A mysterious Inca-era monument consisting of roughly 5,200 holes high up in the Andes may have been a site for barter and accounting hundreds of years ago, a new study suggests.
The holes are laid out in ordered grids on Monte Sierpe ("Serpent Mountain") in the southern Peruvian Andes. The site may have been constructed between A.D. 1000 and 1400 as a place of exchange under the powerful Chincha Kingdom, which had a population of more than 100,000 people, according to the study. When the kingdom was conquered by the Inca Empire in the 15th century, the "Band of Holes" site may have been repurposed to collect tribute and taxes from local groups, the authors suggested.
