(ORDO NEWS) — The Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, which is located in southern Peru, was actually built much earlier than experts believed.
This conclusion was made by experts after they conducted a special radiocarbon study of the remains that were found directly in the citadel. Antiquity reports.
Previously, scientists believed that the city was built around 1440-1550. The latest research proved that they were wrong by about twenty years. This city, most likely, was built for the emperor Pachacuti, who was able to increase his territory several times by the constant seizure of lands nearby.
The city of Machu Picchu is located at an altitude of 2430 meters in the Andes. It was abandoned back in the 1530s after the Spanish visited it.
After some time, they began to talk about him as about the lost city of the Incas. It is for this that he became famous all over the world.
During the study, experts used the remains that belong to 26 residents of the city. They were collected in three cemeteries previously discovered by archaeologists.
They determined the level of the radioactive isotope carbon-14, the complete decay of which takes a certain time. It is worth noting that it stops accumulating after a living creature dies.
The level of a substance is able to show how old a particular sample of organic origin is.
Research has shown that humans lived in Machu Picchu in the 1420s. Based on this, we can say that Emperor Pachacuti began to expand his territories much earlier than historians previously assumed.
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