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Machu Picchu Is Mini Re-creation of a Mythic Landscape?

Peru's Machu Picchu was an Inca pilgrimage site and a scaled-down version of a mythic landscape, according to a controversial new study.

The finding challenges the conventional view that Machu Picchu was a royal estate of the Inca ruler Pachacuti, who built it around A.D. 1460.

"I believe that much of the sacred space of the Incas has still to be recognized as such," said study author Giulio Magli, an astrophysicist at the Polytechnic Institute in Milan, Italy.
Read entire article at National Geographic