The mother of all civilisations?

[Mech]

The mother of all civilisations?

2007 12 23
By Shobhan Saxena | timesofindia.indiatimes.com



The ruins were so magnificent and sprawling that some people believed that the aliens from a faraway galaxy had built the huge pyramids that stood in the desert across the Andes.

Some historians believed that the complex society, which existed at that time, was born out of fear and war. They looked for the telltale signs of violence that they believed led to the creation of this civilisation. But, they could not find even a hint of any warfare. It was baffling. Even years after Ruth Shady Solis found the ancient city of pyramids at Caral in Peru, it continues to surprise historians around the world. It took Ruth Shady many years and many rounds of carbon dating to prove that the earliest known civilisation in South Americas—at 2,627 BC–was much older than the Harappa Valley towns and the pyramids of Egypt.

Solis, an archaeologist at the National University of San Marcos, Lima, was looking for the fabled missing link of archaeology— a ‘mother city’—when she stumbled upon the ancient city of Caral in the Supe Valley of Peru a few years ago. Her findings were stunning.

It showed that a full-fledged urban civilisation existed at the place around 2700 BC. The archaeologist and her team found a huge compound at Caral: 65 hectares in the central zone, encompassing six large pyramids, many smaller pyramids, two circular plazas, temples, amphitheatres and other architectural features including residential districts spread in the desert, 23 km from the coast.





The discovery of Caral has pushed back the history of the Americas: Caral is more than 1,000 years older than Machu Picchu of the Incas. They built huge structures in Caral hundreds of years before the famous drainage system of Harappa and the pyramids of Egypt were even designed.

But, it was not easy for Ruth Shady to prove this. It was only in 2001 that the journal Science reported the Peruvian archaeologist’s discovery. And, despite the hard evidence backing her, she is still trying to convince people that Caral was indeed the oldest urban civilisation in the world.

"There were many problems, many of them in my own country," says Ruth Shady, on a visit to India to discuss her discovery with other historians. "The discovery of Caral challenged the accepted beliefs. Some historians were not ready to believe that an urban civilisation existed in Peru even before the pyramids were built in Egypt," she says.

Basically, there were two problems. First, for decades archaeologist have been looking for a ‘mother city’ to find an answer to the question: why did humans become civilised?

The historians had been searching for this answer in Egypt, Mesopotamia (Iraq), India and China. They didn’t expect to find the first signs of city life in a Peruvian desert. Secondly, most historians believed that only the fear of war could motivate people to form complex societies. And, since Caral did not show any trace of warfare; no battlements, no weapons, and no mutilated bodies, they found it hard to accept it as the mother city.





That’s when Ruth Shady stepped in with her discovery. "This place is somewhere between the seat of the gods and the home of man," she says, adding that Caral was a gentle society, built on trade and pleasure. "This great civilisation was based on trade in cotton. Caral made the cotton for the nets, which were sold to the fishermen living near the coast. Caral became a booming trading centre and the trade spread," she says.

Caral was born in trade and not bloodshed. Warfare came much later. This is what this mother city shows: great civilisations are born in peace. Ruth Shady continues to battle for this great truth.

Read more: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
/HealthScience/The_mother_of_all_civilisations/
articleshow/2625053.cms

[Mech]

Celestial Find at Ancient Andes Site
The discovery in Peru of a 4,200-year-old temple and observatory pushes back estimates of the rise of an advanced culture in the Americas.
2006 05 15

By Thomas H. Maugh II | latimes.com




Gateway: Archeologist Robert Benfer’s team found this clay sculpture of a frowning face at the Buena Vista site near Lima. The disk, marks the position of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter solstice. (Robert Benfer / University of Missouri)

Archeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the oldest known celestial observatory in the Americas — a 4,200-year-old structure marking the summer and winter solstices that is as old as the stone pillars of Stonehenge.

The observatory was built on the top of a 33-foot-tall pyramid with precise alignments and sightlines that provide an astronomical calendar for agriculture, archeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri said.

The people who built the observatory — three millenniums before the emergence of the Incas — are a mystery, but they achieved a level of art and science that archeologists say they did not know existed in the region until at least 800 years later.

Among the most impressive finds was a massive clay sculpture — an ancient version of the modern frowning "sad face" icon flanked by two animals. The disk, protected from looters beneath thousands of years of dirt and debris, marked the position of the winter solstice.

"It's really quite a shock to everyone … to see sculptures of that sophistication coming out of a building of that time period," said archeologist Richard L. Burger of Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the discovery.

The find adds strong evidence to support the recent idea that a sophisticated civilization developed in South America in the pre-ceramic era, before the development of fired pottery sometime after 1500 BC.

Benfer's discovery "pushes the envelope of civilization farther south and inland from the coast, and adds the important dimension of astronomy to these ancient folks' way of life," said archeologist Michael Moseley of the University of Florida, a noted Peru expert.

The 20-acre site, called Buena Vista, is about 25 miles inland in the Rio Chillon Valley, just north of Lima. "It is on a totally barren, rock-covered hill looking down on a beautiful fertile valley," said Benfer, who presented the find last month in Puerto Rico at a meeting of the Society for American Archeology.

The site is remarkably well preserved, Benfer said, because it rains in the area only about once a year.

The name of the people who inhabited the region is unknown because writing did not emerge in the Americas for 2,000 more years. Some archeologists call them followers of the Kotosh religious tradition. Others call them late pre-ceramic cultures of the central coast. For brevity, most simply call them Andeans.

Benfer and archeologist Bernardino Ojeda of Peru's National Agrarian University have been working at Buena Vista for four years. The site contains ruins dating from 10,000 years ago to well into the ceramic era in the first millennium BC.

The large pyramid and a temple occupy about 2 acres near the center of the site. Radiocarbon dating of cotton and burned twigs found in the temple's offering pit place its use at about 2200 BC.

That is about 400 years after the first pyramid was built in Egypt and about the same time that the peoples who would become the Greeks were settling into the Mediterranean region.

The temple is built of rock that was covered with plaster and painted, although most of the white and red paint has long since flaked off.

Benfer calls it the Temple of the Fox because a drawing of a fox is carved inside a painted picture of another animal, probably a llama, beside each doorway. According to Andean myth, the fox taught people how to cultivate and irrigate plants.

As the team mapped out the site, Benfer observed that a person standing in the doorway of the temple and gazing through a small, flap-covered window behind the altar is aligned with a small head carved onto a notch of a distant hill. The line had an orientation of 114 degrees from true north, pointing southeast.

Benfer does not normally deal with archeoastronomy — the science of ancient astronomy — so he contacted a childhood friend, Larry Adkins of Tustin, and asked him what that angle signified.

Adkins, a physicist who is retired from Rockwell International and who now teaches astronomy at Cerritos College, told him 114 degrees pointed the way to sunrise on the Southern Hemisphere's summer solstice, Dec. 21, the longest day of the year.

"That really got the ball rolling," Adkins said.

The summer solstice marks planting time, as the Rio Chillon begins its annual flooding, fed by melting ice higher up in the Andes. The flooding deposits fresh soil on the land, fertilizing the crops and eliminating the need for manure from domestic animals.

"This was the beginning of flood-plain agriculture," Benfer said. He thinks fishermen from the coast originally moved to the site to grow cotton for use in making fishing nets.

The large frowning disk sits near the door to the temple. It is made of mud plaster and grass and covered with a fine surface of clay.

Benfer speculates that the sculpture represents Pacha Mamma, the most important god of the Andes. He acknowledges the difficulty of proving that, however, because the next known sculpture of the mother goddess does not appear until 800 BC.

"The disk would frown over the sunset on the winter solstice, the last day of harvest," Benfer said.

Alignments in the temple also pointed to the position at the summer solstice of a constellation known in Andean culture as the fox, Benfer said.

Unlike Western constellations, which are outlined by groupings of stars, some Andean constellations were made from dark areas in the sky that are gaps in the bright Milky Way.

Scientists once thought that the gaps represented a lack of stars, but astronomers now know that they are caused by large clouds of dust that block light from distant stars.

The so-called dark cloud constellation of the fox is well-known today in the region, but archeoastronomer Anthony Aveni of Colgate University doubted that it has maintained its shape for four millenniums.

"He has an alignment. That's neat," Aveni said. But the idea that the ancients were looking at the same constellation "is a bit of a leap for me."


Musician: The team found this sculpture of a figure playing a pipe at the Buena Vista site, the oldest found in the region. (Robert Benfer / University of Missouri)
Last summer, Benfer's team also partially excavated a second sculpture, that of a life-sized human figure playing a pipe. The figure is sitting with its legs sculpted in high relief and hanging over the edge of one of a series of short platforms that lead down to what appears to be another temple.

The remaining 18 acres of the site have a variety of buildings, most of them from later cultures, that include a ceremonial center, stepped pyramids and what apparently was a residence center for elites. Most of those have been looted.

Oval houses that probably served as homes for families of commoners sit across a ravine from the main pyramid.

There were probably other buildings farther down the slopes, Benfer said, "but the Chillon River removes everything from time to time."

Evidence of pottery indicates that the site was inhabited for centuries, but it is not yet clear whether or how it was eventually abandoned.

"There were people in the valley at the time of the Spanish Conquest, but they were of several ethnic groups," Benfer said.

That suggests that the sophisticated civilization was eventually replaced by small bands of farmers who immigrated from various areas.

Article from: www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world
/la-sci-observatory14may14,0,3343915.story?page=1

[Mech]

Ancient Solar Observatory Discovered in Peru
2007 03 04



By Sara Goudarzi | space.com

The fortified stone temple at Chankillo. Credit: National Aerial Service, Peru

The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been discovered in coastal Peru, archeologists announced today.

The 2,300-year-old ceremonial complex featured the Towers of Chankillo, 13 towers running north to south along a low ridge and spread across 980 feet (300 meters) to form a toothed horizon that was used for solar observations.

Researchers excavated the solar observatory between 2000 and 2003. They found buildings—in exact mirror position of each other—to the east and west of the towers with observation points for watching the Sun rise and set over the toothed horizon.




The rise of the sun between Tower 1 and Cerro Mucho Malo at the June solstice, 2003, viewed from the western solar observaotry. The sunrise position at the solstice has shifted to the right approximately 0.3° from year 300 BC. Credit: Ivan Ghezzi

How it works

In addition to the daily east to west motion, our Sun appears to move eastward through the stars in a path known as the ecliptic over the course of a year. Also, the Earth’s axis is not perpendicular to the ecliptic but slanted by an angle of a little over 23 degrees. The combinations of these positions determine where the Sun is above our horizon day by day.

At different times of the year one can observe the Sun rise and set in different spots with respect to our horizon and for different lengths of time. For example, in the Northern Hemisphere, around the summer solstice—which falls on June 21—the Sun rises highest in the sky and stays up longer.

As viewed from the two observing points of Chankillo [image], the spread of towers along the horizon corresponds very closely to the range of movement of the rising and setting positions of the Sun over the year, the authors write in the March 2 issue of the journal Science.

Once the Sun started to move away from any of its extreme positions, like the solstices or equinoxes, the towers and gaps between them provided a means to track the progress of the Sun up and down the horizon, to within a couple of days accuracy.

“Chankillo is arguably the oldest solar calendar that can be identified as such with confidence within the Americas,” said lead study author Ivan Ghezzi from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru.

Tree-ring samples dated these structures back to the fourth century B.C.

“Many indigenous American sites have been found to contain one or a few putative solar orientations,” Ghezzi said. “Chankillo, in contrast, provides a complete set of horizon markers and two unique and indisputable observation points.”

Other discoveries
At the end of a 131-foot-long corridor in the building to the west of the towers, the researchers found pottery, shells, and stone artifacts in an area possibly for commoners who participated in rituals linked to solar observations.

Previous studies showed that the Incas—South American Indians who established an empire that once ranged from northern Ecuador to central Chile from 1100 to the 1530s—had built sites to mark solar observations by 1500.

In comparison, the earliest portion of Stonehenge—megalithic ruins in southern England purported to correlate with the rising and setting of the Sun and the Moon—is said to have been completed around 3000 B.C.

The new finding, however, puts Sun cults in the Americas at an earlier date than the Incans.

“Chankillo was built approximately 1,700 years before the Incas began their expansion,” Ghezzi said. “Now we know these practices are quite a bit older and were highly developed by Chankillo’s time.”

Article from: space.com/scienceastronomy/070301_oldest_observatory.html

Towers point to ancient Sun cult



The Thirteen Towers constitute an ancient solar observatory

The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been found, suggesting the existence of early, sophisticated Sun cults, scientists report.
It comprises of a group of 2,300-year-old structures, known as the Thirteen Towers, which are found in the Chankillo archaeological site, Peru.

The towers span the annual rising and setting arcs of the Sun, providing a solar calendar to mark special dates.

The study is published in the journal Science.

Clive Ruggles, professor of archaeoastronomy at Leicester University, UK, said: "These towers have been known to exist for a century or so. It seems extraordinary that nobody really recognised them for what they were for so long.


The towers have inset staircases
"I was gobsmacked when I saw them for the first time - the array of towers covers the entire solar arc."

The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo run from north to south along the ridge of a low hill within the site; they are relatively well-preserved and each has a pair of inset staircases leading to the summit.

The rectangular structures, between 75 and 125 square metres (807-1,345 sq ft) in size, are regularly spaced - forming a "toothed" horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals.

About 230m (750ft) to the east and west are what scientists believe to be two observation points. From these vantages, the 300m- (1,000ft-) long spread of the towers along the horizon corresponds very closely to the rising and setting positions of the Sun over the year.

"For example," said Professor Ruggles, "if you were stood at the western observing point, you would see the Sun coming up in the morning, but where it would appear along the span of towers would depend on the time of the year."

"So, on the summer solstice, which is in December in Peru, you would see the Sun just to the right of the right-most tower; for the winter solstice, in June, you would see the Sun rise to the left of the left-most tower; and in-between, the Sun would move up and down the horizon."

This means the ancient civilisation could have regulated a calendar, he said, by keeping track of the number of days it took for the Sun to move from tower to tower.

Sun cults
The site where the towers are based is about four square kilometres (1.5 square miles) in size, and is believed to be a ceremonial centre that was occupied in the 4th Century BC. It is based at the coast of Peru in the Casma-Sechin River Basin and contains many buildings and plazas, as well as a fortified temple that has attracted much attention.

The authors of the paper, who include Professor Ivan Ghezzi of the National Institute of Culture, Peru, believe the population was an ancient Sun cult and the observatory was used to mark special days in their solar calendar.

Professor Ruggles said: "The western observing point, and to some extent, the eastern one, are very restricted - you couldn't have got more than two or three people watching from them. And all the evidence suggests that there was a formal or ceremonial approach to that point and that there were special rituals going on there.


"This implies that you have someone special - the priests perhaps - who watched the Sun rise or set, while in the plaza next door, the crowds were feasting and could see the Sun rise, but not from that special perspective.

Written records suggest the Incas were making solar observations by 1500 AD, and that their religion centred on Sun worship.

"We know that in Inca times, towers were used to observe the Sun near the solstices, which makes you speculate that there are elements of cult practice that go back a lot further," Professor Ruggles told the BBC News website.

Article from: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6408231.stm

[Swamp Gas]

Interesting!! ;D

One thing this does is dispel the myth of humans coming into being in 4004 BC, unless what was meant by that is scientific, thinking, logical humans started searching the sky around that time.

[Mech]

It proves that not all societies were based on War, domination, ecocide and anti-humanism.

One has to wonder when the time started for humans to want to club each other.

I don't think it was something that came natural. My belief is that it was bred (literally) into us from some type of alien DNA.

Now scientists are saying that there is indeed a type of extraterrestrial DNA in us. Probably having an R-complex (reptilian inner brain) probably doesnt help either.

No wonder the people who run the planet want to keep us all in our baser insticts....survival, territoriality( TV sports) and pornography/titilation..(Not REAL sex), junk food, chemtrails...you name it.

It lowers our vibration...and that is the way to control society with "bread and circuses".

[Swamp Gas]

Sure enough!

Cro-Magnon vs Neanderthal. Two basic DNA strands running counter to each other. One designed to operate in zero-G or another dimension and the other for domination of a planetary surface. it would then seem like the earth is a breeding ground for both species, and the trick is to avoid Cro-Magnons bashing our heads in and eating our brains.

I heard something pretty cool on Tom Hartman's show today. It mentioned that early life was sulfur based and was oxygen was literally poison. Around one billion years ago there was a mutation, and only the oxygen/carbon mutation survived, but 90% of the sulfur-based life died off. I wonder whether the mutation was triggered by alien intervention?

[Mech]

If you look into the drawings, tablets and wall carvings of antiquity....many are peppered with images of strange beings...and some with "craft" in the skies.

Tsarion compiled some of these in his video series. He seems to also think that our DNA was altered and the EGO...that was once a survival mechanism....had a lot to do with our own self-destruction throughout the last few thousand years.

Terence McKenna seems to think that the dominator culture started sometime after the introduction of agriculture.

[Swamp Gas]

mech said:

Terence McKenna seems to think that the dominator culture started sometime after the introduction of agriculture.

To add to that, the consumption of psychoactive mushrooms probably activated another neural circuit in early humans. Agriculture took more imagination and work than the bashing of heads. However, the discovery of weapons could have saved early humans from saber toothed tigers and other large predators. So, there was an evolutionary need for the Cro-Magnon and its weapon building, although in modern times it is a remnant.