Inka Road Symposium 08 - Inka Engineering: The Technology and Culture of Roads and Bridges

This special symposium celebrates the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian’s landmark exhibition, The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire, with a fascinating look at the material, political, economic, and religious structures that integrated more than one hundred Native nations and millions of people in the powerful Andean Empire known as the Tawantinsuyu. In this segment, John Ochsendorf, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks on "Inka Engineering: The Technology and Culture of Roads and Bridges." John Ochsendorf is the Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been researching the history and technology of Inka suspension bridges since his undergraduate thesis on the topic at Cornell, where he majored in structural engineering and minored in archaeology. He is a founding partner of Ochsendorf DeJong and Block LLC, a consulting firm specializing in historical structures. He has won numerous awards for research in structural engineering and architecture, including a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The symposium was recorded at the Rasmuson Theater of the National Museum of the American Indian on June 25-26, 2015.