacred Rock and the Condor, each an archetype made structural, cave, sun, mountain, spring and bird, and each particular, this boulder, this spring, this view of these peaks. The cosmogram is inferred from Andean religion and from Cusco, since the building labels nothing; what is credited is what is built.
Movement IV
The stone is the granite of the ridge, quarried where it lay and set dry, in three grades. Fitted ashlar, each block dressed to its neighbours so closely that the joints read as lines, in the Temple of the Sun, the Principal Temple and the Royal Residence. Large polygonal blocks in the Temple of the Three Windows and in the retaining walls. Rubble, pirca, set in clay for the ordinary buildings. Every wall is battered inward and every opening, door, window or niche, is a trapezoid, the principal doors double-jambed; the batter and the interlocking of the courses are the making’s answer to earthquake. The costs are the makers’: spans are short, there is no vault, the roofs were thatch on poles, and the houses are rough. The structural system is modest. The civil engineering and the fitting of stone are the summit of their tradition.
The urban sector is cut in two by its plaza into an upper half and a lower. In the upper half stand the temples and the Royal Residence; in the lower, the compounds of dwellings, gabled rubble houses round courts, in rows that step with the contours, and among them the Mortars group, two shallow basins cut in a floor, their use unknown. A few hundred people lived here in season. Rank is built three times over: in the grades of the masonry, in the order of the fountains and in the two halves crossed on foot. The dead are held in the cave under the tower and in the burials in the cliffs round the site; the sun in the solstice window; labour in the quarry; the state in the estate itself. Absent are history as narrative, since there is no text and no relief, the family beyond lineage, commerce and any single consciousness: more than a villa holds, less than a capital.
The inheritance was mature. Andean terracing was millennia old; the fitted masonry was Cusco’s, with Tiwanaku behind it; the compound round a court and the trapezoid were the Inca’s; and the royal estate was a type Pachacuti had already built at Pisac and Ollantaytambo. The departure is the site. No estate had been set so far down toward the forest, on so narrow and steep a ridge, in a country of rain and slides, with a whole town grown from the bedrock. The stake was real, a court carried to a place with one spring and the risk that the slope would not hold, and it held. But the type was the patron’s own proven path, the forms are Cusco’s, and the wager was paid in labour, not in risk to the form. It is the most complete and the most extreme of the Inca estates, and whether any later building answered it cannot be shown: the conquest ended the tradition within a century.
Movement V
The Spaniards took Cusco in 1533 and ended the Inca state at Vilcabamba in 1572, and between the first date and the second the estate was emptied; whether at the conquest, with the epidemics, or at the end is not known. No Spaniard is recorded there. For some three centuries it stood unfound under forest, which spared it what Cusco’s temples suffered. On 24 July 1911 Hiram Bingham of Yale was led up to it by a local man and found peasant families farming some of the terraces and the forest over everything. The Yale Peruvian Expedition cleared the site in 1912 and in 1914–15, partly by burning, excavated it and took its finds to Yale; the clearing made the site visible, and Bingham’s Lost City of the Incas of 1948 fixed its image. Yale began returning the finds to Peru in 2011, after a long dispute.
Peruvian campaigns cleared and rebuilt from 1934 and through the 1960s and 1970s. Collapsed walls were re-laid, some conjecturally, and how much is rebuilt is not known; a few roofs were rebuilt in thatch on conjecture. The site was inscribed as World Heritage in 1983. In September 2000 a crane used for an advertisement fell on the Intihuatana and broke a piece from its edge. Visitors number more than a million a year; the floods and landslides of January 2010 cut the railway below and stranded visitors in the valley. None of this is credited or charged to the makers. It is weighed as survival, and the account is plain: the form is whole, as legible as when built, with nothing modern on the ridge; the use is lost, some 450 years without its purpose, entered since 1912 only as a monument; the fabric is largely original in stone and wholly gone in roof. The water runs again. The fields do not.
Its reach came late and came as an image. Since 1911 it has become the emblem of Peru and of pre-Columbian America; within its own tradition no answer can be shown, because the tradition ended. Neruda wrote Alturas de Macchu Picchu in 1945, asking of the stone “Piedra en la piedra, el hombre, dónde estuvo?”
“Stone upon stone, and man, where was he?” (X), and opening its last canto “Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano”
“Rise up to be born with me, brother” (XII): the site read as the grave and the rising of the labourers who built it. Every reading brought to the ridge has exhausted nothing in it, and the questions stay open: why here, why abandoned, what the Intihuatana did, what the place was called. The site answers with what it has always had: a town that grows from its rock, five centuries of rain passed through its terraces, and one spring still running down sixteen basins from the king’s door.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on plan, section and structure, under purpose and site, and the site compels almost everything. Remove the terraces and the slope goes down the mountain with the first rains; they hold the ridge before they feed anyone. Remove the drains and the terraces fail. Remove the canal and there is no settlement, since the ridge has no water but its spring. The plaza had to be levelled on fill, the moat and wall had to part field from house, and each temple stands where its outcrop is. What resists is the estate’s own excess: some 200 buildings for a few hundred retainers, five ceremonial foci where one plaza would serve, and terraces that, on the usual estimates, could not have fed the estate, so that part of their extent is display. Scale here is compelled by the slope and permitted by the Inca.
Score: 8.7 / 10
What can be stated as true: in this polity, to rule the land was to work it into order, and worship was the finishing of the land itself. The terraces say the first, a state that cut a mountainside into fields. The shaped outcrops say the second: the sacred thing is the rock, the spring, the cave and the peak, and building completes them rather than replaces them. A third holds: a king’s house could be a claim on a landscape, and water, led first past his door, ordered rank. What keeps the axis below the gate is that the site carries no text. Its purpose must be supplied from a document of 1568 and from Cusco; the dead king’s household, which the estate existed to keep, is nowhere legible in the stone; and much of what the visitor takes away is the lost city in cloud, the twentieth century’s mood and not the makers’.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation here is grandeur and terror at once, and it recurs: the first sight from the Intipunku, the whole ridge laid out below, the peak beyond and the river’s loop far down on either hand; the view from the Guardhouse, the site composed in one picture with Huayna Picchu behind it; the main gate, which frames the peak in a trapezoid as one passes through; the Torreón’s curve of ashlar growing out of its boulder, and the cave under it; the carved stone against sky at the top of the Intihuatana’s stairs; the terraces falling away over the cliff, and cloud filling the valley and clearing. Held below the top because part of the height is the mountain’s, which the makers chose and did not make, and because the buildings are small, roofless and low. The sublime is the site composed, not any room entered.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The archetypes are built into plan and structure, not applied. The settlement is set between an old peak and a young one, on a ridge the river encircles, and cut in two by its plaza into upper and lower halves, the Andean dual order built as plan. Its sacred places are the archetypes themselves, each made structural: the cave beneath the Torreón, with the sun admitted by a window to the rock above it at the June solstice; the mountain repeated in the Intihuatana’s built hill with a stone at its summit; the spring led into sixteen basins, so that water descends the settlement as liturgy; the condor’s wings in living rock. The particular stays particular: this spring, this boulder, these peaks. Held below the top because the cosmogram is inferred from Andean religion and from Cusco, not stated by the building, and the Three Windows’ tie to the origin myth is Bingham’s and is not credited.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is a mature tradition: Andean terracing, millennia old; the fitted masonry of Cusco, with Tiwanaku behind it; the Inca compound and the trapezoid; and the royal estate, which Pachacuti had already built at Pisac and Ollantaytambo. The departure is the site. No estate had been set so far down toward the forest, on so narrow and steep a ridge, in a country of rain and slides, with a whole town made to grow from the bedrock as if the ridge had put it out; the outcrops are finished into temples, not cleared. The stake was real, a court carried to a place with one spring and the risk that the slope would not hold, and it held. Kept below the gate because the type was the patron’s own proven path, the forms are Cusco’s, and the wager was paid in labour by a state that commanded labour, not in risk to the form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Substitute a valley-floor estate with the same rooms and almost nothing the site knows survives. The approach along the ridge makes arrival a descent onto the settlement seen whole. The terraces make the estate’s farming a stair of fields and the slope a thing walked. The water passes the Inca’s door first and the lower half last, so that rank is lived daily as the order of the fountains. The Torreón makes the solstice an event inside a room, the light meeting the rock. The two halves and the plaza between them make the social order a thing crossed on foot, and the dwellings step with the contours, so that to live there was to live on the ridge’s own section. Held below the top by the roofs, which are gone, so that no interior can be lived or judged, and by the uncertainty of purpose, which leaves some of the form’s intent unreadable.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise. The record of return is 115 years, and in that time the site has yielded to every reading brought to it and exhausted none: to archaeology, in Bingham’s reports, Rowe’s document of 1568, Burger and Salazar’s estate reading, the radiocarbon of 2021 and the study of the dead; to engineering, in Wright’s study of the spring, canal, fountains and terrace fills, which made the site a work of civil engineering; to astronomy and sacred geography, in the solstice window and the alignments proposed to the snow peaks; and to the poets and the nation, in Neruda, who read it as the grave and the rising of the labourers who built it. The questions stay open: why here, why abandoned, what the Intihuatana did, what the name was. Held below the older works because the record is short, there is no literature before 1911, and many of the questions are of function, not meaning.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Built some 576 years ago and known for 115, so force and reach are scored together; the field is Inca and Andean building. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a settlement could be: a town planned as a continuation of its topography, the rock finished rather than removed, the water the plan’s spine; within the Inca estate it is the most complete instance and the most extreme. Held below the gate because within its own field the redirection cannot be shown: the site was late in a tradition the conquest ended within a century, and no building the record holds answered it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since 1911 it has become the emblem of Peru and of pre-Columbian America, a reference for every architect who sets building to land, and the subject of Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu of 1945; that reach is delayed, credited and discounted, and is to an image more than to a copied form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, with no discount for age. The form is whole: sectors, halves, terraces, the stair of fountains, the temples on their outcrops and the setting of peaks and river are as legible as when built, and the ridge carries nothing modern. It has outlived the Inca state, its religion and its conquerors, and three centuries unfound spared it what Cusco’s temples suffered. The use is lost: it has not served its purpose for some 450 years, and since 1912 it has been entered only as a monument, now by more than a million a year; the water runs again, the fields do not. The fabric: stone largely original, roofs wholly gone, walls re-laid since 1934, some conjecturally, the Intihuatana chipped in 2000, the slope and the visitors pressing. A form that survives whole is not charged for ruin as a text is for a missing part; the loss of use holds the axis here.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included; the command of site is of the first rank and load-bearing. The engineering: a spring led by canal on a gradient fine enough to run and not scour; sixteen fountains cut so that each falls into the next; terraces built as filters of soil over sand over chips that have held a wet slope for five centuries; drains under plaza and house, much of the making below ground. The masonry: the Torreón’s curve and the Principal Temple’s courses, granite fitted dry so closely that the joints read as lines, battered and interlocked against earthquake. The rock-cutting: outcrops shaped into stairs, altars, niches and the Intihuatana without a seam between the cut and the natural. The costs are the makers’: the Principal Temple’s corner settled on a bad footing, the houses are rough rubble in clay, spans are short, there is no vault, and the roofs were thatch on poles.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a rubble terrace wall at the foot of the agricultural sector, and the Torreón’s fitted curve round its boulder. They obey one law. Both are the ridge’s own granite, battered inward, set dry, fitted to the rock they stand on, with the same trapezoid wherever there is an opening. Or take the spring’s canal and the Intihuatana: water and stone are both led, not forced. The law can be stated: nothing on the ridge is imposed on it; every wall follows a contour or an outcrop, the grades of masonry are one scale from field to shrine, and the fountains are one scale from the Inca’s door to the last basin. The range is wide, from farming to the solstice, from the retainers’ compounds to the royal house, and it holds. What resists is small: the plurality of shrines, which do not resolve into one axis.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held are seven: the natural order, mountain, river, cloud, spring and sun, held in the fabric and not only in the view; labour, in the terraces and the quarry, where split boulders still lie; the state and the king, the estate as a claim on a landscape; rank, in three grades of masonry, the order of the fountains and the two halves; the sacred, in the shaped rocks and the solstice; the dead, in the cave under the Torreón and the burials in the cliffs round the site; and agriculture and the calendar, the fields and the sun’s turning. One slope places each in its height. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: history as narrative, since there is no text and no relief; the family as anything but lineage; commerce; and any single consciousness. A royal estate holds more than a villa and less than a capital.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 9.2, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 9.0. The site composed, from the Sun Gate to the carved stone against sky; a form in which arrival, farming, rank and the solstice are lived on the ridge’s own section; one law, nothing imposed, from a terrace wall to the Torreón’s curve; cave, mountain, spring and sun made structural; and a civil engineering that has held a wet slope for five centuries.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: seven orders placed on one slope, with no history as narrative, no family beyond lineage, no commerce and no single consciousness, which is the measure of a royal estate. Just above it, The Unconcealment, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 each: a site that carries no statement of its own, whose purpose must be supplied from a document and from Cusco; a type the patron had already built, set on a new ridge, with the stake paid in labour; and a tradition cut off by the conquest before any building answered it. The three are one fact seen three ways, and each falls a tenth short of its gate.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall short, each by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every other condition holds; the three gates and an aggregate of 8.8 keep the work below the summit.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the site as it stands in 2026 (its documented plan, fabric, water system and setting) and of its history since 1911 and its reception. No plan, image or written source on the site was consulted. The site carries no inscription and no documented words of its makers, and nothing of Bingham’s prose or of the document of 1568 is quoted. The only quotations are two lines of Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945; in Canto general, 1950), in his Spanish, with a plain rendering by the desk beneath each; they are evidence of reception and are neither credited nor charged to the work. The work scored is the built site on its ridge with its setting as one: the agricultural sector with its terraces, storehouses, Guardhouse and Funerary Rock; the dry moat, wall and main gate; the urban sector in its upper and lower halves about the plaza, with the Temple of the Sun and its cave, the Royal Residence, the Sacred Plaza, the quarry, the Intihuatana, the compounds, the Mortars group, the Temple of the Condor and the Sacred Rock; the spring, canal, sixteen fountains and drains; and the ridge as the makers used it, with the Intipunku, the cliff path and the Inca Bridge, the two peaks and the river loop. The works on Huayna Picchu and on the summit of Machu Picchu mountain, the Inca Trail and its stations, the wider Historic Sanctuary, the other royal estates of the valley and Cusco, and the railway, town and road below are context only. The lost roofs, the forest, Bingham’s clearing and excavations, every rebuilding and restoration since 1934, the rebuilt thatch, the damage of 2000 and the pressure of visitors and rain are weighed only as facts of survival, of form, use and fabric together, and none is charged to the makers; what restoration added is not credited to them. The subsided corner of the Principal Temple is read as the makers’ own and charged to the making. The use scored is the one the record gives the makers, a royal estate occupied in season by a king’s household and its retainers; its use since 1912 as a monument is weighed only as survival. The name of the settlement, the date and cause of its abandonment, the amount of rebuilt wall, the equinox shadow of the Intihuatana, the reading of the Sacred Rock’s profile, the use of the Mortars’ basins and Bingham’s readings of the Three Windows and of the site’s purpose are contested or unproven and are stated as such or not used. Figures that could not be verified, among them the altitude, the height of the site above the river and of the peaks above the site, the distance from Cusco, the length and gradient of the canal, the extent of the built site and of the terraces, the counts of terraces, stairs, steps, drain outlets and burials, the room sizes, the yearly rainfall, the population of the estate beyond a few hundred and the yearly count of visitors beyond a round million, are not given; the number of buildings is given as the record commonly counts it.