Category Archives: SOUTH AMERICA

BOLIVIA, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Laser mapping reveals the oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago

Laser mapping reveals the oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago

Laser mapping reveals the oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago
A lidar map of the city of Kunguints in the Ecuadorian Amazon reveals ancient streets lined with houses.

Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past two decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar.

The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society.

Lidar, which allows researchers to see through forest cover and reconstruct the ancient sites below, “is revolutionizing our understanding of the Amazon in pre-Columbian times,” says Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn who wasn’t involved in the new work.

Finding such an ancient urban network in the Upano Valley highlights the long-unrecognized diversity of ancient Amazonian cultures, which archaeologists are just beginning to be able to reconstruct.

Stéphen Rostain, an archaeologist at CNRS, France’s national research agency, began excavating in the Upano Valley nearly 30 years ago. His team focused on two large settlements, called Sangay and Kilamope, and found mounds organized around central plazas, pottery decorated with paint and incised lines, and large jugs holding the remains of the traditional maize beer chicha.

Radiocarbon dates showed the Upano sites were occupied from around 500 B.C.E. to between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. “I knew that we had a lot of mounds, a lot of structures,” Rostain says. “But I didn’t have a complete overview of the region.”

That changed when Ecuador’s National Institute for Cultural Heritage funded a lidar survey of the valley in 2015. Specially equipped planes beamed laser pulses into the forest and measured their return path, revealing topographic features otherwise invisible under the trees.

The lidar data allowed Rostain and his collaborators to see the connections between settlements and also uncovered many more. “Each day it was Christmas, with a new gift,” Rostain says. The team identified five large settlements and 10 smaller ones across 300 square kilometers in the Upano Valley, each densely packed with residential and ceremonial structures.

The cities are interspersed with rectangular agricultural fields and surrounded by hillside terraces where people planted crops, including the corn, manioc, and sweet potato found in past excavations. Wide, straight roads connected the cities to one another, and streets ran between houses and neighborhoods within each settlement. “We’re talking about urbanism,” says co-author Fernando Mejía, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.

A large complex of earthen platforms in Nijiamanch, one of the urban settlements in the Upano Valley.

Although the researchers don’t yet know how many people lived in the Upano Valley, the settlements were large: The core area of Kilamope, for example, covers an area comparable in size to the pyramid-studded Giza Plateau in Egypt or the main avenue of Teotihuacan in Mexico.

The extent of Upano’s landscape modification rivals the “garden cities” of the Classic Maya, the authors say. And what’s been discovered so far “is just the tip of the iceberg” of what could be found in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Mejía says.

The network of roads connecting the Upano sites suggests they all existed at the same time. They are a millennium older than other complex Amazonian societies, including Llanos de Mojos, a recently discovered ancient urban system in Bolivia.

The Upano Valley cities were denser and more interconnected than sites in Llanos de Mojos, Rostain says. “We say ‘Amazonia,’ but we should say ‘Amazonias,’” to capture the region’s ancient cultural diversity, he says.

The details of each culture, however, are still coming into view. People in both the Upano Valley and Llanos de Mojos were farmers who built roads, canals, and large civic or ceremonial buildings. But, “We’re just beginning to understand how these cities were functioning,” including how many people lived in them, who they traded with, and how they were governed, says Jaimes Betancourt, who studies Llanos de Mojos.

So it’s too soon to compare the Upano cities with societies such as the Classic Maya and Teotihuacan, which were “much more complex and more extensive,” says Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist and geographer at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in lidar and wasn’t involved in the work. Still, he says, “It’s amazing that we can still make these kinds of discoveries on our planet and find new complex cultures in the 21st century.”

SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Mystery Of Pyramids Submerged On the Cuban Coast More Than 50,000 Years Ago

Mystery Of Pyramids Submerged On the Cuban Coast More Than 50,000 Years Ago

In 2001, a Cuban-Canadian research team discovered what could be the ruins of an ancient city that sank more than 50,000 years ago between Yucatan and the western coast of Cuba. The team worked on “Project Exploramar,” which discovered the well-preserved USS Maine, three miles off the Cuban coast at 1150 m depth in 2000.

On December 7, 2001, BBC News announced the discovery of an ancient sunken city with unusual features off the coast of the Guanahacabibes peninsula in the Pinar del Río province of Cuba. It was found using an underwater robot equipped with cameras, lights, and sonars at more than 2,000 feet (650 meters) below the sea’s surface covering an area of 2 square kilometers (200 hectares).

The discovery was reported by Canadian Marine Engineer Paulina Zelitsky along with her husband Paul Weinzweig. She stumbled upon the fantastic geometric patterns which she found 2000 feet underwater while studying the grainy, black and white sonar images on her computer screen, searching for a scientific explanation.

Map showing the location of the supposed ancient city discovered by Paul Weinzweig and Paulina Zelitsky.

Paulina Zelitsky was born in Poland and studied engineering in the former Soviet Union. During the Cold War, she worked on a submarine base in Cuba but defected to Canada, where she married Paul Weinzweig, and together, they set up a company called Advanced Digital Communications (ADC).

The expedition that resulted in the discovery of megalithic structures off the coast of Cuba was a joint venture between ADC, the National Geographic Society, and the Centre for Marine Archaeology and Anthropology at the Cuban Academy of Sciences in Cuba. The Cuban government employed Zelitsky & her team to assist in the location of a sunken treasure that is believed to lie off the coast in a variety of vessels.

The structures, located at a depth of approximately 650 meters, seemed to have an urban pattern and generated significant headlines such as “The Discovery of Atlantis in Cuba.” ADA mapped the ocean floor surrounding Cuba for three years under contract with the Cuban government. Using their 265-foot ship, Ulises, they found about 20 shipwrecks, including the USS Maine, and vast oil fields in deep waters around the island.

The shapes appear to be arranged in patterns, the scientists say. The images, made with sophisticated sonar, show an area of about 100 by 200 meters.

“The structures we found on the side scan sonar simply are not explicable from a geological point of view. There is too much organization. too much symmetry, too much repetition of form,” Weinzweig said.

Discovery Made

According to Zelitsky, the research vessel Ulises sailed in the Yucatan Channel just off the west coast of Cuba that day, hired by the Castro government to look for undersea oil and gas, as well as old treasure ships if they could be found.

As Zelitsky and Weinzweig were watching the screen, the empty plain of the sea bed suddenly gave way to images of massive geometric shapes, apparently cut from stone. As more shapes came into view, some appeared to be arranged in patterns over a large area of about 20 square kilometers.

Some stones seemed to be cut into blocks, and some blocks looked perfectly aligned. They appeared to form corridors and the outlines of rooms, the two scientists said. There were round stones and pyramid-shaped ones, too.

“The sea bottom in that area is an undulating sand plain. What they were seeing should not have been there. We were shocked, and frankly, we were a little frightened. It was as though we should not be seeing what we were seeing. Our first thought was maybe we found some kind of secret military installation,” said Zelitsky.

“Nothing is known for certain now,” Weinzweig noted, “but the oral tradition in early Mexico speaks of an advanced civilization of tall white people who came from the East, and of an island that sank in a great natural disaster.” In the ancient language of some early Central American Indians, he said, “The word Atlantic means ‘our good father,’ or, ‘the place where our good father rests.’”

Paulina Zelitsky and her husband Paul Weinzweig.

What if the intriguing shapes found by the sonar are just carved over the centuries by whimsical nature? Zelitsky and Weinzweig did not think so. Besides, she added that they believed it to be the remnants of a city that had been built by locals upon a land bridge connecting Cuba to the mainland at some point, although such a bridge is not known to have ever existed.

“There is no granite in Cuba or the Yucatan. That area features limestone,” Zelitsky said. Granite is found in Central Mexico and was used by ancient people such as the Maya and an older civilization, the Olmec, in their construction of cities and buildings.

This site, perhaps built by a culture that far pre-dates the famous Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, might have been the victim of a vast, mysterious cataclysm that somehow dropped 2,000 feet beneath the surface of the sea. The Maya developed a magnificent civilization on the Yucatan Peninsula beginning about A.D. 250 and peaking about A.D. 900. Spain finally completed its conquest of the Maya in about 1500.

The Maya produced advanced architecture, paintings, pottery, and sculpture, and their grasp of mathematics and astronomy was remarkable for that time. They might have developed the first calendar and were among the first to make paper and books of tree bark. They cut large stone blocks and made buildings, courtyards, and pyramids, many for the worship of numerous gods.

But Zelitsky thought the Mega site pre-dates even the ancient Maya by a lot.

Then other voices arose that expressed their opinion about the discovery, such as Archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews of Bad Archeology. According to him, during the ice age, the city would never have been above sea level unless the place it was built on had sunk first.

A computer-generated mock-up of the supposed city

“However, if we take Plato at his word – as we must if we assume Atlantis to have been a historical place – the violence of its sinking makes it improbable that an entire city could have survived plunging more than 600 m into an abyss. Rapid sinking would devastate structures; the persistence of mud just below the surface suggests that the sinking was not to a depth of 600-740 m. Unless we are prepared to jettison Plato’s text – the sole source for the story of Atlantis – we cannot identify the features found by Paulina Zelitsky with Atlantis,” he explained.

A similar discovery was made off the coast of Yonaguni Island in Japan in 1986. The find was known as the “Yonaguni Monument,” an artificial rock formation submerged in prehistory. There, strange megaliths up to 5 stories high were found.

Are the Cuba underwater ruins really the sunken underwater city? Could it be another piece of evidence of the lost mystical Atlantis? Unfortunately, there is simply not enough imagery data, and the ruins might be anything. Interestingly, there seems to have been no real follow-up expedition to the site, which some have seen as rather suspicious and conspiratorial.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

73 intact Wari mummy bundles and Carved Masks Placed On False Heads Discovered In Peru

73 intact Wari mummy bundles and Carved Masks Placed On False Heads Discovered In Peru

73 intact Wari mummy bundles and Carved Masks Placed On False Heads Discovered In Peru
Carved wood mask on the so-called “false head” of a burial tomb, Pachacámac, Peru. 

At Pachacámac, an archaeological site southeast of Lima in Peru, archaeologists unearthed bundles of 73 intact mummy bundles, some containing “false-heads” masks made of wood or ceramics.

The site of the find is an extensive complex of cemeteries from different periods at the foot of the Painted Temple. Nearby, wooden staff with images of dignitaries of the Wari Empire were also discovered.

The Wari culture belongs to the most important prehistorical cultures of Peru. It developed in the mountainous valley of Ayacucho in Central Peru based on local traditions and the influences carried by the Tiwanaku culture that flourished in the altiplano of Bolivia.

The finds date to the latter part of the Middle Horizon, between 800-1100 AD, corresponding to the expansion period of the Wari Empire’s reign.

The discovery was made by a team of archaeologists from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, led by Professor Krzysztof Makowski at Pachacámac, south of Lima (Peru).

The cemetery complex was first discovered in the late 19th century by German archaeologist Max Uhle.

They had been widely damaged in the “extirpation of the idolatries” during the colonial period and would be repeatedly looted after Uhle’s excavation. The discovery of 73 undamaged burials is therefore of great archaeological significance.

Professor Makowski’s team, consisting of Cynthia Vargas, Doménico Villavicencio, and Ana Fernández, purposefully focused their research on a site where a tall wall that was constructed during the Inca and colonial periods had collapsed. It had been assumed that the piles of adobe bricks would have made it difficult for robbers to access the graves. This turned out to be accurate.

The discovery of a well-preserved assemblage of individual and group burials with dates precisely to the second half of the Middle Horizon.

In addition to the burial discoveries, archaeologists stumbled upon two wooden staffs near the cemetery within the remnants of a nearby settlement.

These staffs were found in a deposit of “thorny oyster” ( Spondylus princeps) shells, believed to have been imported from present-day Ecuador, situated to the north of the Wari Empire.

Staff carved in wood with depictions of two figures of the Wari Empire (800-1,100 AD).

The carved iconography on these staffs potentially suggests that the inhabitants of Pachacámac had established some form of contact with individuals from the Tiwanaku kingdom.

The Tiwanaku kingdom, positioned to the south of the Wari Empire, spanned the present-day regions of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile – an indicator of ancient trade routes and cultural exchanges.

The wooden staffs depict dignitaries donning headgear reminiscent of the styles worn in the Tiwanaku kingdom. The shared elements in the headgear design along with the stylistic similarities make these finds historically and culturally unique, according to Archeowiesci blog.

The team’s findings contradict the previous understanding of Pachacámac history. It was not, as historians have posited, a sacred city from the construction of the Old Temple during by the Lima culture ca. 200 A.D. through the arrival of the Spanish. During the Wari Empire, it was not the monumental sacred site that was one of the most important in the central Andes. That only happened after it was absorbed in the Inca Empire.

North-South profile at cemetery 1 in Pachacamac (Peru), the surface of which was partially disturbed by a wall from the Inca period, rebuilt in the early Colonial period.

Due to the state of preservation and the precision of the documentation of the context of the finds at the time of excavation, as well as the laboratory analyses, the burial assemblages uncovered are a veritable goldmine of information on the social position of men, women and children according to kinship ties, the care of invalids, indicators of war and domestic violence.

Nineteen of the bundles, with their lower part preserved and an intact structure, could be transferred to the laboratory in their entirety in order to document them three-dimensionally using CT scanning without having to be opened. Their contents will be analysed on a computer screen by bioarchaeologists Professor Dr. Andrew Nelson and Dr. Lucía Watson.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Mummies Buried at Ancient Temple Site Discovered in Peru

Mummies Buried at Ancient Temple Site Discovered in Peru

Mummies Buried at Ancient Temple Site Discovered in Peru

Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed four mummies of children believed to be at least 1,000 years old from what was once a sacred ceremonial space that is now in one of the oldest neighborhoods of modern-day Lima.

Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed four mummies of children believed to be at least 1,000 years old from what was once a sacred ceremonial space that is now in one of the oldest neighborhoods of modern-day Lima.

Researchers believe the children, discovered on Monday alongside the remains of an adult, come from the Ychsma culture that developed on Peru’s central coast before the Inca Empire rose to span swathes of the Andean region.

People stand around the Huaca La Florida archaeological site where five mummies, which according to archaeologists belong to the pre-Inca Ychsma culture that inhabited the central coast of Peru from approximately 900 to 1450 AD., were found, in Lima, Peru.

Some remains were found at the foot of a staircase on a small hill, which is believed to have once hidden a temple. Luis Takuda, an archaeologist in Lima’s Rimac district, said the temple was likely built 3,500 years ago.

“This whole area is a very important ceremonial chamber,” Takuda said. “The people who lived here during the Ychsma period still considered it a sacred space and therefore buried their dead here.”

Takuda said the mummies’ skulls still had hair on them. The remains were found alongside ceramics.

With a population of about 10 million, the Peruvian capital is home to some 400 archaeological ruins.

Peru’s largest archaeological sites are located outside Lima in places such as Cusco, which was the capital of the Inca Empire and fell to Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists reveal the face of Peru’s ‘Ice Maiden’ mummy

Archaeologists reveal the face of Peru’s ‘Ice Maiden’ mummy

In a remarkable unveiling, the potential true appearance of “Juanita,” Peru’s iconic mummy, a teenage Inca girl sacrificed over half a millennium ago on the lofty Andean peaks, has been revealed.

The bust was unveiled at a ceremony at the Andean Sanctuaries Museum of the Catholic University of Santa Maria in Arequipa

A lifelike sculpture revealing the potential living face of Peru’s most famous mummy, a teenage Inca girl sacrificed in a ritual over 500 years ago on the Andean peaks, has been unveiled.

The reconstructed mummy, known as “Juanita” or “The Ice Maiden”, is the result of collaborative efforts between a team of Polish and Peruvian scientists, in conjunction with Oscar Nilsson, a Swedish sculptor renowned for his expertise in facial reconstructions.

Johan Reinhard, the US anthropologist who found the mummy said he could not have imagined having a precise reconstruction of the mummy.

It took over 400 hours for Nilsson to reconstruct “Juanita,” from the research given by the Polish team.

Who was “The Ice Maiden”?

Archaeologists reveal the face of Peru's 'Ice Maiden' mummy
The mummy known as “Juanita” and the “Inca Ice Maiden”

Reinhard and his Peruvian climbing partner, Miguel Zárate, discovered the mummy in 1995 at an altitude of more than 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) on the snow-capped Ampato volcano.

Juanita, the mummy, was almost entirely preserved in a frozen state, retaining her internal organs, hair, blood, skin, and even the contents of her stomach.

In addition to the mummy, they stumbled upon a multitude of items that had been left as offerings to the Inca gods.

These included llama bones, small figurines, and fragments of pottery, scattered across the mountain slope from which the body had tumbled down.

Anthropological research places the sacrificial date of Juanita between A.D. 1440 and 1450 when she was aged between 13 and 15.

The likely cause of her death was identified as a severe blow to the right occipital lobe, as determined by researchers at Johns Hopkins University who conducted a CT scan.

She is considered one of the best-preserved mummies in the Andes and her remains can currently be viewed at the Museum of Andean Sanctuaries in Arequipa, Peru

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists discover 1,000-year-old mummy in Peru

Archaeologists discover 1,000-year-old mummy in Peru

Archaeologists have discovered a 1,000-year-old mummy — believed to be of an adult individual — in Peru’s capital, Lima.

The mummy, which was discovered at the Huaca Pucllana archaeological site in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood, was found alongside two ceramic vessels and textiles.

The discovery becomes the latest in a string of ancient discoveries made in Peru this year.

A general view of Huaca Pucllana, an archaeological site in a residential neighborhood where the remains of a 1,000-year-old mummy were discovered, in Lima, Peru, Sept. 6, 2023.

“I find it quite interesting that right in the heart of Miraflores, in the middle of the city, surrounded by modern buildings and constructions, an important site is still preserved,” said lead archaeologist Mirella Ganoza.

Ganoza noted the mummy had long hair and was found seated with bent legs. The remains of the ancient figure were also found with its jaw and long hair still preserved.

A general view of Huaca Pucllana, an archaeological site in a residential neighborhood where the remains of a 1,000-year-old mummy were discovered, in Lima, Peru, Sept. 6, 2023.

The mummy is thought to date back to 1,000 A.D, belonging to the Yschsma culture, inhabitants of whom lived south of Lima.

“This discovery helps to complement the information we know about the Ychsma culture so far,” said Ganoza.

The discovery is the latest in string of century-old discoveries of mummies and pre-Hispanic remains made in Lima, including the discovery in June on a hilltop of a mummy found surrounded by cocoa leaves.

Archaeologists discover 1,000-year-old mummy in Peru
A general view of Huaca Pucllana, an archaeological site in a residential neighborhood where the remains of a 1,000-year-old mummy were discovered, in Lima, Peru, Sept. 6, 2023.

In March, a Peruvian man was arrested and charged for illegal possession of historical patrimony after he was found in a possession of a mummy believed to be 600 to 800 years old in his cooler delivery bag.

The Huaca Pucllana site is viewed as a Pandora’s Box and archaeologists anticipate that many more artifacts could be found.

A general view of Huaca Pucllana, an archaeological site in a residential neighborhood where the remains of a 1,000-year-old mummy were discovered, in Lima, Peru, Sept. 6, 2023.
PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists Find Massive Underground World Belonging To A Long Lost Civilization In Peru

Archaeologists Find Massive Underground World Belonging To A Long Lost Civilization In Peru

Researchers in Peru have discovered a complex underground world belonging to the ancient Chavín culture that has been identified as burial chambers that date back thousands of years.

The culture developed in the northern Andean highlands of Peru between 1,300 and 550 BC. The Chavín extended its influence to other civilizations along the coast.

The Ancient Chavin civilization developed advanced knowledge not only in metallurgy, but in soldering, and temperature control. The ancient Chavin used early techniques to develop refined gold work.

Not, researchers have discovered galleries, ceramics and even a place where this civilization carried out burials, located beneath the surface. They say it’s the most important archaeological discovery made in the last 50 years.

Archaeologists Find Massive Underground World Belonging To A Long Lost Civilization In Peru
Seen in this image are the new underground galleries that have been found containing the first human burials of the Chavin period.

Since June of 2018, a team of archaeologists has unearthed three new galleries in an area adjacent to the circular plaza of Chavín. In the place, they have found remarkable pieces of ceramics, utensils and intact human burials.

According to an American anthropologist and archaeologist John Rick, in charge of the Archaeological and Conservation Research Program of Chavín, the three discovered galleries come from the late period of this civilization that developed between 1,300 and 550 BC.

“What these galleries show is that Chavín has a much larger underground world than we think,” said Rick.

The Ministry of Culture estimates that to date only 15% of the area has been explored.

Inside one of these underground galleries, archaeologists discovered artefacts that belonged to the later Huaraz culture.

These successive occupations, found at different levels in the archaeological complex demonstrate the cultural and religious importance that Chavin had in the central highlands for centuries.

The project’s specialists used small robots with built-in micro-cameras to carry out the explorations. These machines – designed on-site by engineers from Stanford University – entered very small areas and discovered cavities in the Chavin labyrinths, where pottery was preserved.

Chavin de Huantar was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. So far 35 interconnected underground passageways have been found at the site, Peru’s culture ministry said.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Tomb from the Ichma Culture found in Peru

Tomb from the Ichma Culture found in Peru

During excavations in Ancon, a district of northern Lima Province, Peru, archaeologists have revealed a tomb from the Ichma Culture.

Around the 11th century, the Ichma emerged in the valleys of the Lurin and Rimac Rivers to the south of Lima.

This pre-Inca culture endured until the 1469s when they were assimilated into the Inca Empire.

Tomb from the Ichma Culture found in Peru
The tomb contains remains, offerings, and the funerary bundle that was found along with various offering artifacts, such as mate vessels and ceramics.

It is thought that the Ichma were an Aymara-speaking population that settled in the coastal regions close to Lima in the aftermath of the Wari empire’s decline.

During this period, multiple tiny kingdoms and alliances were established, with the Chancay Culture ruling the northern part of Lima and the Ichma Culture dominating the southern part.

The Ichma had their capital, previously known as Ishma, called Pachacamac. There, they erected at least 16 pyramids and worshipped the deity Pacha Kamaq, the god of creation.

Calidda company workers made the archaeologists aware of the antique tomb when they were constructing a new pipeline.

This sepulcher dated back 500 years to the end of the Ichma period, and the body was placed in a hole, covered with plant-fiber blankets, and bound together with ropes tied in a geometric design.

At the burial site, there are several items meant to be used as funerary gifts, like pottery and containers for a mate — a type of herbal beverage made from dried leaves of the yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis) plant, which many cultures in the Americas steep in hot water to make a caffeine-rich drink.

Caravedo, a representative of Calidda, stated that their company has assigned archaeologists to monitor their Gas Natural installation projects to ensure the preservation of the city’s archaeological landmarks.

Additionally, they collaborate with the Ministry of Culture to rescue and protect any discoveries.