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LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an
ancient temple, roadway and irrigation systems at a famed fortress
overlooking the Inca capital of Cuzco, according to officials involved
with the dig.
The temple on the periphery of the Sacsayhuaman fortress casts added
light on pre-Inca cultures of Peru, showing that the site had
religious as well as military aims, according to researchers.
It includes 11 rooms thought to have held mummies and idols, lead
archaeologist Oscar Rodriguez told The Associated Press.
The team of archaeologists that made the discoveries believes the
structures predated the Inca empire but were then significantly
developed and expanded.
"It's from both the Inca and pre-Inca cultures; it has a sequence,"
Wa****ngton Camacho, director of the Sacsayhuaman Archaeological Park,
told the AP on Thursday. "The Incas entered and changed the form of
the temple, as it initially had a more rustic architecture."
Archaeologists are still waiting for carbon dating tests, but Camacho
said their calculations about the facilities' age are sup****ted by
historical references such as ceramics and construction style.
Previous carbon-14 dating of Sacsayhuaman revealed that the Killke
culture constructed the fortress in the 1100s, said Peruvian
archaeologist Luis Lumbreras, former director of Peru's National
Culture Institute and an expert on Cuzco's pre-Incan cultures. He was
not involved in the dig.
The Killke occupied the region from 900 to 1200 A.D., prior to the
arrival of the Incas.
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Mesopotamia, Indus valley, Cathay, Egypt, S.America ...
it seems that "civilization" with all the usual trimmings
is a hidden 'emergent property' of humanity. Once some
critical mass of people come together, random collections
of tribally-organized hunter-gatherers and dirt farmers
suddenly, rapidly, transform - producing technologically-
advanced civilzations with a suprisingly similar "look & feel".
The similarity of the pattern and 'look & feel' suggest a
genetic, 'hard-wired', factor.
But where did this 'super-organization' capacity COME from ?
What kept it alive, but unexpressed, over hundreds of thousands
of years until critical population densities were reached ?
Or, has it always been there, excess capability, but merely
seen as the usual heirarchical social organization of small
groups ? But why the over-capacity ? Why not JUST ENOUGH
organizing capacity to handle the usual small groups which
were the norm during the vast majority of sapiens-sapiens
roughly 200,000 year existence ?
Or were there ice-age supercultures too, environments
that would have favored and honed superorganizational
genetics ? With smallish populations, most would bave
been on seashores and major rivers ... drowned when the
glaciers melted, the remains now hundreds of feet below
current sea level. And our immediate 'cousins' - the
neanderthals and Heidelbergensis - did they also posess
social superorganizational abilities ? Perhaps even
a few bona-fide 'civilizations' also obliterated by
the ice and its later melting ? Dredging of the sea
floor, especially in the Med, may one day bring up
relics - deep under the water and especially the MUD
caused by glacial-melt floods.
It clearly doesn't take all THAT many people to create
the 'critical mass' which spawns civilization-as-we-
know-it with buildings, math, writing, astronomy,
moderate technology and such. No reason such critical
m***** didn't happen time and again ... creating
history before what we know as history ... the bits
and pieces pulverized and scattered by relentless
forces of the ice. No, nothing like the nutty
elaborations of Platos 'Atlantis' with exotic metals
and modernistic tech, but 'regular' towns and cities
of wood and mud-bricks.
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