Engineering

In addition to the agricultural systems, which reflect engineering skills as well as agricultural ones, other aspects of Inca engineering remain in modern Andean culture. Many examples of Inca buildings still exist and are still used, despite over 400 years of earthquakes and other seismic disturbances. The foundations of the Church of Santo Domingo in Cuzco consist of the original Coricancha, the interior design of which was exposed in this century by

Inca stone foundation for a modem building in Cuzco.

An earthquake. Many other major buildings in Cuzco also have Inca foundations.

Inca bridges remained in use for centuries over some of the major rivers in the central Andes. One was still in use and drawn by the American traveler George Squier when he passed through Peru in the 1870s (Squier 1877). Although it is doubtful that any bridge was the original one dating to Inca times, many continued to be rebuilt and maintained by local villages in the same manner as they were under Inca rule.

Even though it may seem that all vestiges of the original Inca settlement patterns were eradicated by the reduction, there still exist villages dispersed among the fields that are suggested as being Inca or pre-Inca (Mishkin 1946: 439). This is perfectly reasonable, given that the reduction policy focused on the areas of greatest importance to the Spaniards. The basic house of a rural family in the Cuzco area today is also very similar to the original Inca ones, being rectangular with a single room and a gabled roof (Allen 1988: 68). As in Inca and pre-Inca times, families live

Close together, and it is not uncommon for newlyweds to live in the home of one of their parents for a while.