Mysterious Machu Picchu Trivia Quiz

Answer: Peru

It is situated about 75 miles (120 kilometers) northwest of the town of Cusco. Cusco was the old imperial Inca capital, which was both the administrative and the religious center of the empire.

Answer: Andes

One stone used in the town's construction is estimated to weigh 300 tons. Archaeologists are unsure how it was moved in place at the top of a mountain.

Answer: 8,000 feet

By comparison, Denver, CO, in the U.S. is 5,280 feet (one mile) above sea level. The town of Kakani in Nepal in the Himalayan Mountains is 6,500 ft. above sea level.

Answer: Precision stonework, with no mortar between stone joints

Many stones are so precisely fitted a standard playing card cannot be inserted between adjacent stones, even though there is no mortar in the joints. What is even more impressive is that all this precision finish work was done with stone tools.

Answer: 5 square miles

Most of Machu Picchu's approximately 200 residences were probably homes for wealthy Inca nobility. The village walls were made with an inward inclination for protection against earthquakes.

Answer: Incan

The Incas were a highly-organized, pre-Columbian civilization. Their last ruler, Tupac Amaru, was executed by the Spanish in 1572 by a public hanging in Cusco.

Answer: The Spaniards never found it

Some historians believe the Incas had already abandoned Machu Picchu by the time of the Spanish conquest in the 1530s.

Answer: No one really knows, but these are all possibilities

The Inca Trail is a walking route that leads through the mountains above the Urubamba river, following (at least partly) the course of an old Inca roadway leading to the city of Machu Picchu.

Answer: 1911

Machu Picchu was unknown to the outside world until July 24, 1911, when American archeologist Hiram Bingham stumbled upon the then-overgrown site. He later described the find in his book "Lost City of the Incas: The Story of Machu Picchu and its Builders." Roosevelt supporters bolted from the Republican Party and formed the Progressive Party in the 1912 U.S. presidency election (Roosevelt is often referred to as the "Bull Moose" candidate because of his remark to reporters "I am as fit as a bull moose.") Because they split the Republican vote in the 1912 election, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected the next U.S. president.

Answer: Hiram Bingham

Hiram Bingham was later elected Governor of Connecticut and then U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1924 to 1933. Heinrich Schliemann found the ancient city of Troy (of Trojan Horse fame) in Turkey in 1870. Howard Carter found the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. William Sanders has recently directed surveys and excavations by a team from Penn State University of Mayan sites in the Copan River Valley, Honduras, in Central America (his team's results can be seen (in the U.S) in the Public TV series "Out of the Past").