The Ancient Seers of Chaco Canyon

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[9th]

 

In the Peruvian Desert, about 200 miles south of Lima, there lies a plain between the Inca and Nazca (sometimes also spelled Nasca) Valleys. Across this plain, in an area measuring 37 miles long and 1-mile wide, is an assortment of perfectly-straight lines, many running parallel, others intersecting, forming a grand geometric form. In and around the lines there are also trapezoidal zones, strange symbols, and pictures of birds and beasts all etched on a giant scale that can only be appreciated from the sky.

 

There are about 900 geoglyphs on the plain. Geoglyphs are geometric forms that include straight lines, triangles, spirals, circles and trapezoids. They are enormous in size. The longest straight line goes nine miles across the plain.

 

The purpose of the geoglyphs may have also changed over time from what archaeologists call the final Formative period, which spanned until A.D. 200, to the early Nazca period, which ended in A.D. 450. The smashed ceramics dated to the later period.

 

"Our research revealed that the Formative geoglyphs were placed to be seen from the ritual pathways, while those of the early Nazca period were used as the loci of ritual activities such as intentional destruction of ceramic vessels," Sakai said.

 

 

 

Many recent interpretations of Chaco Canyon see it as a site of pilgrimage, and this is often specifically seen as taking the form of regular region-wide ritual events involving communal feasting, construction work on the massive buildings in the canyon, trade involving various mundane and exotic items, and ritual breakage of pottery and deposition of it in the mounds accompanying most great houses.

 

Based on the number of rim shards in the excavated portion and an estimate of the size of the whole mound, Toll calculated that 150,000 vessels were used during the 60-year period (A.D. 1040 to 1100) during which Gallup Black-on-white was the predominant decorated type, a period that roughly corresponds to the height of the Chaco system.  This works out to 2500 vessels a year, or 125 for each of the 20 households estimated to have lived at Pueblo Alto at any one time.  This is a huge number compared to ethnographically documented rates of pottery usage and breakage or ratios seen at small sites, and to Toll it suggested that the pottery deposited in the mound was probably not broken in the course of everyday life at Pueblo Alto but was instead broken deliberately in rituals associated with the annual pilgrimage fairs.  Ritual breakage and deposition of pottery is a known Pueblo practice, but this would be on a scale not seen at any other known site.  

 

 

 

 

ALBUQUERQUE — For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen.

 

Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects.

 

But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border.

 

After an exchange with Ms. Reents-Budet in October 2007 about the resemblances between the Chacoan and Mayan earthenware, Ms. Crown said she thought about having the Chacoan cylinders checked for cacao residue.

 

Ms. Crown turned to W. Jeffrey Hurst, a senior bioanalytical chemist for the Hershey Company, the giant chocolate maker, whose bosses have been allowing him to test Mesoamerican ceramics for cacao for two decades. In 2002, he co-published a paper in Nature showing that early Maya were using cacao by 600 B.C., pushing back the earliest chemical evidence for their cacao use by 1,000 years.

 

Ms. Crown submitted five fragmentary shards to Mr. Hurst’s laboratory, which subjected the samples to high performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry testing, which confirmed the presence of theobromine — a bio marker for cacao — in three shards.

 

“The results were unequivocal,” said Mr. Hurst, who wrote the new paper with Ms. Crown.

 

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Evidence that an ancient Pueblo site was built out of “golden rectangles”

 

 

A millennium ago, the Pueblo peoples were constructing incredible monuments and cities throughout the US Southwest. Among the most impressive structures they left behind is called the Sun Temple, in what is now Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park. Probably the location for meetings and ceremonies, the Sun Temple is an enormous D-shaped building with walls that were once 11-15 feet high. Now, an applied mathematician has discovered something intriguing about the proportions used to lay out the temple and its internal structures.

 

What she found was twofold. First, it appears the Sun Temple was built using a common unit of measurement, which is roughly 30 cm. This in itself is a fascinating discovery, because we have no evidence that the Pueblo peoples had a written language or number system. In a recent paper for Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, Towers wrote that major structures at the site—namely, the retaining wall and four round, tower-like "Kivas"—were "laid out with remarkable precision, with the relative uncertainty on measurements estimated to be approximately one percent."

 

More incredibly, she also found that "key features of the site were apparently laid out using the Golden rectangle, squares, 45◦ triangles, Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangles, and equilateral triangles." She added that the "Sun Temple site thus likely represents the first evidence of advanced knowledge of several geometrical constructs in prehistoric America." Though ancient peoples in Greece also used the golden rectangle in their constructions, this would be the first evidence for a similar geometric structure in the pre-contact Americas. It means that the Pueblo peoples' urban layouts, which included cities carved into rockfaces and a sizable reservoir system, were aided by a sophisticated understanding of geometry.

 

More study is needed to substantiate Towers' claim, but she's taken the first important step. She hopes that scientists can move on to study other ceremonial structures built by the Pueblo peoples, such as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, which may have been built using the same standard unit of measure she discovered at the Sun Temple.

 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/evidence-that-an-ancient-pueblo-site-was-built-out-of-golden-rectangles/

 

 

 

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http://westerndigs.org/chacos-elites-were-native-to-the-canyon-not-migrants-their-remains-show/

 

From here, some of the researchers hope to explore some other physical traits among the remains, ones whose further study might be explain how Chaco’s home-grown residents differed from outsiders, or how elites compared with the rest of Chaco’s population.

 

Dr. Steven LeBlanc, for example, observed that many of the elites exhibit a distinctive form of cranial deformation, their skulls apparently having been shaped in infancy to feature a slope at the top rear of the cranium.

 

Likewise, the elites also include an unusual example of polydactyly — a woman who had six fingers instead of five.

 

 

Paracas is a desert peninsula located within Pisco Province on the south coast of Peru. It is here where Peruvian archaeologist, Julio Tello, made an amazing discovery in 1928 – a massive and elaborate graveyard containing tombs filled with the remains of individuals with the largest elongated skulls found anywhere in the world. These have come to be known as the ‘ Paracas skulls’. In total, Tello found more than 300 of these elongated skulls, some of which date back around 3,000 years. 

The elongated skulls of Paracas in Peru caused a stir in 2014 when a geneticist that carried out preliminary DNA testing reported that they have mitochondrial DNA “with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far”. Now a second round of DNA testing has been completed and the results are just as controversial – the skulls tested, which date back as far as 2,000 years, were shown to have European and Middle Eastern Origin. These surprising results change the known history about how the Americas were populated.

 

 

It is well-known that most cases of skull elongation are the result of cranial deformation, head flattening, or head binding, in which the skull is intentionally deformed by applying force over a long period of time. It is usually achieved by binding the head between two pieces of wood, or binding in cloth. However, while cranial deformation changes the shape of the skull, it does not alter other features that are characteristic of a regular human skull. 

In a recent interview with Ancient Origins, author and researcher LA Marzulli describes how some of the Paracas skulls are different to ordinary human skulls: 

“There is a possibility that it might have been cradle headboarded, but the reason why I don’t think so is because the position of the foramen magnum is back towards the rear of the skull. A normal foramen magnum would be closer to the jaw line…” 

Marzulli explained that an archaeologist has written a paper about his study of the position of the foramen magnum in over 1000 skulls. “He states that the Paracas skulls, the position of the foramen magnum is completely different than a normal human being, it is also smaller, which lends itself to our theory that this is not cradle headboarding, this is genetic.” 

In addition, Marzulli described how some of the Paracas skulls have a very pronounced zygomatic arch (cheek bone), different eye sockets and no sagittal suture, which is a connective tissue joint between the two parietal bones of the skull. 

“No academics as far as we can tell can explain why some of the skulls that still have hair are red or even blonde,” writes Brien Foerster, “the idea that this is from time or bleaching has NOW been disproven by 2 hair experts. For the ancient Paracas people, at least, they had blonde to reddish hair that is 30% thinner than NATIVE American hair. It is GENETIC!” 

From the samples, only the mitochondrial DNA (DNA from the mother’s side) could be extracted. Out of four hair samples, one of them couldn’t be sequences. The remaining three hair samples all showed a Haplogroup (genetic population group) of H2A, which is found most frequently in Eastern Europe, and at a low frequency in Western Europe. The bone powder from the most elongated skull tested came back as T2B, which originates in Mesopotamia and what is now Syria, essentially the heart of the fertile crescent. “It rewrites history as we know it,” said Marzulli.

 

[Rocky Lionmouth]

EDIT

Am i getting this right:

 

Some of the owners of those skulls had mutations never before encountered in any animal, or were perhaps not human as we know human aka homo sapiens? Like a sort of localized cancer-like mutation or a whole new branch of homo sapiens?

 

Are there traces of european and western-asian heirtage or is the evidence pointing to geolocational markers (i've read you can trace a persons longtime geographical residence/origin by analyzing what went into building their bones) that these inhabitants came there around 0 WCE?

I mean 2k years isn't so huge a time period, south american pyramids were contemporary to the egyptian ones right and those are like 5-3k BWCE?

Vikings were in Newfoundland around 1k WCE (pretty high tech sailors) while the first Oceanian settlers came south on more rudimentary vessels even earlier.

I'm no expert but i wouldn find it plausible if fenician seafarers went to the americas way before any reputable Europeans did, those guys seem to have been litterally everywhere to make trade and connections.

There seems to have been rumors about terra firma far far over west from the old chunk. West African sailors must have had a pretty decen shot at crossing too right?

My scientific cred and stake in this is zero btw, i'm just way excited about this thread ^^

 

I thought the geoglyphs were still pretty much a "yeah nobody really knows exactly who or what and evidence is inconclusive" since the plain didnt have any known or recognizable settlements. But hey, i read that fifteen years ago in art-history 101 so who am i to tell?

I'm just baffled at the gap i just found in my knowledge here

Edited March 14, 2017 by Rocky Lionmouth