Qullqa – Inca food storage structure
The Inca Empire built a vast network of structures in the mountains for storing the food items, such as grains. These structures, known as qullqas, preserved food for a long time because of the lower temperature in the mountains.
The Incas built qullqas on locations high enough for the preservation of food and low enough for quick access. They maintained an accurate inventory of the stock by using quipus, which is an ingenious way of recording numeric and non-numeric data using knotted strings. See Quipu – Inca Writing System for more details.
The image shows a qullqa located on a mountain near Ollantaytambo in the Cuzco region of Peru. As you can see from the image, it is built on a convenient location – not too high and not too low – easily accessible by paths that zig-zag through the mountains.
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