Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb under a home in the heart of Peru’s capital, Lima, a burial believed to hold remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments.
500-year old structure, found in working-class area of Lima, thought to contain remains of society elites
The lead archaeologist, Julio Abanto, told Reuters the 500-year-old tomb contained “multiple funerary bundles” tightly wrapped in cloth.
He said those entombed were probably from the elite of Ruricancho society, a culture that once populated present-day Lima before the powerful Inca came to rule a sprawling empire across the length of western South America in the 1400s.
Hipolito Tica, the owner of the house in Lima, said he was overcome with emotion at the surprise find. “It’s amazing. I really have no other words to describe it,” he said, expressing a hope that future generations in the working-class San Juan de Lurigancho neighbourhood would better appreciate the rich history all around them.
Excavations began in May after Tica’s building plans for his property triggered a required archaeological survey. The district of Lima is known for hundreds of past archaeological finds from cultures that developed before and after the Inca.
Second Possible Seventh-Century Mosque Uncovered in Israel
Archaeologists working on the site of the mosque at Rahat.Credit: Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority
Three years after finding one of the world’s earliest rural mosques in southern Israel, archaeologists have found a second one in the same town. Both mosques were discovered during different stages of salvation excavations in the Bedouin town of Rahat, in the northern Negev, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday. The excavations are directed by Oren Shmueli, Dr. Elena Kogan-Zehavi and Dr. Noe David Michael on behalf of the IAA.
The two mosques are both approximately 1,200 years old, though precise dating is challenging under the circumstances – and the newly unearthed one was built a few hundred meters from the ruins of a strangely magnificent mansion that had apparently belonged to wealthy Byzantine Christians.
An aerial view of the seventh-century mosque.Credit: Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority
Facing Mecca
The newly found mosque is classic in structure, including a square room and a wall facing the “sacred” direction of the Kaaba in the holy city of Mecca. The structure also contains a niche shaped in a half-circle, called a mihrab, located along the center of the wall and also pointing southward toward Mecca.
Why is dating the mosques a problem? In the case of the one found first and reported in 2019, it seems the people who came to pray came empty-handed, Kogan-Zehavi explains. Since the sites at Rahat – five are presently under excavation – are dated mainly by pottery, if the worshippers came without any, that is a problem. That one was dated based on finds in the buildings around it, Kogan-Zehavi says.
This second one did contain finds – in the sense that it had been built above a Christian farm, which had been discovered earlier. Thus, they reached the conclusion that it dates to the early days of Islam, the seventh century. In other words, we cannot say whether the two mosques operated at the same time – but there is no reason to think they didn’t, she says.
An aerial view of the mosque at Rahat in southern Israel.Credit: Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority
The ancient farming settlement at Rahat operated in the late Byzantine and early Islamic periods. It is not known, certainly not regarding the house, whether the inhabitants were Islamic nomads who swept in from the desert and settled down, or were local converts from Christianity, Kogan-Zehavi says. In any case, a city this was not; ancient Rahat was farmland, and the mosques were not central in the town; they were on its periphery. Located a few kilometres apart, each could have served its immediately local community, calling the faithful in adjacent farms to prayer, Kogan-Zehavi says. So, even though there may have been two contemporary mosques in the same settlement, this was still not a town, let alone a city, and they can still be called extremely early rural mosques.
Elsewhere, in Har Hanegev – a range of rather small, barren mountains deep in the desert – archaeologists have found early mosques built in open land, not associated with settlements. They may have been open to the air, without roofs, and served to call people in the area to convene, Kogan-Zehavi says. The ones at Rahat are closer to settlement, but do stand alone. The newly unearthed one could have been used by several dozen worshippers at a time.
She adds that in urban areas, one finds more early mosques but this was hinterland, and people didn’t move to farm in the Negev because that was their dream. Nicer places in Israel were “full” and they had no choice, Kogan-Zehavi explains.
Remains of the palatial Byzantine structure at Rahat.Credit: Assaf Peretz, Israel Antiquities Authority
Family secrets
This leads us to the Byzantine manse by which the second early mosque in Rahat had been built, which was first reported in 2020. It was an extraordinary structure for the Negev, more akin to a small palace. Around 30 by 30 meters (nearly 100 by 100 feet) in area, it featured lovely frescoed walls – a thing not found before in ancient domiciles in this region. It had halls with stone pavement, some paved with imported marble (Israel has enormous amounts of chalkstone and limestone but no marble worthy of mention), plastered floors and was divided into sections.
Remains of fine tableware and precious glassware were found, also indicative of wealth. This structure was not a fortified citadel built to repel invaders from the desert, though it may have had a small guardhouse, plausibly built to deter thieves. Not one but two wells were dug by this mansion. A quick dig showed that the western section had large, elaborate rooms that could have served for hosting because of the great breeze, the archaeologists say. The eastern section also featured a large hall.
And what does this mini-palace in seventh-century Rahat indicate? That somebody had money. In one section Kogan-Zehavi and the team discovered two ovens, one of which was far too big to have served just for the culinary arts. Right by it was a water cistern, which leads her to theorize just how the occupants got so rich. They were making soap, she postulates.
Pottery from the early Muslim period found at the site.Credit: Yasmin Orbach / Israel Antiquities Authority
Items from the Early Muslim period that were found during the dig in Rahat.Credit: Yasmin Orbach / Israel Antiquities Authority
“Soap made from olive oil is one of the industries that Islam brought to civilisation. And Israel, according to Islamic historians, is one of the areas where soap was made and exported throughout the Islamic world,” she says. “The actual recipe for the soap would be kept secret and passed down through generations, and made some families very rich.”
It bears adding that soap was not invented in the Islamic period, early or otherwise, it goes back to Babylonian and Roman times. But what the earliest soap was used for is not clear; it may have been to clean clothes, not the body. And the word soap apparently derives from the Celtic word, sipa.
Why would anybody build a soap factory in the Negev of all places? Possibly because their recipe included a wild herb plant indigenous to the Negev – and the site is near the South Hebron Hills, where there was heavy production of olive oil during the period in question.
“You don’t need quality oil to make soap. You can use the residue,” Kogan-Zehavi explains.
Yet this lovely manse was abandoned, for reasons we do not know.
An aerial view of the luxurious estate building at Rahat.Credit: Assaf Peretz, Israel Antiquities Authority
No evidence of destruction, violence or hostilities has been found, Kogan-Zehavi says. None. It seems to have been abandoned, after which the mosque arose at the site. On a nearby hilltop, the archaeologists found other well-to-do estates that were constructed in a completely different manner – apparently mudbrick-walled rooms surrounding a courtyard – and seem to be from a later time.
In any case, the sites in this area operated continuously from the Byzantine to the early Islamic period and were then all abandoned in the ninth century, after 150 to 200 years. The cause was not marauders or war, and likely not even a passing pestilence, because the signs all show the people packed up in a leisurely and orderly manner before decamping, Kogan-Zehavi notes.
Wall decoration in the estate building from the Early Islamic period.Credit: Assaf Peretz, Israel Antiquities Authority
“They packed up all their goodies and left. So there isn’t much left for us to analyze. We don’t know where they went,” she says.
So the new discoveries shed a little more light, but not much at this point, on the relations between the late Byzantine Christians and early Islamic rulers in the Negev. The evidence by and large indicates that relations were decent – as said, there is no sign of aggression in the archaeological record.
“We know that nearby there was a monastery that operated until the seventh century, and was abandoned. There’s no sign of violence there either, and it seems to have continued to operate under Islamic rule,” Kogan-Zehavi says. “But there was abandonment at some stage. We also do find farms that continued to operate from the Byzantine to the Islamic periods, but we can’t say if the occupants converted. And we also find new sites from the Islamic period that aren’t built atop older structures: they show expansion, the gain of new territory.”
Finds discovered at the site dated to the Early Islamic period.Credit: Yasmin Orbach / Israel Antiquities Authority
Finds discovered at the site dated to the Early Islamic period.Credit: Yasmin Orbach, Israel Antiquities Authority
Aboriginal Artwork In The Kimberley Could Be Among Oldest In The World, Scientists Say
Archaeologists and Aboriginal elders are hoping the most comprehensive study of rock art in the Kimberley region will confirm the images are among the oldest made by humans anywhere in the world. More than a dozen scientists took part in two field trips to study remote faces in Dambimangari and Balanggarra country.
Scientists hope they can establish the age of rock art in the Kimberley
They used pioneering techniques to collect and analyse hundreds of samples to narrow down the timeframes in which the striking images of people, animals and shells were made. Professor Peter Veth, from the University of Western Australia, said they were expecting to have the first results through by the end of the year.
“We expect some of those dates to be old, and some of them will be extremely old,” he said.
“We believe that this art will be as old, if not older, than that art in Europe, and that will make the Kimberley and all of its art, with its living, cultural connections, of world significance.”
Establishing firm dates for rock art is notoriously difficult, but dates of around 40,000 years have been recorded for images in Indonesia and Spain. In Australia, dating has been relatively limited, but dates of between 13,000 to 15,000 years old have been recorded in Queensland and up to 28,000 years in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.
Given that Aboriginal people are believed to have arrived in northern Australia up to 50,000 years ago, Professor Veth said there was potential for older dates to emerge. Professor Veth said the Kimberley region had one of the most diverse and abundant collections of Indigenous rock art in Australia.
Aboriginal people are thought to have arrived in northern Australia up to 50,000 years ago
“There are probably no reliable dates for the Kimberley, and yet here is one of the largest rock art galleries in the world, and probably the earliest concentration of figurative art anywhere in the world,” he said.
“We’re literally on the cusp now of dating it properly now, with all these different techniques, for the first time, so it’s incredibly exciting … it’s a bit of a cyclonic event.
“I think there will be surprises, things we totally don’t expect.”
The team used several different dating techniques on each painting to come up with the most reliable set of dates possible.
Their focus was on analysing the tiny samples of material taken from both under and on top of the painting, to narrow down the period in which it was created. It was a painstaking process for scientists like Helen Green, from the University of Melbourne.
The geologist pioneered a technique to date tiny crusts of dirt that form over an image in the hundreds, or thousands of years since it was created.
Indigenous rangers accompanied scientists to ensure nothing was damaged during the testing phase
“We can see where a crust has formed over the squiggles of pigment, so we can use a small chisel to chip off a little piece,” she said.
“It will let us know that the art underneath that is older than the age that we get for that crust.”
She said she was now in lockdown at the university’s laboratories processing hundreds of tiny samples.
“You’re just really eager once you’ve collected all the samples to get in the lab and get the results, so yes it’s a really exciting time for us,” Ms Green said.
Watching closely are the Dambimangari and Balanggarra people.
Members of their ranger groups accompanied the researchers on their field trips to learn more about their sacred sites and ensure they were not damaged.
For young Balanggarra ranger Scott Unhango, the field trip was the first opportunity he had to visit rock art sites he had heard about in stories.
“I find it … interesting,” he said. “The powerful men, the great leaders, put these paintings on these walls and rocks.”
“When you come out here, you can sit down and listen and learn from our people and others, throughout the Kimberley … listen [to] what they got to tell you, and how important the stories are and the land and the people.”
For many elders, pinpointing creation dates for their art is of little concern. Elders like Balanggarra man Augustine Unhango have their own deeply felt understanding of how and when the images were made. But he said he recognised the value in documenting the rock art sites for posterity.
“It’s good to be teaching our kids as they’re growing up about the sacred places and the rock art, and to keep track of our sacred sites.”
Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years — but researchers aren’t sure who made them. The eye-popping artefacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal.
Two of the rhino’s limb bones are smashed in as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino’s ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.
But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. The research — partially funded by the National Geographic Society — pushes back occupation of the Philippines to before the known origin of our species, Homo sapiens. The next-earliest evidence of Philippine hominins comes from Luzon’s Callao Cave, in the form of a 67,000-year-old foot bone.
“It was surprising to find such an old peopling of the Philippines,” says lead study author Thomas Ingicco, an archaeologist with France’s National Museum of Natural History. While the researchers don’t know which archaic cousin of ours butchered the rhino, the find will likely cause a stir among people studying the human story in the South Pacific — especially those wondering how early hominins got to the Philippines in the first place.
“I think it’s pretty spectacular,” says Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who was not involved in the work.
“While there had been claims for early hominins in places like the Philippines, there wasn’t any good evidence until now.”
Dating With Confidence
Several of the habitable islands across the South Pacific have long been hemmed off by swaths of open ocean, so it was thought that humans’ ancient cousins couldn’t have made it to them without knowing how to sail. But as the saying goes, life finds a way. In 2004, researchers unveiled Homo floresiensis, which lived on the isolated island of Flores for hundreds of thousands of years. In 2016, researchers also found stone tools on Sulawesi, an island north of Flores. As National Geographic reported at the time, the Sulawesi tools date to at least 118,000 years ago, or some 60,000 years before the first anatomically modern humans arrived.
“It’s really, really exciting — it’s now becoming increasingly clear that ancient forms of hominins were able to make significant deep-sea crossings,” says Adam Brumm, a paleoanthropologist at Griffith University who studies H. floresiensis.
In search of similar sites, Ingicco and Dutch biologist John de Vos went to Kalinga, a site in northern Luzon with a reputation for yielding ancient bones. Researchers had found animal bones and stone tools there since the 1950s, but those scattered remains couldn’t be dated. To prove that ancient hominins had lived at Kalinga, de Vos and Ingicco needed to find artefacts that were still buried. In 2014, the team dug a test pit at Kalinga about seven feet to the side. Almost immediately, the researchers started finding bones that belonged to a long-extinct rhinoceros. Soon, they had uncovered an entire skeleton, as well as stone tools left behind by its butchers.
To get an age range for the site, the team measured the sediments and the rhino’s teeth to see how much radiation they had naturally absorbed over time. In addition, they measured the natural uranium content of one of the rhino’s teeth, since that element decays like clockwork into thorium. In the mud around the rhino’s bones, they also found a speck of melted glass from an asteroid impact dated to about 781,000 years ago.
“Nowadays, it’s necessary that you try various methods to nail the dates because, in the past, there have been so many dates that have proved unreliable,” says study coauthor Gerrit van den Bergh, a University of Wollongong sedimentologist.
The Unusual Suspects
The list of possible toolmakers includes the Denisovans, a ghost lineage of hominins known from DNA and a handful of Siberian fossils. The leading candidate, though, is the early hominin Homo erectus, since it definitely made its way into southeast Asia. The Indonesian island of Java has H. erectus fossils that are more than 700,000 years old.
Ingicco’s team suggests that the butchers may have been Luzon’s version of H. floresiensis, which may have descended from a population of H. Erectus that ended up on Flores. Over millennia, the H. Erectus there may have evolved to live efficiently on a predator-free island, shrinking in a process called island dwarfism. In 2010, a team led by University of Philippines Diliman archaeologist Armand Mijares found the Callao Cave foot bone, which has measurements that overlap with both modern humans and H. floresiensis. Was this Luzon hominin a homegrown hobbit, descended from H. Erectus castaways that arrived hundreds of thousands of years before? It’s too soon to say.
“We don’t have any information about 600,000 years of prehistory, [so] it’s a reach,” says Petraglia.
Riding Out the Storm?
Whoever they were, the toolmakers’ ancestors may have taken one of two migration routes into the Philippines, according to Ingicco’s team: a west-to-east route from Borneo or Palawan, or a north-to-south route from China and Taiwan. But it’s an open question how these hominins crossed the open ocean.
It’s tempting to think that our extinct cousins used rudimentary boats: When news of the Callao Cave remains broke in 2010, some experts chalked up their presence to ancient seafarers. But the idea is still considered farfetched. Rhinos and elephant-like creatures also made it to Luzon, and they clearly didn’t build boats.
The Philippines’ Tubbataha is host to 600 species of fish, 13 species of whales and dolphins, and 360 species of coral. The reef’s isolated location, combined with committed management, has left it in a nearly pristine state.
Perhaps large animals and the butchers’ ancestors accidentally rode to Luzon on floating masses of mud and aquatic plants, torn off coastlines by large storms. Regional tsunamis may have also washed some terrified H. Erectus out to sea. As they clung to floating debris, they may have inadvertently island-hopped.
“Water dispersal by H. Erectus is accidental — there’s no Manifest Destiny, there’s no plot,” says Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa at Iowa City. There are also outstanding questions about what happened when and if descendants of these early hominins made contact with the first modern humans to reach Luzon:
“Did our species come face to face with these creatures? What is the nature of that contact?” wonders Brumm.
These and other questions remain to be answered, but researchers say that study of the human story in Luzon — and the South Pacific writ large — is only just beginning.
Dutch Archaeologists Unearth 2000-Year-Old Roman Temple Complex
The excavation was carried out in the village of Herwin-Hemeling situated in the eastern central province of Gelderland close to the Netherland-German border, also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site
A 2,000-year-old Roman temple complex in Netherland was uncovered by Dutch archaeologists. The archaeologists belonged to the private archaeological consulting firm RAAP.
These religious relics belonged to Netherlands’ Roman era. These were the first actual ruins of the temple found in the entire country. A part of it belonged to the northernmost territory of the legendary Roman Empire which was very powerful.
One of the votive blocks or small altars dedicated to the gods was found at one of the two Roman temples, the first ever found on Dutch soil.
The excavation was carried out in the village of Herwin-Hemeling situated in the eastern central province of Gelderland close to the Netherland-German border. The site was situated close to Roman Limes (Limes Germanicus) UNESCO World Heritage Site.
According to a report, the Cultural Heritage Agency in a press release said,” The remains of statues of deities, reliefs and painted plasterwork have all been discovered at the site.
One particularly remarkable feature is the discovery of several complete votive stones, dedicated to various gods and goddesses. This is a highly unusual find in the Netherlands, but also in international terms.”
As per the findings, Roman soldiers erected votive stones which were small altars that were found at the Herwin-Hemeling site. These votive stones paid homage to Hercules Magusanus, a hybrid figure which represented Greek-Roman Hercules and a mythic hero, Magusanus – who was worshipped by the German tribes who had occupied the area during the Roman era.
Other artefacts that were discovered were Jupiter and Serapis, a syncretic deity which represented the king Roman gods Jupiter and the Egyptian god known as Serapis. Along with these, Mercury, a Roman god was also erected. He was a messenger between the realm of the living and the land of the dead.
Not just statues alone, archaeologists also discovered deep pits where Roman soldiers lit large sacrificial fires. They also uncovered inscribed roof tiles, plasterwork decorated with painted images and other broken remnants of limestone sculptures.
Along with religious findings, other military objects were also discovered like battle armour, horse harnesses and spears and lances.
Other Findings
Archaeologists were aware of the possible Roman settlement in the area before they began the excavation process. In 2021, archaeologists discovered a few ancient Roman artefacts there.
According to the Dutch national cultural heritage agency, archaeologists informed the authorities of the possibility of the discovery of artefacts on a larger scale. The research team discovered remains of two Roman-era temples which dated long back to the first and fourth centuries.
Archaeologists uncovered a large Gallo-Roman temple on a hill which displayed a tiled roof and brightly painted walls. The second temple which was discovered was smaller and was situated a few metres from the first temple. The area suggested an important and pious gathering place for Roman soldiers.
Were the bones of fallen Battle of Waterloo soldiers sold as fertilizer?
As very few human remains have been found from what was such a bloodied affair, killing thousands, it’s a conclusion that a new study suggests is most probable. However, publishing his findings today – exactly 207 years since the historic conflict – in the peer-reviewed Journal of Conflict Archaeology, lead expert Professor Tony Pollard states it isn’t quite a situation of ‘case closed’.
Batalla de Waterloo – Jan Willem Pieneman La bataille de Waterloo (1824, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) de Jan Willem Pieneman (1779-1853)
The Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow demonstrates original data comprising newly found battlefield descriptions and drawings, made by people who visited in the days and weeks following Napoleon’s defeat.
These included letters and personal memoirs from a Scottish merchant living in Brussels at the time of the battle, James Ker, who visited in the days following the battle and describes men dying in his arms. Together the visitor accounts describe the exact locations of three mass graves containing up to 13,000 bodies.
But will these new data lead to a mass grave discovery of the long-lost bones of those who gave their lives in this battle, which finally concluded a 23-year-long war?
It’s unlikely states, Professor Pollard.
“Artistic licence and hyperbole over the number of bodies in mass graves notwithstanding, the bodies of the dead were clearly disposed of at numerous locations across the battlefield, so it is somewhat surprising that there is no reliable record of a mass grave ever being encountered.
“At least three newspaper articles from the 1820s onwards reference the importing of human bones from European battlefields for the purpose of producing fertilizer.
“European battlefields may have provided a convenient source of bone that could be ground down into bone-meal, an effective form of fertilizer. One of the main markets for this raw material was the British Isles,” Professor Pollard, from the University of Glasgow Centre for War Studies and Conflict Archaeology, says.
“Waterloo attracted visitors almost as soon as the gun smoke cleared.
“Many came to steal the belongings of the dead, some even stole teeth to make into dentures, while others came to simply observe what had happened.
“It’s likely that an agent of a purveyor of bones would arrive at the battlefield with high expectations of securing their prize.
“Primary targets would be mass graves, as they would have enough bodies in them to merit the effort of digging the bones.
“Local people would have been able to point these agents to the locations of the mass graves, as many of them would have vivid memories of the burials taking place, or may even have helped with the digging.
“It’s also possible that the various guidebooks and travelogues that described the nature and location of the graves could have served essentially as treasure maps complete with an X to mark the spot.
“On the basis of these accounts, backed up by the well-attested importance of bone meal in the practice of agriculture, the emptying of mass graves at Waterloo in order to obtain bones seems feasible, and the likely conclusion is that.”
But, to determine once and for all, as part of his role as the Lead Academic and an Archaeological Director at the charity Waterloo Uncovered, Professor Pollard will help to lead an “ambitious”, several years-long geophysical surveys, involving veterans who will join the dig to provide insight to world-class archaeologists. In turn, they receive care and recovery.
“The next stage is to head back out to Waterloo, to attempt to plot grave sites resulting from the analysis of early visitor accounts reported here,” states Pollard, a Professor of Conflict History and Archaeology.
“If human remains have been removed on the scale proposed then there should be, at least in some cases, archaeological evidence of the pits from which they were taken, however, truncated and poorly defined these might be.
“Covering large areas of the battlefield over the coming years, we will look to identify areas of previous ground disturbance to test the results of the source review and distribution map, and in conjunction with further documentary research and some excavation will provide a much more definitive picture of the fate of the dead of Waterloo.”
If the team was to find anything, it would be an extremely rare discovery.
In 2015 a human skeleton was uncovered during the building of a new museum and carpark at the site. Then in 2019, amputated human leg bones were unearthed by the Waterloo Uncovered team in an excavation of the main allied field hospital. There is also a skeleton of uncertain provenance in the museum in Waterloo.
No other significant remains have ever been found.
A Galway archaeologist has discovered what he describes as one of the most extraordinary monuments of probable Bronze Age in Ireland.
Michael Gibbons identified the large fortress, which is bound by turloughs or seasonal lakes, within the park at Coole, during fieldwork in the Burren lowlands east of Gort in Co Galway.
Working with Muintearas, the Gaeltacht education project, Mr Gibbons said the site had been known previously, but its antiquity was questioned.
However, his recent survey of the area indicates it is a unique fortress which used the turloughs as part of its defence and is likely to date from between 800 and 1200BC.
Measuring about 400m north-south and 110m east-west, the archaeologist said that it is comparable to Dún Aonghasa on Inis Mhór, and a couple of hundred people could have lived there.
Mr Gibbons said the site is like a giant lake-dwelling, utilising the turloughs in a very special way and set in a magical landscape.
Much of it is covered in dense woodland but he hopes that further research and analysis of LiDAR data from aerial surveys will reveal many Bronze Age round houses within the ramparts.
The fotresses is located within coole park
Describing it as an incredible find, the CEO of Muintearas, Seán Ó Coistealbha, said it is a huge addition to the archaeology of the area.
“Enormous work would have gone into constructing it by men and women in ancient times,” he said.
“We are just skirting around the stone ramparts of this community with a wealth of information yet to be discovered.”
Mysterious Pyramids In The Amazon, Spotted By NASA Satellite In 1976
In 1976, NASA’s Landsat Satellite was orbiting Earth when it photographed mysterious dots in southeast Peru, at 71 degrees, 30 minutes west longitude in the Madre de Dios region of the Amazon.
The satellite photograph, archived under number C-S11-32W071-03 showed a mysterious set of formations, in the middle of Peru’s southeastern jungle.
The satellite image revealed structures symmetrically spaced and uniform in shape, looking like a series of eight or more pyramids, in at least four rows of two.
“The Dots” of Paratoari as seen in NASA satellite photograph
The curious formation became known as the Pyramids of Paratoari, or as many authors would later call them, The Dots of Peru, or the Pyramids of Pantiacolla.
The satellite image sent explorers, authors, and researchers into a frenzy as to what the curious structures are. The ‘pyramids’ became quite popular, especially since it is believed that the lost city of Paititi was located somewhere in that area.
The president of the South American Explorers Club, Don Montague wrote about the enigmatic structures in an article published in the South American Explorer Journal, where he described them as nothing other than odd geological formations.
However, many people who saw the satellite image were not convinced by Montague’s writing.
Proponents of the theory that the structure are not geological formations but in fact, manmade structures argue that the Pyramids were most likely built by a long-lost ancient civilization that inhabited the Amazonian rainforest thousands of years ago.
The alleged structure, many argue, has been devoured by the surrounding rainforest and is covered with thousands of years of vegetation.
Exploring The Pyramids
Despite the fact that the alleged pyramids’ structures are located in a remote part of the Amazonian rainforest, a number of expeditions have been mounted to explore, not only the alleged pyramids but the region in search of the lost city of Paititi.
The lost city of Paititi is a legendary ancient Incan metropolis, said to be located somewhere east of the Andes, within the dense and remote rainforests of southeast Peru, northern Bolivia or southwest Brazil.
Numerous expeditions to search for the lost city of Paititi were established, and some of them even searched for the alleged pyramids of Paratoari.
Between 1984-2011 various expeditions were led by Gregory Deyermenjian, a member of the explorer’s club and a Peruvian explorer.
These included the documentation of Incan remains in Mameria, the exploration and documentation of the petroglyphs at Pusharo, the exploration, and documentation of Manu’s Pyramids of Paratoari, and others.
Deyermenjian had discovered plenty of evidence of ancient Inca inhabitance in the area, including petroglyphs, paved roads, platforms, and plazas, but he did not find conclusive evidence that the mysterious structures spotted by NASA’s Landsat satellite were man-made structures.
Deyermenjian argued that the structures were natural sandstone formations known as truncated ridge spurs, which can take the form of natural pyramids.
Deyermenjian has since, in 1999 and 2006, seen and photographed various very similar sites in the area of the Río Timpía, with intriguingly pyramidal-shaped huge natural formations.
“In 1996, still without a helicopter, we again ensconced ourselves within the steamy lower jungles of Manu, in an area just to the south of Pusharo, to reach and make the first definitive examination of the “Pyramids of Paratoari,” eight apparently evenly spaced and unnaturally symmetrical hillocks which had caused a flurry of speculation as to their origin and relation to Paititi since having been spotted on a NASA satellite photograph twenty years before…”
But people were still amazed by the formations.
In 2001, French explorer Thierry Jamin investigated the site of Pantiacolla and is said to have investigated the pyramids, concluding that they are in fact natural formations. However, Jamin discovered several Inca artefacts in the same area.
In 2011, a British expedition to investigate the Pyramids of Paratoari with Kenneth Gawne, Lewis Knight, Ken Halfpenny, I. Gardiner and Darwin Moscoso as part of the documentary “The Secret of the Incas” took place.
