Beneath the Megaliths Exclusive Sacsayhuamán Tunnel Exploration Megalithomania

So we've just arrived here at the area of the tunnel at Sacsayhuaman, where they've been digging down here and actually found it goes 10 feet lower than some parts of the wall. We're here with the head archaeologist. We're going to interview them about what's happening. We're also going to get access to the entrance to the tunnel. These tunnels going through to Cusca and the Coricancha, are they like, is it just one level or are they multiple levels? So here we are at Sacsayhuaman in Cusco, Peru. And just in this area, in fact, just around the corner there, some recent excavations have been carried out where they've been digging down here and actually found it goes, you know, potentially up to seven to 10 feet lower than some parts of the wall. And at the base, they found these giant blocks all along the edge of all the wall that they checked. So there seems to be some kind of almost like they're like benches, almost giant benches, which would possibly like stabilize the wall, but it could have some other purpose. And now within the next few months, we're going to get some actual dating because they've taken samples from it. A whole team have been working here and we might get some actual dating of this site because officially this dates to 1400 AD or thereabouts, which is just a few years before the Spanish arrived. Although the traditions of the Inca say quite different, that these were built by a race of giants in prehistory. But as you can see, the magnificence and scale of these walls is quite different to what we find in other Inca construction, even at this site. And we'll see some examples of the differences as we go around. So here we are at Sacsayhuaman, which is one of the most magnificent sites in all of Peru. It has remarkable megalithic construction. There's clearly three different types of stone here. And this is limestone, primarily comes from a local quarry quite nearby or somewhere bought from several miles away. But this isn't andesite, this isn't basalt, this isn't what a lot of people think. It's genuinely really high quality limestone. And the shaping of it is quite remarkable. There's the work of Derek Cunningham, which I've been speaking to one of our guests, Neil, about. And he's been telling me that all the different angles, whether it's from a north angle or a horizontal angle like this, actually reveals information about the moon, the sun, the difference between the earth and the sun and things like this, in between all the different angles. And it's all been worked out. It's almost like a code within the site itself. He's also found this in the polygonal walls in Egypt. It's been seen on the polygonal walls in Turkey. And so it's not just here we find these kind of potential codes, there's something much more profound going on with these sites than people realise. So behind me is one of the most interesting stones at the site, one of the largest as well. Estimates put this at like 150 tonnes. You can see all the different angles on here that go round really beautifully. And you can see major, now the sun's come out, you can see massive striations on all these different stones. It's really quite something. When you get the sun angle, the sun right above, it's like midday. Yeah, this is really quite something. Look at the shaping on these. These are just remarkable. Makes you wonder how they could have done this. Check this out. This is one of the most famous ones. It's almost got like a flower of leaves going around the main megalithic block here. And this is where it starts to get really big as well. We get really unusual, really heavily shaped stones. Look at these corners here. Look at the way that all the little detail that joins up. It's really quite something. This is, this I think, is that even bedrock? Could be bedrock they've just built on there. So here we have like what looks like a water channel. Really big one coming out there. Steps coming down here. Fascinating. So we've just arrived here at the area of the tunnel at brand new excavation. Part of the Chincana project. We're here with the head archaeologist. There's two or three of them. We're going to interview them about what's happening. The bigger picture. We're also going to get access to the entrance to the tunnel. You can't film right inside it, but I'll describe to you what's there. But you can film into it a certain way. It only goes a bit further than that anyway, at the moment, because there's so much rubble. There appears to be different levels as well. We must remember that there's more entrances, 13 entrances in this whole area. Three known tunnels we're dealing with here, so it's pretty astonishing. How did you find out about the entrance to the tunnels here? 27 years ago I found the entrance to Sacsayhuaman here, he say. And what do you know? I mean with old traditions and the legends of these tunnels going through to Cusca and the Coricancha, did you follow the stories from the old legends, the Spanish stories, or was it a more scientific approach? Three things. One document from the 16th, 17th and 18th. Later, the experimentation in archaeology. I asked to make a way from here, from this point to Coricancha, and then the possibilities of the constructions from the past and now, they are really similar. Basically, because we have different levels. And the other point is we did many interviews to many people. For example, a workers, they fall out on the tunnels in the sector of San Cristobal. They've been working and they fell out. And those people, when they fall out, they were scary and they put a field of soccer field on the top of one of the tunnels in Cusco. And the project, Chinkana, basically has also information of geodesic information around here. And in the beginning, this geophysics information, in the beginning, we didn't have money. 27 years ago, we got gold metals, widers. We used to put on the ground. With a hammer, we used to put ground. And then we heard the sound and they hear it was a hole inside, and we were marking, checking. And then we got a georadar because it was a donation. With the georadar, we found that it was real. The historical dates, the archaeological experimentations, and then the seismic proofs. Are the tunnels blocked? Are they all blocked up? And are they going to clear them out to see what's in there? Now, we have one tunnel that is open in the upper part of Sacsayhuaman. And here, I have to excavate three more meters of tunnel to go inside of the real tunnel. Three more meters. And it's a red of tunnels. It's the temple of Maderer or Pachamama. And you say there's more than one tunnel. So there's one, there's near here, there's one main entrance. And then does it go off in different directions, different tunnels? There are 13 entrances. And yes, I am attacking just three, he said. They don't leave, finish me. They did an electric tomography also, he said. He put the electric tomography, they put yodo metals on the ground. And then we go to draw like triangular shape. And when we put all of these metals, he said, we got 40 meters of this side. The third part, he said. If there are 120 meters, I have to go 40 meters inside, he said. And there are news. There is a room inside this rock, under 15 meters deep. It's 15 meters wider. And there is another room inside here, over there, under these rocks. Of 18 meters, per 18 meters. Wider is 18 meters side. Oh, the next year, there is a promise will be lots of adrenaline around here. And this is a project made by indigenous people, he said. He said, all of us, we are indigenous. There is another doctor, an archeologist called Mildred Fernandez. She's also indigenous. And this is the only project in the whole Peru joined by indigenous. And this is between the respect between people of the world. General comes from different places of the world. And he is the person to lead. And then where we are, is the palace of Huayna Capa. She's the Mildred Fernandez. She's the other doctora. She's another main archeologist. This is the main palace of Huayna Capa. And Huayna Capa king, he did for love this project to her wife. And then the Inca is son of the sun, the child sun. And he's representing the sun. It's like the pharaohs in Egypt. And the wife is representing mother of Pachamama. And then the meeting of these two fertilize the world. And it's not casual than Coricancha down in the bottom is a masculine temple. Because over there were living Punchao. I told you yesterday is the baby sun. It's a little statue of 80 centimeter of high. And inside of this golden statue, it was the hearts of the kittens of the Incas burned. It's the ashes of the Incas. It was under this statue. And this God was taking from Coricancha to here to fertilize the earth. They were four founders of this. They comes from caves. They are childs of the sun. Who is the mother? And the caves, what are there? The vaginas of the earth. For us, it's called Pacarina. When Huiracocha created the mans, the humans, he say comes up the mans. And then we comes from the caves. I've got a question. Are there underground structures here or just mainly tunnel structures? There are lots of rooms, cameras inside. Are they like, is it just one level or are they multiple levels? Here, he say. In the temple of Madre, there is a cave. Under there is another cave. And then there is another cave under. There are multilevel caves, he say, in English. And it's really good, it's interesting. We were only to the first level and second level. We are looking also for go to the third level, he say. And with the tunnels themselves, do they, does he believe they stretch across the whole kind of this part of Peru? Or is it more localized? The chinkanas or the big caves, the ancient explorers, they are searching for that for 500 years. In these 500 years, nobody was lucky with that. And now in these modern times, we are lucky. But it's not luck. And he say, the indigenous thought, understand the indigenous thought, he say. In the mind of the Occidental, he believe, he say, everything, they believe everything has been carved and perfect. But in the Andean world, the nature is magical. This rock, so you are watching around here. This big hole around here is the eye of one eagle. Geologically, it was a hole here, around here. They were trying to fix it, the face of the eagle around here. They saw to this place, it was a kind of the crest of the eagle. And they saw over there, it was the eye of the eagle. That's why they fixed it according to the nature. Have you got any dating evidence that goes back earlier than the Inca? When we have a document from the 16th century and 17th century, and they describe how these places they were making. In the documents, they mention how they were made the ramps, how they were made the things. On other people, they talk about the origin of our civilization. Like Lemuria, Atlantida. But this is lie. We were making excavation and we found the sand when they were carving and using on the rock, he say. It is underground, he say. And also, we found all the process of cantery of the ancient times. The quarries are around there and there. When we did an excavation, we found also skulls, human skulls. And also, we found little pieces of stones on the ground. And the cemetery, there now is something new, it's news. They are doing excavation, they found human bones over there. On the skulls, there are the holes and also stones, like to say, look father Wiracocha, I did these temples. Here on the cemetery, we did excavation three meters under the ground. We found a pre-Inca civilization called Wari. That's interesting. Now, in the cemetery, there is a white cemetery. And under this white floor, we found another field, another level. Even deeper. And we found little pieces of pottery from the pre-Inca culture called Kilke. What date is that? It's 1100 years BC. So that's slightly older than the Wari. In eight months more, we will know a more contundent answer. He's trying to mention, so he's trying to, he will date using the minerals because they were under the ground. We know very well when the minerals are on the top, we know because it's receiving the sun. But when they are under the ground, so we will use that technique to date how old is this place. And this is going to give us a date, a more exact date of this place. Wait eight months. We were waiting 500 years and eight months is nothing. First of all, we are not able to say if the Chincana is only Inca. The tunnel. We will know really clearly in eight years. We have to make more investigations to know if it's only Inca. Literally behind me, this is the entrance to the underworld. You can see there's almost like a kind of carved out first part of the tunnel here. So what you're seeing behind me is probably part of the tunnel. You can see the shape, how it kind of tapered inwards, you know, going down to like a trapezoid shape without the top part. That is the same shape as the tunnel inside as well. And so remarkable experience to see this in person. Here we are just at the entrance to the tunnels of Sacsayhuaman, the newly discovered tunnel that stretches all the way from here at the Sacsayhuaman, so all the way down to the Coricancha. You can see it slopes down. There's lots of rubble in the way. And we're just next to the main circular plaza where there's a whole huge amount of rocky outcrops. And we have the upside downstairs. It's just below that. And so this goes all the way to Cusco. It's over a mile long to the Coricancha, about five foot tall trapezoid shape. And here we are. We're actually being given permission by the archaeologist to actually come in and have a quick look. And we can't go all the way in. We need hard hats. We're waiting for them. But you can see this is it. This proves that there are tunnels under the ground here in ancient Cusco and the surrounding area. They're looking towards finding some kind of dating evidence. They clearly were used by the Inca. Whether they go back much further is currently under investigation. But these are seen as entrances into the underworld, the lower world that existed within Pachamama, within Mother Earth itself. And these go for miles. They go probably beyond even the Coricancha. Apparently, there are 13 different entrances. There are multiple levels. And also, there is actually constructed chambers down there. And these are currently now being excavated. And we're going to get exciting news within the next few months. But we won't know the full story for a matter of years. Possibly, we're told eight. So it's a very, very exciting prospect. And as the archaeologist has said himself, what they find here is going to affect the world of archaeology. Okay, I've just come out of the caves here at Sacsayhuamun. The archaeologist has shown us what's down there. Now, he says that the walls are actually carved. They found various ceramics down there. They've also found various stone tools, which they think are Inca, but they cannot be certain as yet. They've not found any animals like snakes or birds or something like that. But they expect to find them. He also showed me there's a second entrance going down to a deeper level. But unfortunately, at the moment, that is full of water. So access is very, very difficult. But it's incredible because obviously for the Incas, and obviously presumably the peoples before that, this was seen as an entrance into the underworld, just like what we have at Giza, just like the cave underworld that we found in 2008. We're talking about exactly the same type of practices. The lower world, middle world in which we live, and the upper world up there. And we've just come out of the underworld. So we've just come out of the tunnel. It's blown my mind just to have this access, private access visit with our group. Several of our group, JJ and Andrew as well, got in there. And what we're seeing is as you go down, it's flooded with water now. So there's a lower level. But as you look up, it goes further back and takes a left turn. There's giant blocks. That would have made up the walls of the trapezoid-shaped tunnel. Now in the 3D images and the scanning they've done, it looks very neat and tidy, but actually it's very rough. It's lots of rubble. Things have collapsed. So they don't even know how far they're going to get. But just to go inside there and get a sense of what it's really like into these possible hundreds of miles in this whole landscape of tunnels is amazing. So it's a real privilege. We've got to thank Room. We've got to thank the Cusco Native crew for giving us access like this. It's really, really blown our minds. And now we've got to come back every year and we're going to find out as it develops, as more funding is given, as more excavation is done. They found levels here in this part of Sacsayhuaman that go back to 900 BC. This is the Wari culture. But they've also found pottery that goes back to at least 1100 to 1200 BC. And so this could date the whole site. This could put it into like the Bronze Age, Iron Age era. And this means it's pre-Inca technically. So very interesting to have this access. And some of the group are going in there having a look. Amazing. So thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this visit inside and underground Sacsayhuaman. And we'll see you next time, megalithomaniacs.