Name
Class
CHAPTER
12
Date
Critical Thinking Activity
South America
The Incas and Machu Picchu
The Aztecs were not the only advanced civilization in the Americas. Another,
that of the Inca, flourished in the Andes Mountains of South America. Their
religion was based on Sun worship. Their name—Inca—meant “children of the
Sun.” Read the information below and then answer the questions that follow.
By 1400 the Incas had built an empire that numbered about 15 million people. Their empire, larger than the Aztec empire, stretched over almost the
entire western coast of South America. It was a state in which everything
belonged to the Inca ruler, and everyone owed absolute obedience to him.
Most Incas believed that the ruler was a descendant of the Sun god, and did
not question his authority.
The Inca capital was Cuzco, known as the “City of the Sun.” The Incas
built fortresses and irrigation systems and laid paved roads from one end
of their realm to the other. Pack animals carried goods and swift runners
brought news to the Inca capital. Most Incas worked as farmers and herders.
The rulers of the empire maintained storehouses and moved food supplies to villages when crops failed. Thus they were able to prevent local
famines. The Inca made sure that every family had a place to live and
enough clothing to wear. In turn the people worked for the empire. No system of money was needed. Instead the gold and silver were used to craft
beautiful jewelry and statues and decorations for the temples.
The rulers sought to eliminate diversity in their empire. In order to
pacify and colonize newly conquered lands, they transferred entire villages.
They established a public school system that taught the Inca religion and
history. The result was that the Inca language—Quechua—is still spoken
today by millions of people in five South American countries.
The Incas did not have a system of writing. They did keep records by
means of the quipu—a kind of knotted string. Message runners would carry
information across an amazing network of roads built thousands of miles
through the mountains. Where rivers and canyons blocked the way, the
Incas built bridges made of vine ropes with wooden walkways.
An American explorer named Hiram Bingham went to Peru in 1911 to
look for the ruins of ancient Inca cities. He searched where no explorer had
gone before. Bingham was searching for Vilcabamba, which was the undiscovered last stronghold of the Inca empire. When he stumbled upon Machu
Picchu, he thought he had found it, although now most scholars believe that
Machu Picchu is not Vilcambamba.
Machu Picchu (which means “manly peak”) is a city located high in the
Andes Mountains in modern Peru near Cuzco, the Inca capital. The city was
most likely a royal estate and religious retreat. The city has an altitude of
8,000 feet, and is high above the Urubamba River canyon cloud forest, so it
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Holt World Geography Today
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Critical Thinking Activities
Name
Class
Date
Chapter 12, Critical Thinking Activity, continued
likely did not have any administrative, military, or commercial use.
Machu Picchu is comprised of approximately 200 buildings, most residences, although there are temples, storage structures, and other public
buildings. Most of the structures are built of granite blocks cut with bronze
or stone tools, and smoothed with sand. The blocks fit together perfectly
without mortar. The joints are so tight that even the thinnest of knife blades
can’t be forced between the stones
One of the most important things found at Machu Picchu is the intihuatana, which is a column of stone rising from a block of stone the size of a
grand piano. Intihuatana literally translates as “for tying the sun,” although
it is usually interpreted as “hitching post of the sun.” As the winter solstice
approached, when the sun seemed to disappear more each day, a priest
would hold a ceremony to tie the sun to the stone to prevent the sun from
disappearing altogether. The Spanish conquistadors destroyed the other intihuatanas, but because the Spanish never found Machu Picchu, it remained
intact.
1. Describe in detail three technological advances of the Inca.
2. Give three specific reasons why the Inca people might have been content living under
the rule of the Inca king.
3. What features at Machu Picchu indicate that the Incas might have used an astronomical calendar?
4. How did the Inca government seek to unify all the peoples in the empire?
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Holt World Geography Today
24
Critical Thinking Activities
cult, causing landslides due to excessive
rain as well as being a good environment
for the transmission of malaria and yellow
fever.
be the use of English and Spanish phrases;
the bi-words; the metaphors (comparisons) “token, fringes,” and “masking.”
Possible responses for Mexican’s Begin
Jogging: “wag”; “amazed crowds”; “soft
houses”’ “baseball, milkshakes…sociologists”; “great, silly grin”.
3. Possible responses are his boss orders him
to; he might get in trouble if he hangs
around; he accepts it as one of the difficulties of being “different” from the mainstream U.S. culture.
4. Possible response: that Mexican
Americans will seem less “strange” to
other Americans as time goes on; that
time is on his side; that any progress he
makes will be steady but not rapid.
5. Possible responses: Both poems deal with
being Hispanic and thus “different” in the
United States; both deal, more or less positively, with being of Mexican-American
heritage. “Mexicans Begin Jogging” hints
more at the real-world dangers of this situation; “Legal Alien” emphasizes the personal stress of being caught between two
worlds.
Activity 12
1. Answers will vary but may include: the
system for recording, the development of
roads, the architecture.
2. Answers will vary but may include: the
rulers took very good care of their people
(cite specific examples) and the people
believed their rulers were direct descendants of the Sun god.
3. The intihuatana appears to monitor the
solstices, indicative of an astronomical
calendar.
4. By teaching one language the peoples were
unified. By moving entire villages they
sought to integrate new groups. A school
system that taught one religion and only
taught Inca history would unite the people.
Activity 13
1. Five reasons may include: its strategic nav-
igational location between major industrial centers; its uses for fishing, tourism,
recreation; its domestic and agricultural
uses, including its role in generating electricity and acting as a public sewer/drain.
2. The volume of waste has greatly increased
and the type of waste has changed: it is
less biodegradable and more toxic.
3. Three causes are industrial, domestic, and
agricultural pollution. Industrial pollution
includes chemical wastes, such as heavy
metals. Domestic pollution includes phosphates from detergents and human
sewage. Agricultural pollution includes
chemicals from fertilizers. The effects on
the natural environment include being
unable to rid the river banks of deposited
silt, a regular procedure necessary for the
smooth navigation of commercial barges,
because of metal buildup; clogging of
pipelines and filters from phosphatecaused algae growth; increased saline production from pollutants, which affects the
gardening market.
Activity 11
1. Balboa, Cristobal, Fort Amador, and Colon
2. north, northwest
3. Traveling through the canal would save
4.
5.
6.
7.
time for commercial shippers. The canal
would also permit the strategic shuttling
of warships between the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans.
south, southeast
In 1977, two treaties relating to the
Panama Canal and the Canal Zone were
signed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and
General Omar Torrijos Herrara of
Panama. The treaties, which took effect in
1979, guaranteed the neutrality of the
canal after the year 2000, ended the Canal
Zone government, and turned over the
zone itself (except for areas needed to
operate and defend the canal) to Panama.
The Isthmus is a mountainous region so
bringing the canal to sea level was difficult
and required the building of locks.
The climate in Panama made it very diffi-
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Critical Thinking Activities