| October 7.............Tiahuanaco, Bolivia
The drive from La Paz to the ruins of Tiahuanaco is approximately three hours. When I arrived in the mid-afternoon, all the tour buses had left and there were only a few solitary travelers exploring the ruins. I found a place to park the van, mid-way between the main complex containing the Akapana and the Kalasasaya, and the Puma Punku. I was quite delighted to find such a parking place because it would allow me to spend an entire day and night within the ancient city. Before leaving La Paz I had made photocopies of several maps of the ruins. With these maps and my cameras, I set off to see the site for myself. I had been reading about Tiahuanaco for more than twenty years and was enchanted to have finally come. The first thing I noticed is that Tiahuanaco is not a grand visual spectacle such as the ruins of Machu Picchu, Palenque, or Teotihuacan. The excavated central part of the city is quite small and one can walk across it in five minutes. Additionally, there are not a large number of structures to be seen, because so much has been stolen and carted away over thousands of years. This lack of visual grandeur is one the reasons that Tiahuanaco has not had extensive archaeological reconstruction like the great Maya or Inca sites. The Bolivian government, unable to make a lot of money from tourists visiting the unspectacular site, has sponsored only a minimum of research and reconstruction. Additionally, because no rich burials and glittering jewels have ever been found, most archaeologists have by passed the ruins in hopes of excavating sites that will bring them more fame. If it were not for the pioneering work of Arthur Posnansky, we would have little idea of the astronomical significance of the site, or of its stunning antiquity. The appearance of the great age of the site was the first thing I noticed. Over my more than thirty years of exploring and photographing archaeology ruins I have developed a feeling for gauging the antiquity of the places. Radiocarbon, thermoluminescense, dendrochronology, and other scientific dating methods are certainly indispensable indicators of time sequences. Yet with years of experience at old places, feeling, sight, and intuition are often equally as accurate. The remains of Tiahuanaco looked and felt very old. It seemed to me that even a tourist or a novice explorer of old sites would see and sense the extraordinary age of Tiahuanaco. The site looked different too; it had an unusual style. Many scholars have commented on the superb detail and precision of the stone carving and building construction (throughout the ancient world the finest craftsmanship is very often the oldest). But what struck me more than the skill of execution was the overall appearance of the site. It seemed to have been designed and crafted by a people with an artistic, scientific, and philosophic sensibility distinctly different than that of other preColumbian cultures. This same sort of feeling is what motivated Arthur Posnansky, a German-Bolivian scholar, to exhaustively study Tiahuanaco for almost fifty years. Walking around the ruins, he noticed dozens of things which could not be explained by the conventional archeological theory nor fit into its chronological framework. All over the site were enormous blocks of stone that no known preColumbian culture had the technology to fashion or transport. But even more astonishing, the spatial arrangement of these structures - relative to one another and to the celestial realm - indicated that their builders had a highly sophisticated knowledge of mathematics and astronomy.
Puma Punku ruins, Tiahuanaco, Bolivia
The structure known as the Puma Punka, for example, truly startles the imagination. It seems to be the remains of a great wharf (for Lake Titicaca long ago lapped upon the shores of Tiahuanaco) and a massive, four-part, now collapsed building. One of the construction blocks from which the pier was fashioned weighs an estimated 440 tons (equal to nearly 600 full-size cars) and several other blocks laying about are between 100 and 150 tons. The quarry for these giant blocks was on the western shore of Titicaca, some ten miles away. There is no known technology in all the ancient world that could have transported stones of such massive weight and size. The Andean people of 500 AD, with their simple reed boats, could certainly not have moved them. Even today, with all the modern advances in engineering and mathematics, we could not fashion such a structure. How were these monstrous stones moved and what was their purpose? Posnansky suggested an answer, based upon his studies of the astronomical alignments of Tiahuanaco, but that answer is considered so controversial, even impossible, that it has been ignored and censured by the scientific community for fifty years.
With my maps in hand, I walked away from the Puma Punka and climbed to the summit of the Akapana pyramid. Looking to the northwest, I gazed down upon the Kalasasaya compound and the so-called subterranean temple. It was in these structures that Posnansky made the fascinating discoveries that led him to suggest both a great antiquity for Tiahuanaco and an extraordinary use. As part of his studies, Posnansky had conducted precise surveys of all the principal structures of Tiahuanaco. The Kalasasaya structure, a rectangular enclosure measuring about 450 feet by 400 feet, was delineated by a series of vertical stone pillars (the name Kalasasaya means "the standing pillars") and had an east-west orientation. Utilizing his measurements of the lines of sight along these stone pillars, the orientation of the Kalasasaya, and the purposely intended deviations from the cardinal points, Posnansky was able to show that the alignment of the structure was based upon an astronomical principle called the obliquity of the ecliptic. This term, the obliquity of the ecliptic, refers to the angle between the plane of the earth’s orbit and that of the celestial equator, equal to approximately 23 degrees and 27 minutes at the present. The tilt of the obliquity, however, changes very slowly over great periods of time. Its cyclic variation ranges between 22 degrees, 1 minute and 24 degrees, 5 minutes over a period of 41,000 years or 1 degree in 7000 years (this cycle is not to be confused with the better known precessional cycle of 25,920 years or 1 degree of movement every 72 years). The figure which Posnansky determined for the obliquity of the ecliptic at the time of the building of the Kalasasaya was 23 degrees, 8 minutes, and 48 seconds. Based on calculations plotted by the International Conference of Ephemerids in Paris in 1911, Posnansky was thereby able to date the initial construction of the Kalasasaya and Tiahuanaco to 15,000 BC. This date was later confirmed by a team of four leading astronomers from various prestigious universities in Germany. This initial construction date, being vastly older than that deemed possible by the prevailing paradigm of history, was (and still is) ridiculed by mainstream archaeologists and prehistorians. But it is not so easy to dismiss Posnansky’s findings for there are other mysteries concerning Tiahuanaco that seem to confirm the great antiquity of the site. Among these are the ancient myths of Tiahuanaco (from throughout the Andean region) that tell of its founding and use in a pre-flood time; the scientific studies that prove a cataclysmic flood occurred some twelve thousand years ago; the utensils, tools, and the fragments of human skeletons that are mixed in with the deepest layers of the flood alluvia (indicating human use of the site prior to the great flood); and the strange carvings of bearded, non-Andean people that are found around the site (replete with sculptural and iconographic detailing that is completely unique in the western hemisphere). Posnansky, and other writers such as Graham Hancock and Zecharia Sitchin, have suggested that these findings and the astronomical alignments of the site, strongly point to the likelihood that the original Tiahuanaco civilization flourished many thousands of years before the period assumed by conventional archaeologists. Rather than rising and falling during the two millennia around the time of Christ, Tiahuanaco may have existed during the vastly older time of the last Ice Age, some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The implications of this are truly stunning. Tiahuanaco may be (along with Teotihuacan in Mexico, Baalbeck in Lebanon, and the Great Pyramid in Egypt) a surviving fragment of a long lost civilization.
Who were the people of this lost civilization, and where was it located? Readers interested in exploring these mysteries will greatly enjoy Hancock’s fascinating book, Fingerprints of the Gods. In support of his radical ideas concerning the great antiquity of Tiahuanaco, Hancock gives startling proof that the coast line of South America was mapped in extraordinarily accurate detail long before that continent was "discovered" by Europeans. Maps such as Piri Reis map of 1513 and the Oronteus Finaeus map of 1531, depict the coastline of southern South America and - on the same map - accurately show the subglacial topography of nearby Antarctica beneath its great layer of ice. (Both these maps have notes on their borders saying they were copied from much earlier sources.) Modern-day geological studies have confirmed the relatively young age of the Antarctica ice, with the deepest layers being no more than 8000 years old. Simply stated, this means that some unknown civilization had explored and precisely mapped the then ice-free continent of Antarctica thousands of years before it was first sighted by Europeans in 1818. Did these same shadowy people construct and use the enigmatic city of Tiahuanaco? And, if so, what became of them? Is it not highly significant that both ancient myths and modern day geological studies tell of great floods that swept the high Andean alitplano some fifteen thousand years ago? What was the nature of these floods? What caused them? Numerous other questions follow from this line of inquiry. For example, how are we to explain the parallel myths of civilization-destroying floods that are found in nearly all the ancient cultures of the world? And even more interesting, what are we to make of the fact, that when these myths are decoded using the insights of archaeoastronomy, nearly all of them speak of celestial forces having caused the great cataclysms? In the 1950’s, Immanuel Velikovsky proposed the theory that an enormous chunk of rock was spun off from the planet Jupiter and that it rampaged as a comet through the inner solar system, nearly colliding with the earth and causing catastrophes spoken about in numerous ancient mythologies. More recently, other writers have theorized that the combined effects of precessional movement and the asymmetric build-up of ice at the poles cause periodic shifts of the entire earth’s’ crust (a favorite subject of Einstein). Still other theorists are speaking of coming alignments of certain planets and the disastrous effects this may have on Earth. In coming sections of these journal writings I will examine these thought-provoking ideas in greater detail.
|
