This story was originally published on SAPIENS and appears here under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. One early January morning in the mid-1980s after a daylong journey from Ayacucho (formerly “Guamanga”), I (Lidio) found myself being guided across a small rope bridge hanging across the Pampas River. This was my first experience on such a bridge, made with an astonishing ancient technology that uses twisted branches to form a crossing. Although it looked to be only about 20 meters long, the bridge, called Chuschichaka, was beautiful: a reminder of ancient…
