The contribution of Native America to the wealth of the modern world is underestimated. Just think of Mexico's maize, originally teosinte, i.e. "corn", the world's second largest food crop after rice. But that is not all, by a long shot.
Our next postings present our astronomical decipherment of Machu Picchu and its environs in the Andes Mountains, the longest continental mountain chain in the world, and the place of origin of the Inca "potato", the world's fourth largest food crop, the Aztec "tomato" and the Maya and Toltec "tobacco". Where would we be today in terms of feeding the world without the Native Americans who cultivated and improved those crops, especially corn, the potato and the tomato.
The fabulous, remote site of Machu Picchu in recent decades -- deservedly so -- has advanced to "official" status as a "New World" Ancient World Wonder.
We read at the Wikipedia at the Machu Picchu entry:
Machu Picchu marks the end of a long stage of human development, a stage spanning perhaps tens of thousands of years of stargazing the heavens and searching for the order of the spheres. This development and the knowledge attained are epitomized at Machu Picchu, just before the advent of the modern age and the coming of the Europeans to the New World. A new era began.
The Americas thereafter changed massively in a short period of time, and much of the old knowledge in Native America was lost as the few priests who may still have had it, passed away. Ancient technology gave way to newer technology. That is the way of the world. As a Darwinian might say, the better technology leads to winning, the outdated technology leads to losing. This is not a moral judgment, merely an observation made about a basically amoral planet.
As we will show in our subsequent postings, Machu Picchu in its location, architecture and design, symbolizes the crowning achievement of pre-modern mankind's attempt over the millennia to find out where man was and when that was, i.e. WHAT position did Man, Earth, Sun, Moon and Stars occupy in the Milky Way Galaxy and WHEN were the ancient astronomers THERE to view what they saw? Man was seeking to escape a fate that he did not know where he was and when he was there....
It was a search for a prehistoric GPS on a galactic scale and a time CHRONOLOGY on the order of astronomical eras.
Men's conceptions of the heavens, both in the Old World and the New World, formed mankind's initial ideas of a religion and a creator God, or creator gods, in the sky, who had formed the universe according to their then notions of "intelligent design". That intelligent design was seen in the stars, and brought to earth, hermetically, "as above, so below". Little has changed in the interim, except for the technology. Men still seek to inquire as to their whereabouts in the cosmos and frankly, many are far more lost today, than in ancient times.
The ancients would, for example, not have taken kindly to Giordano Bruno's question: "If the world has no beginning and no end, then where are we?"
Rather, ancient mankind was busy finding out where they were -- and when -- and devising a system of recordation, even in days before what we call "writing". They "wrote" not in alphabets or syllabic script but rather in pictures, and in sculptures, and in architecture.
The ancients used the stars as a known map to cartograph the Earth in which they lived, and they watched the apparent movement of those stars over millennia to develop their systems of the passage of time.
To comprehend Machu Picchu fully, one has to recall that we started our series postings about the Brickell Point Miami Circle in Florida as an ancient sky map with graphic-only decipherments at http://ancientworldblog.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-brickell-point-miami-circle-in.html.
We then proceeded to an even wider decipherment at The Miami Circle at Brickell Point: A Wider Decipherment Image 2 in Color Including Material Outside the Circle -- a decipherment image which shows the Miami Circle as a turtle:
The number of readers of those postings was not high at all, indicating once again to us that many people appear not to have good instincts about what is truly important and what is not so important. Our hits should have increased massively, but, in fact, nothing happened.
The Miami Circle is critically important, because it tells us that the region of Nazca, Peru, not far from Machu Picchu,
-- quite apart from the ultimate significance of the Nazca lines and figures to which we will turn at a later time --
marked the stars of what we today call Ophiuchus, and since that is a very large constellation, the region should include Machu Picchu -- whose name element Picchu looks suspiciously similar to Ophiuchus.
We thought immediately: did Machu Picchu mark stars in that region of the sky we modernly call Ophiuchus?
The next posting will tell.
THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 81 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America
The Native America Contribution to the Wealth of the Modern World: Maize (Corn), the Potato, the Tomato, Tobacco, and Machu Picchu
Our next postings present our astronomical decipherment of Machu Picchu and its environs in the Andes Mountains, the longest continental mountain chain in the world, and the place of origin of the Inca "potato", the world's fourth largest food crop, the Aztec "tomato" and the Maya and Toltec "tobacco". Where would we be today in terms of feeding the world without the Native Americans who cultivated and improved those crops, especially corn, the potato and the tomato.
The fabulous, remote site of Machu Picchu in recent decades -- deservedly so -- has advanced to "official" status as a "New World" Ancient World Wonder.
We read at the Wikipedia at the Machu Picchu entry:
"Machu Picchu was declared a Peruvian Historical Sanctuary in 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983. In 2007, Machu Picchu was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a worldwide Internet poll."It is not our intention to detract in any way from that attained position in our forthcoming decipherment of Machu Picchu and environs as astronomy. Quite the contrary, we hope to add to it.
Machu Picchu marks the end of a long stage of human development, a stage spanning perhaps tens of thousands of years of stargazing the heavens and searching for the order of the spheres. This development and the knowledge attained are epitomized at Machu Picchu, just before the advent of the modern age and the coming of the Europeans to the New World. A new era began.
The Americas thereafter changed massively in a short period of time, and much of the old knowledge in Native America was lost as the few priests who may still have had it, passed away. Ancient technology gave way to newer technology. That is the way of the world. As a Darwinian might say, the better technology leads to winning, the outdated technology leads to losing. This is not a moral judgment, merely an observation made about a basically amoral planet.
As we will show in our subsequent postings, Machu Picchu in its location, architecture and design, symbolizes the crowning achievement of pre-modern mankind's attempt over the millennia to find out where man was and when that was, i.e. WHAT position did Man, Earth, Sun, Moon and Stars occupy in the Milky Way Galaxy and WHEN were the ancient astronomers THERE to view what they saw? Man was seeking to escape a fate that he did not know where he was and when he was there....
It was a search for a prehistoric GPS on a galactic scale and a time CHRONOLOGY on the order of astronomical eras.
Men's conceptions of the heavens, both in the Old World and the New World, formed mankind's initial ideas of a religion and a creator God, or creator gods, in the sky, who had formed the universe according to their then notions of "intelligent design". That intelligent design was seen in the stars, and brought to earth, hermetically, "as above, so below". Little has changed in the interim, except for the technology. Men still seek to inquire as to their whereabouts in the cosmos and frankly, many are far more lost today, than in ancient times.
The ancients would, for example, not have taken kindly to Giordano Bruno's question: "If the world has no beginning and no end, then where are we?"
Rather, ancient mankind was busy finding out where they were -- and when -- and devising a system of recordation, even in days before what we call "writing". They "wrote" not in alphabets or syllabic script but rather in pictures, and in sculptures, and in architecture.
The ancients used the stars as a known map to cartograph the Earth in which they lived, and they watched the apparent movement of those stars over millennia to develop their systems of the passage of time.
To comprehend Machu Picchu fully, one has to recall that we started our series postings about the Brickell Point Miami Circle in Florida as an ancient sky map with graphic-only decipherments at http://ancientworldblog.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-brickell-point-miami-circle-in.html.
We then proceeded to an even wider decipherment at The Miami Circle at Brickell Point: A Wider Decipherment Image 2 in Color Including Material Outside the Circle -- a decipherment image which shows the Miami Circle as a turtle:
- Ophuichus at the left as the tail of the turtle, and
- Orion at right as the head of the turtle,
- with the entire turtle showing how South America
was surveyed in prehistoric days using the stars marked there.
The number of readers of those postings was not high at all, indicating once again to us that many people appear not to have good instincts about what is truly important and what is not so important. Our hits should have increased massively, but, in fact, nothing happened.
The Miami Circle is critically important, because it tells us that the region of Nazca, Peru, not far from Machu Picchu,
-- quite apart from the ultimate significance of the Nazca lines and figures to which we will turn at a later time --
marked the stars of what we today call Ophiuchus, and since that is a very large constellation, the region should include Machu Picchu -- whose name element Picchu looks suspiciously similar to Ophiuchus.
We thought immediately: did Machu Picchu mark stars in that region of the sky we modernly call Ophiuchus?
The next posting will tell.
THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 81 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America
The Native America Contribution to the Wealth of the Modern World: Maize (Corn), the Potato, the Tomato, Tobacco, and Machu Picchu
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