The Great Inca Road

The National Museum of the American Indian (part of the Smithsonian) has opened an exhibit, The Greak Inka Road: Engineering an Empire; it will be open until June 2018 (per WSJ, 10-20-2015).

My own interest in great highways is linked with my interest in civilizations; civilizations build road networks as a by-product of administering large areas; and these highways are usually the longest-lasting residues of such cultures; all of us Europeans have trod or driven on what once were Roman roads. A post of mine on South American empires is here. The Incas originated as a culture around 900 A.D. Their empire extended from 1438 to 1533—and would have lasted a great deal longer had it not been for those conquistadors. Most of the Great Inca Road was built during the period of the Inca Empire although parts of it predate Inca dominion.

The map I show is from Wikipedia (link). The system, a roughly parallel formation, has a coastal main highway (in brown) and a mountain route (in blue). The light-brown roads connecting these and branching from them were part of the system—with those crossing the mountains the most spectacular. The broken lines are today’s state borders.

Pondering this vast structure—and looking at many great pictures easily accessible by entering “Inca Road System” into Google Images—I wonder what some counterpart of mine, studying civilizations and their roads, will think of the remains of The Great American Road System two thousand years from now. Will he imagine that they were built by slaves? Such is the reflex belief we bring to the subject—although we know that most Roman roads were built by soldiers and, as best as we can determine, Inca road-building itself was based on something akin to military levies. Such levies are well known to us from medieval times—never mind the still vividly remembered draft….

The Metalled Road

Words, in seems, have always fascinated a subset of humanity, whereas the majority speak “as me my mouth has grown”—to translate, literally, a common German saying (“Wie mir der Mund gewachsen ist”). I first consciously remember reading that phrase, “a metalled road,” in a history of the Civil War; from the context I gathered that a tarred road was meant, or so at least I understood it. Why it would have been called metalled puzzled me, but not enough to lay the book aside. After that, like a tiny bit of rock inside a shoe, the phrase came up occasionally to irritate me for a moment, but never enough to sit, take the damned shoe off, and shake the pesky little thing out. Now, recently, it happened again, and this time my resistance snapped. Herewith the explanation of the “metalled road.” Writing such posts on words or phrases always makes me feel like a weird friend I had in high school who had no friends, never mind girl friends, but had a basement full of parakeets; meandering from the subject, I once spent an afternoon living his passion in that basement, staring at these, for me, quite ugly birds and breathing in that strange atmosphere of feathery mold. Metalled road? Well, whatever. Long time ago. Tarmac to you.

Curious history. Metalled roads have nothing to do with metal, nor metal with metalled roads, but both have an intimate connection to mining. A mine, in Latin, is called metallum. Aha. Of course. Things start to unpack. The big product of mines was ore which, smelted, yielded such things as bronze, copper, and iron. All of these came from the metallum and therefore their generic collective name was metal. But, of course, mines also yielded other things. They yielded stone and rock and gravel. A carefully constructed road, such the Roman road, was made of layers of stone packed inside dug trenches. Big rocks made the foundation, pressed-down gravel and crushed rock constituted the middle layer; paving stones completed the structure. The phrase “road metal” came into use to distinguish one product of a mine or quarry from another. Later on tar was used to give a binding to the crushed rock. While we’re on the subject, tarmac comes from the name of a Scotsman called John Loudon McAdam; he pioneered an updated technique of making Roman-style roads; his technique came to be called macadam, a method of construction—thus spreading rock on prepared road beds. The rock was carefully selected for size. When tar was applied to these roads, we got the name tarmac.

The stone is out of the shoe. The strange butterfly is pinned to the wall. The new parakeet is in its cage…