"Lacing the beer served at their feasts with hallucinogens may have helped an ancient Peruvian people known as the Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire, according to a new paper published in the journal Antiquity. Recent excavations at a remote Wari outpost called Quilcapampa unearthed seeds from the vilca tree that can be used to produce a potent hallucinogenic drug. The authors think the Wari held one big final blowout before the site was abandoned." Source: Ars Technica.
An old dig in progress at Quilcapampa. Video from 2015.
The Wari, and presumably other cultures of the time, used the Anadenantherea colubrina tree, aka the vilca tree, for a variety of purposes, and its beans contained a powerful entheogen:
"The beans of A. colubrina are used to make a snuff called vilca (sometimes called cebil). The bean pods are roasted to facilitate removal of the husk, followed by grinding with a mortar and pestle into a powder and mixed with a natural form of calcium hydroxide (lime) or calcium oxide. The main active constituent of vilca is bufotenin; to a much lesser degree DMT and 5-MeO-DMT are also present." (Wikipedia)
"Caral, or Caral-Chupacigarro, was a large settlement [inhabited between the 26th and 20th centuries BC] in the Supe Valley , near Supe, Barranca Province, Peru, some 200 kilometres (120 mi) north of Lima. Caral is the most ancient city of the Americas and a well-studied site of the Norte Chico civilization" (Wikipedia)
"A team of researchers with the National University of San Marcos has found and recovered a well-preserved pre-Incan mummy in an underground tomb. They have posted their findings on the university's Noticias page." Source: Phys.org.
"Prior research has shown that the area on the outskirts of modern Lima was once part of a bustling ancient community of as many as 10,000 people. Those who lived there were mostly traders, serving as go-betweens for people from the mountains and those who lived on the coast of what is now Peru. Researchers have been excavating a site there called the Cajamarquilla archaeological complex, which is located approximately 25 kilometers from Lima."
"Lying on the northern outskirts of the city of Cusco in Peru, lies the walled complex of Saksaywaman (Sacsayhuaman). The site is famed for its remarkable large dry stone walls with boulders carefully cut to fit together tightly without mortar ... This precision, combined with the rounded corners of the blocks, the variety of their interlocking shapes, and the way the walls lean inward have puzzled scientists for decades." Source: Ancient Origins (2014).
Note: According to Wikipedia, Saksaywaman was built by the Incas in the 15th century. This seems to be the mainstream consensus.
Saksaywaman is a masterpiece of ancient engineering. According to Wikipedia, "The stones used in the construction of these terraces are among the largest used in any building in pre-Hispanic America. They display a precision of cutting and fitting that is unmatched in the Americas. The stones are so closely spaced that a single piece of paper will not fit between many of the stones." The Ancient Origins article quoted above goes into some detail about how the complex's walls could have been built and how their massive stones might have been transported. The next video describes one theory about how the walls were engineered.
Did the Inca build the intricately fitted stone walls of Sacsayhuaman or were they the work of some earlier "lost civilization?" Both possibilities might be true. The walls show clear signs that they were constructed in different stages over the years, perhaps by different cultures building on top of each other. And there is some reason to believe that the complex was already in existence, at least in some form, when the Incas took over the site. According to Megalith Builders, for instance, sections of the walls were first built by the Killke culture (900 -1200 AD) which lived in the area before the arrival of the Incas in the 13th century.
According to Wikipedia, "Killke culture flourished in highland Peru in the Late Intermediate Period around what is now Cusco. They built the massive fortress, Saksaywaman, during the 12th century [next video]. Later, the fortress was used by the Inca, following their occupation of the region."
Note: the Wikipedia article on the Killke culture contradicts its article on Sacsayhuaman, which says that the complex was built by the Incas. There's a lot of confusion about who the builders actually were in the sources I've seen.
This whole subject is very confusing. For example, Sacsayhuaman was first occupied around 900 AD, according to History Things, four centuries before the Incas conquered the area. The Killke culture, according to Wikipedia, existed between 900 and 1200 AD. If these dates are reliable, they seem to imply that the complex was already in existence in some form when the Killke culture appeared. If that's believable, then it's possible that a civilization even older than the Killke built the first walls. This is pure conjecture, naturally, but it's not completely implausible:
"Sacsayhuamán may still be hundreds or even thousands of years older than the Killke culture. There seems to be no reason why building in the Cuzco and Sacsayhuamán area would have only begun in 1100 AD when megalithic building had begun much earlier in other areas…" -- D.H. Childress, quoted in Ancient Pages.
I like rogue archaeologists like Childress -- they're entertaining, if nothing else -- but after sifting through all these various sources of unknown reliability, I'm guessing that the megalithic walls of Peru were probably built in stages by the Killke culture and the Incas. Like the Mayans and Aztecs, they were master stone-workers and perfectly capable of constructing these spectacular sites. How they did it, though, remains a mystery.
"A new study counters the view that tropical forests were pristine natural environments prior to modern agriculture and industrialization. Moreover, humans have in fact been having a dramatic impact on such forest ecologies for tens of thousands of years, through techniques ranging from controlled burning of sections of forest to plant and animal management to clear-cutting." Source: Science Daily (2017).
Comment: Humans have lived in the rainforests for thousands of years, but there's a big difference between the controlled burns and clear-cutting practiced by aboriginal tribes and the massive destruction which started during the last century.
For example, the 2012 NASA time-lapse video above shows the scale of the deforestation taking place in one section of the Amazon rainforest between around 1975 and 2010. The changes are pretty dramatic and this kind of destruction is happening all over the world.
According to Wikipedia, deforestation "accelerated significantly between 1991 and 2004, reaching an annual forest loss rate of 27,423 km² in 2004. Though the rate of deforestation has been slowing since 2004 (with re-accelerations in 2008 and 2013), the remaining forest cover continues to dwindle."
Deforestation is an inevitable result of industrialization, economic growth and overpopulation, and the loss of wilderness, even if it hasn't been pristine for millennia, doesn't just have ecological effects. For instance, I've always thought that one of the most appealing things about the ancient world is that it was still an unexplored wilderness to a large extent.
When Julius Caesar wrote his history of the wars in Gaul, he mentioned at one point that no one knew what lay on the other side of the Black Forest. Technically that wasn't true, of course -- the Germanic tribes had been living in the forest for a long time and there was a whole continent full of people to the east -- but the point is that it was still possible at the time for large sections of the planet to be terra incognita, even to a culture as large and sophisticated as the Roman republic.
The loss of this terra incognita has a mass psychological impact. It's the closing of the mental frontier. Like air travel, the disappearance of the wilderness makes the world a smaller place where most people end up concentrated in urban centers, an army of disposable proles who can be found by the millions in shanty slums and megacities surrounded by hundreds of miles of countryside which have been turned into agricultural factory floors.
Deforestation, industrialization and population growth are all connected. There's a feedback loop involved here. Clearing the forest makes it possible to grow more crops which leads to population growth which creates a demand for more crops which leads to more deforestation, and industrialization just makes the whole process faster and more efficient. Villages turn into towns which grow into cities and spread across the land like outbreaks of tobacco mosaic virus while the map changes color from green to brown and concrete gray.
In the near term, the situation looks grim. In the long term, it doesn't matter because it's not possible to eradicate wilderness. The current deforestation is only temporary. Wilderness always returns when civilization collapses and it can happen very quickly. Most people would say that this is no excuse for complacency, but what exactly can be done to stop the loss of wilderness on any meaningful scale? Doing that would require deindustrialization, depopulation and deliberate attempts to stop development in societies which are still struggling to pull themselves out of extreme poverty.
This 2015 NASA Goddard video demonstrates how windblown dust from the Sahara Desert travels as far as the Amazon in South America. Presumably, dust from Asia travels in the same way, perhaps in an easterly direction -- I'm not sure.
"Historians and archaeologists debate what led to the decline of Polynesian society on Rapa Nui. Although one popular narrative holds that the creation of the famous Easter Island statues depleted resources and led to environmental collapse, more recent research indicates that collapse began when Europeans brought disease and conflict. Whatever the case, Polynesians on Rapa Nui never reached the levels of agricultural productivity seen on an archipelago settled around the same time: Hawai‘i." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"According to new research, small size and isolation might have set up Rapa Nui for failure from the beginning. Researchers knew that by the time Polynesians arrived, Rapa Nui’s soils were probably already less fertile than those on Hawai‘i. Now, analysis of soil samples has shown that an important fertilizer — dust blown over from Asia — doesn’t even reach the isolated island (now a part of Chile, more than 3,500 kilometers away on the South American mainland). This finding could help researchers better understand the environmental challenges faced by ancient Polynesians."
Note: According to this research, Easter Island was doomed from the start because of a lack of nutrients in the soil:
Researchers "determined that by the time humans arrived on Rapa Nui, heavy rains had already leached many nutrients from the soil. The new soil analysis shows that Rapa Nui also lacks traces of mica, quartz, and rare earth minerals that don’t naturally occur in volcanic rock. Hawaiian soils contain these minerals thanks to continental dust blown in from Asia."
Video from Oct. 9, 2020. I can't find much of anything about this complex, but some cursory information and photographs can be found at the Hidden Inca Tours site.
"On the north coast of Peru, researchers have discovered the oldest adobe architecture in the Americas, constructed with ancient mud bricks carved from natural clay deposits created by floods caused by El Nino." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The pre-Hispanic bricks — carved from sedimentary layers versus created by mixing clay, temper and water — date the invention of adobe architecture to more than 5,100 years ago, according to the international research team led by archaeologist Ana Cecilia Mauricio."
"Phorusrhacids, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorousflightless birds that were the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era; their conventionally accepted temporal range covers from 62 to 1.8 million years ago." Source: Wikipedia.
Terror birds spread into North America around 2.7 million years ago after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents, leading to a cross-migration of flora and fauna known as the Great American Interchange.
It's possible that early humans coexisted with descendants of these monsters in South America. According to Wikipedia, "...reports from Uruguay of new findings of relatively small forms [of terror birds] dating to 18,000 and 96,000 years ago would imply that phorusrhacids survived there until very recently (i.e., until the late Pleistocene); the initial report of such a recent date has been questioned."
"In the 15th century, a group of elite women in the ancient city of Chan Chan spent their days making textiles while living ... and in death." Source: Live Science.
"Archaeologists recently uncovered a mass grave in the Trujillo province of modern-day Peru that held the remains of about 25 people, mostly women and a couple of children and teenagers, surrounded by textile tools, including needles, spindles and chalk, according to a statement from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture.
"Because the women were buried with these items, they were likely 'people dedicated to textiles,' according to the statement. The women were buried in a seated position, with their legs bent, and most were under age 30."
Note: Like the rest of South and Central America, Peru seems to be littered with mass graves. Just to give one example, back in 2018 archaeologists discovered what may be "the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas — and likely in world history --" on the north coast of the country.
Deforestation & The Loss Of Terra Incognita
"A new study counters the view that tropical forests were pristine natural environments prior to modern agriculture and industrialization. Moreover, humans have in fact been having a dramatic impact on such forest ecologies for tens of thousands of years, through techniques ranging from controlled burning of sections of forest to plant and animal management to clear-cutting." Source: Science Daily (2017).
Comment: Humans have lived in the rainforests for thousands of years, but there's a big difference between the controlled burns and clear-cutting practiced by aboriginal tribes and the massive destruction which started during the last century.
For example, the 2012 NASA time-lapse video above shows the scale of the deforestation taking place in one section of the Amazon rainforest between around 1975 and 2010. The changes are pretty dramatic and this kind of destruction is happening all over the world.
According to Wikipedia, deforestation "accelerated significantly between 1991 and 2004, reaching an annual forest loss rate of 27,423 km² in 2004. Though the rate of deforestation has been slowing since 2004 (with re-accelerations in 2008 and 2013), the remaining forest cover continues to dwindle."
Deforestation is an inevitable result of industrialization, economic growth and overpopulation, and the loss of wilderness, even if it hasn't been pristine for millennia, doesn't just have ecological effects. For instance, I've always thought that one of the most appealing things about the ancient world is that it was still an unexplored wilderness to a large extent.
When Julius Caesar wrote his history of the wars in Gaul, he mentioned at one point that no one knew what lay on the other side of the Black Forest. Technically that wasn't true, of course -- the Germanic tribes had been living in the forest for a long time and there was a whole continent full of people to the east -- but the point is that it was still possible at the time for large sections of the planet to be terra incognita, even to a culture as large and sophisticated as the Roman republic.
The loss of this terra incognita has a mass psychological impact. It's the closing of the mental frontier. Like air travel, the disappearance of the wilderness makes the world a smaller place where most people end up concentrated in urban centers, an army of disposable proles who can be found by the millions in shanty slums and megacities surrounded by hundreds of miles of countryside which have been turned into agricultural factory floors.
Deforestation, industrialization and population growth are all connected. There's a feedback loop involved here. Clearing the forest makes it possible to grow more crops which leads to population growth which creates a demand for more crops which leads to more deforestation, and industrialization just makes the whole process faster and more efficient. Villages turn into towns which grow into cities and spread across the land like outbreaks of tobacco mosaic virus while the map changes color from green to brown and concrete gray.
In the near term, the situation looks grim. In the long term, it doesn't matter because it's not possible to eradicate wilderness. The current deforestation is only temporary. Wilderness always returns when civilization collapses and it can happen very quickly. Most people would say that this is no excuse for complacency, but what exactly can be done to stop the loss of wilderness on any meaningful scale? Doing that would require deindustrialization, depopulation and deliberate attempts to stop development in societies which are still struggling to pull themselves out of extreme poverty.
There are still sparsely populated and little explored places on Earth, but the real terra incognita now is outer space.
Posted at 06:58 AM in Archeology News, Climate, Commentary, Current Affairs, South America, Videos | Permalink