<< News >> MIT Students build Inca rope bridge to study the past
Submitted by bat400 on Friday, 11 May 2007 Page Views: 7266
Pre-ContactCountry: Peru Incas scaled deep gorges with fiber bridges. Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes.Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.
So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man's torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century.
Although scholars have studied the Inca road system's importance in controlling the pre-Columbian empire, John A.Ochsendorf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, "Historians and archaeologists have neglected the role of bridges." Dr. Ochsendorf's research on Inca suspension bridges illustrates an engineering university's approach to archaeology, combining materials science and experimentation with the traditional fieldwork of observing and dating artifacts. Other universities conduct research in archaeological materials, but it has long been a specialty at M.I.T.
Students here are introduced to the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient technologies as applied in transforming resources into cultural hallmarks from household pottery to grand pyramids. In a course called "materials in human experience," students are making a 60-foot-long fiber bridge in the Peruvian style. On Saturday, they plan to stretch the bridge across a dry basin between two campus buildings.
In recent years, M.I.T. archaeologists and scientists have joined forces in studies of early Peruvian ceramics, balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; and also the casting of bronze bells in Mexico. They discovered that Ecuadoreans, traveling by sea, introduced metallurgy to western Mexico. They even found how Mexicans added bits of morning-glory plants, which contain sulfur, in processing natural rubber into bouncing balls.
Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist of ancient technology who helped develop the M.I.T. program, said that in learning "how objects were made, what they were made of and how they were used, we see people making decisions at various stages, and the choices involve engineering as well as culture."
The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.
The Peruvians apparently invented their fiber bridges independently of outside influences, Dr. Ochsendorf said, but these bridges were neither the first of their kind in the world nor the inspiration for the modern suspension bridge.
For more, see the article by John Noble Wilford here at the International Hearld Tribune.
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