Encyclopedia of the Incas

According to the chronicler Juan de Betanzos, Pachacuti named the whole city
“puma’s body.” Some scholars read a puma shape into the ceremonial core of the
city, with Sacsahuaman, the temple-fortress, serving as the puma’s head, the
Tullumayu river as its back, and the confluence of the city’s two rivers as the
puma’s tail, an area in fact called puma chupan (puma’s tail). But others interpret
references in the chronicles to the puma as a metaphor of Inca kingship rather
than as the town plan or the shape of the city.
While a single architect-ruler may not have designed and built the entire city in
a mere 20 years, careful planning is nonetheless evident. Excavations in the city
core reveal earlier Killke foundations (see Chronology, Inca), dismantled by
Inca builders. Although an overarching grid plan is not readily discernable, there
are at least two longitudinal streets traversed by at least five intersecting streets,
forming irregular blocks. These blocks contained the cancha compounds, which
varied in size. Sancho noted how the houses that composed the canchas were
built of well-fitted stone with upper stories of adobe (mainly the gables, which
reduced the weight of the building). Covered by roofs of thick thatch, the adobe
gables weathered the rainy season. The streets were narrow, paved and often
stepped, with a water channel running down the center. Sancho complained that
these were too narrow, as only two horsemen could ride abreast.
Nevertheless, almost five centuries of wars, earthquakes, demolition, and
remodeling make it difficult to imagine Cuzco in all its splendor. Almost
immediately after their entry into the city, in 1534, the Spaniards began dividing
cancha compounds into house lots, dismantling the walls or piercing them with
doorways and streets. In fact, the surviving segments of Inca walls are generally
retaining walls or enclosure walls of cancha compounds; the interior buildings
were all razed. The Spaniards began to reduce the size of the dual plaza that so
dominated the city plan, erasing the division of the great plaza by covering over
the Saphi River to make way for houses. In addition, Inca walls served as
convenient quarries for the Spanish settlers, who filched the stones to build their
churches and residences. Attempts to reconstruct Inca Cuzco are further
hampered by the confusing and contradictory descriptions by the first Spanish
eyewitnesses to see the city before the 1536–1537 siege by Inca rebels. In May
1536, frustrated by the looting, ill-treatment, and awarding of house lots to
Spaniards, Huayna Capac’s son Manco Inca, who had been crowned ruler by the
Spaniards, rebelled against the Spanish invaders. From the summit of
Sacsahuaman, which rises above the city, Manco Inca’s forces fired incendiary,
red-hot sling stones wrapped in cotton cloth down onto the Spaniards, who were