Near the ruins of the great temple are those of other buildings, also unique, so far as I know.  The base of the party wall, decorated with large niches, is of cut ashlars carefully laid; the middle course is of adobe, while the upper third is of rough, uncut stones.  It looks very odd now but was originally covered with fine clay or stucco.  In several cases the plastered walls are still standing, in fairly good condition, particularly where they have been sheltered from the weather.

The chief marvel of Racche, however, is the great adobe wall of the temple, which is nearly fifty feet high.  It is slowly disintegrating, as might be expected.  The wonder is that it should have stood so long in a rainy region without any roof or protecting cover.  It is incredible that for at least five hundred years a wall of sun-dried clay should have been able to defy severe rainstorms.  The lintels, made of hard-wood timbers and partially embedded in the wall, are all gone; yet the adobe remains.  It would be very interesting to find out whether the water of the springs near the temple contains lime.  If so this might have furnished natural calcareous cement in sufficient quantity to give the clay a particularly tenacious quality, able to resist weathering.  The factors which have caused this extraordinary adobe wall to withstand the weather in such an exposed position for so many centuries, notwithstanding the heavy rains of each summer season from December to March, are worthy of further study.

It has been claimed that this temple was devoted to the worship of Viracocha, a great deity, the Jove or Zeus of the ancient pantheon.  It seems to me more reasonable to suppose that a primitive folk constructed here a temple to the presiding divinity of the place, the god who gave them this precious clay.  The principal industry of the neighboring village is still the manufacture of pottery.  No better clay for ceramic purposes has been found in the Andes.

It would have been perfectly natural for the prehistoric potters to have desired to placate the presiding divinity, not so much perhaps out of gratitude for the clay as to avert his displeasure and fend off bad luck in baking pottery.  It is well known that the best pottery of the Incas was extremely fine in texture.  Students of ceramics are well aware of the uncertainty of the results of baking clay.  Bad luck seems to come most unaccountably, even when the greatest pains are taken.  Might it not have been possible that the people who were most concerned with creating pottery decided to erect this temple to insure success and get as much good luck as possible?  Near the ancient temple is a small modern church with two towers.  The churchyard appears to be a favorite place for baking pottery.  Possibly the modern potters use the church to pray for success in their baking, just as the ancient potters used the great temple of Viracocha.  The walls of the church are composed partly of adobe and partly of cut stones taken from the ruins.