7. What surprised you most about the engineering practices of the Incas? How do you think their culture and their interactions with other cultures affected their society and choices of creation of buildings/water ways/etc.

     What surprised me the most about Incan engineering was their ability to move massive stones for miles across hills and valleys. It took massive organization of manpower to move 70 ton stones such as we saw at Saksaywaman. That scale of organization is amazing to me for a time when long distance communication was much slower and more difficult. Also, they were able to accomplish this without a written language. Instead, the Incas used quipus, a series of knots, to track information. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to read quipus was lost and is still a mystery today.
     Another amazing aspect of Incan accomplishments was that they advanced so far without much outside influence. Due to the geography of the Andes Mountain Range and Amazon Rainforest, the civilizations of the Andes grew without help from outside civilizations. The Incan culture developed over time from its local predecessors, as we witnessed at a Wari aqueduct and at a museum. They slowly learned how to adapt to their environment over the years until the Incas mastered it.