Roca Funeraria

This guide to the Roca Funeraria, at the edge of the Machu Picchu citadel, starts with Hiram Bingham's 1911 team digging up graves nearby and carrying mummies back to Yale, where osteologist George Eaton concluded most of the skeletons he could sex were women. It follows how Bingham turned that finding into the legend of the Virgins of the Sun hiding here after the Spanish conquest, and how later DNA testing complicated the picture with men and boys mixed in throughout. The guide also weighs the theory that this carved, stepped altar doubled as a sundial. Stand on the slab and listen for how little of its purpose has ever been settled.