The Moray Terraces

I spent this morning making a database of vinyl record mailers and other related packaging for reasons that I can’t totally explain. Well, maybe I can. I think cataloguing and collecting are two of our most basic survival instincts aside from maybe sex-having and rock-throwing or whatever, and over a long period of time that’s snowballed into a more patient attention to the complexities of the things we love. Take the Incas for example.

Above and further down the page you’ll see pictures of the Moray terraced circular depressions found in the Urubamba Valley, otherwise known as the Sacred Valley of the Incas. What exactly they were used for is still the subject of speculation, but the most plausible theory given their structure is that they were used to experiment with growing different crops in different climates. The largest of the depressions is about 100 feet deep, and each has 12 levels to it with the temperature from top to bottom differing by nearly 27 degrees Fahrenheit. Given how vast the Inca Empire was and how many different climates it covered, it’s pretty fascinating that they were capable of creating an agricultural lab like this to simulate the viability of particular crops and soil compositions to such an acute and specific degree.

And that sort of stuff is extremely interesting to me, and maybe to everyone? I don’t mean that in a projecting-my-experience-on-to-everything-and-everyone sort of way, but in the sense that if we push past the first couple of cranky layers of our animal brains and let the information in as it actually is, a great number of things turn out to be pretty interesting and enjoyable. Maybe not in a vacationing to see a farm lab sort of way, but more in the attentive awareness of the way things actually are. It takes the basic question of how did the Incas survive at such wild altitudes and in such sheer landscapes at the population scale they reached, and returns a rich database of composite soil mixtures, crop planning, and altitude mapping as the answer. And I think that framework is a healthy one to use when any sort of question in our lives feels insurmountable. The answer, at least very often, ends up lying somewhere right in front of you in the form of something you might have previous thought was boring.