Ollantaytambo: House of the Dawn; an Underestimated Inca Monument (cont.)
By Brien Foerster

It is my hope that Ollantaytambo no longer needs to take a back seat to any great Peruvian monument, and that more research will be done about it in the future. If academia is not up to the task, then I and others are.

There are many other features at Ollantaytambo which are seemingly of great antiquity and are not well understood, and have not been well studied by academia as far as I know. One is the 400 foot tall stone profile of the face of Viracocha (Tunupa) across the valley of Ollantaytambo on the side of Pinkuylluna mountain.

Another is the Temple of the Sun high up on the western flank of the Inca built andene (agricultural terraces) in the main part of the Ollantaytambo complex. Conventional archaeology states that was unfinished, but seems to give no explanation as to why. I think a more logical answer is that a massive cataclysm caused it to fall apart, with multi ton stones having been flung hundreds of feet away.

Temple of the Sun (remains of) and great wall at Ollantaytambo. Photo by Brien Foerster

And the Temple of the Condor, at the other end of the andene; with large andesite cubes having been removed from it’s surface by unknown means, leaving neither tool or even sanding marks. Also, there are ruins here, consisting of stone blocks of varying sizes, with planed surfaces and square depressions eerily similar to those found at Puma Punku in Bolivia.

Temple of the Condor enigmatic feature (Ollantaytambo.) Photo by Brien Foerster

In my next article I would like to focus on the mysterious elongated skulls, not unique to Peru, and seemingly concentrated here. Examples can be seen in the small museum below the Coricancha in Cusco, and are labelled as being Inca, while others have been taken from digs at Tiwanaku; the proposed Inca homeland. Also, the largest and oddest have been found near Paracas, a small fishing town south of Lima on the Peruvian coast. I will attempt to show how all three locations may tie in historically.