Ancient America Rocked!

Originally posted by Byrd
Returning to the topic... I'll be going to the Texas Archaeological Society meeting in Del Rio this year, and they've arranged for us to do a tour of Big Satan Rock Shelter.

Any feed back on that?

Inquiring minds want to know.

----Thread Update----

Pre-Inca Remains Found in Peru

Peruvian archaeologists have found remains from a person believed to be a leader of a key pre-Inca civilization that is more than 1,200 years old, one of the researchers said.

Carlos Elera told AFP the remains from the northern region of Lambayeque are from what some call the Sican culture that flourished in the area between around 700 and 1375 AD.

He said among the remains found two weeks ago in the archaeological complex Las Ventanas is a type of sarcophagus for an adult with a headdress and a feathered eye mask, which are "characteristic of the nobles of the Sican culture."

Nature's Incredible Cover-Up: An Ancient Amazonian Civilization

Spanish adventurer Gaspar de Carvajal wrote of "cities that gleamed white" and "very fruitful land," on his wanderings along the Eucadorian Napo River in 1541. But today there is little evidence of such a civilization. Instead this corner of the Amazon, like the rest of the massive tropical forest, is seemingly inhospitable: full of dense, obstructive vegetation and buzzing with poisonous creepy crawlers.

Is this a case of a Spaniard painting pretty pictures to pocket more money for future conquests, or an example of a perfectly executed cover-up directed by Mother Nature herself?

The Washington Post recently reported on the work of Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo of the University of Florida, who is part of a growing number of anthropologists who believe an ancient, advanced society once occupied Amazonia.

And finnaly this little gem


'Astonishing' Ancient Amazon Civilization Discovery Detailed

Some called it El Dorado, others, like Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (a British version of Indiana Jones) cryptically named it the "City of Z."

The jungle swallowed them all, and no evidence has ever been produced that such a place existed.

Now the satellite imagery of deforested sections of the upper Amazon Basin revealed more than 200 geometric earthworks.

I read about the Amazonian civilization in "1491; New Revelations of the Americas before colombus" by Charles Mann. In it it documents the words of Spanish soldiers who boated down the Amazon from the Andes, and were attacked by the natives, who they said lived in populous towns along the river.

Later explorers found nothing, so these soldiers' claims were discarded as fancy. What in fact happened was likely what happened everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere; disease. Keep in mind that the Inka had suffered something like a decade of civil war spurred by a smallpox plague, before any Europeans knew they existed. The disease had spread from Spanish colonies in Panama, ravaged the Andes, and killed the Inka emperor, causing a three-way civil war for succession. It likely crossed the Andes and wiped out the people of the Amazon basin less than two years after the Inka fell to Pizarro.

The Americas were not Walden's "untrammeled wilderness" where Indians were nature-beings who left no impact behind them. They were densely-populated, with agricultural civilizations stretching from southern Canada to the southern cone of south America.

A good clue to this is the nature of disease itself; Influenza, smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis, measles.. .All had apallingly high kill rates among native populations. However, such a high death rate is NOT conductive to rapid spread. If the Indians lived only in isolated woodland and prairie villages and camps, and numbered the low millions between two continents, every outbreak would have been local, and direct from European contact. What actually happened was that these diseases covered both continents before the Europeans even ventured very far into the interior. That could only happen if you have dense populations and well-traveled trade routes.

Great thread
Saving for when I get time to read.