Lessons from the Incas

Whilst on Easter Island I quickly appreciated the importance of the Humanities. Over the last three weeks, as I have worked my way round Chile, Peru and Bolivia with little Spanish beyond gracias and manana, I have inevitably realised how much easier things would have been had I spoken some, any, Spanish. Whether that makes the case for studying languages per se I am not so sure. Having worked in Prague and Athens I have generally taken the view that schools can’t prepare students for the languages they will necessarily need in their career/life (it would have been an odd Yorkshire school to teach Czech or Modern Greek, although a surprising number of Sheffield schools taught Russian in the 1980s) but by learning one or two languages it makes it easier to grasp and communicate in any of them. That isn’t quite what has happened; indeed, in the panic of the moment I have tended to resort to Italian – the language I know least well and the least likely to be known here. I won’t be shaken of my view that learning languages is important, but I suspect at school its value lies more in the cultures you discover and the mind set you encourage as the practical advantages of knowing useful vocabulary.

Of all subjects, it is engineering that I have come to appreciate most in the last month or so. A typical historian, I had until recently viewed engineering as a rather dull and mechanical subject – important to have engineers, and good ones too, but a rather dull and earnest thing for academic study. If I am brutally honest, those who studied it when I was at university didn’t really do much to dispel that perception either. My opinion has been changing on that over recent years; at Ryde we have had an impressive number of pupils going on to do engineering courses and they have largely been intelligent, committed and creative characters. Visits to Machu Picchu, the Nazca Lines, numerous Inca and pre-Inca sites and the Potosi mines have brought home the extraordinary achievements in engineering that those societies achieved, centuries before our own and not just without computers and calculators but the wheel and pulleys too. But I have also been struck by the blend that engineering requires of scientific/mathematical knowledge and precision on the one hand; creativity, aesthetic awareness and verve on the other. We know if, of course, but sometimes it takes places of great beauty, simplicity and antiquity to appreciate it.

It was also clear, particularly at the Inca sites of Ollantaytambo and Machu Picchu, just what social organisation much have been necessary to construct and sustain these places; step forward the social sciences too. An understanding of politics, psychology, sociology and economics not only helps us to analyse these societies with hindsight, the understanding those subjects engender must have been necessary on the part of the political and priestly classes to organise the construction of these sites in the first place.

And so I come to the surprising conclusion as I prepare to leave Latin America that, whilst Languages, History and Geography have all helped me appreciate this amazing part of the world, it is a new respect for Engineering and a renewed respect for the social sciences that these extraordinary monuments to civilisation have left me with.