Photograph courtesy of Tom D. Dillehay
RUNNING WATER The sites of ancient irrigation canals. People in Peru's Zaña Valley dug the
canals as early as 6,700 years ago to divert river water to their crops.
Posted on 01/03/2006 3:43:00 AM PST by Pharmboy
Photograph courtesy of Tom D. Dillehay
RUNNING WATER The sites of ancient irrigation canals. People in Peru's Zaña Valley dug the
canals as early as 6,700 years ago to divert river water to their crops.
In the Andean foothills of Peru, not far from the Pacific coast, archaeologists have found what they say is evidence for the earliest known irrigated agriculture in the Americas.
An analysis of four derelict canals, filled with silt and buried deep under sediments, showed that they were used to water cultivated fields 5,400 years ago, in one case possibly as early as 6,700 years ago, archaeologists reported in a recent issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Other scholars hailed the discovery as adding a new dimension to understanding the origins of civilization in the Andes. The canals are seen as the long-sought proof that irrigation technology was critical to the development of the earliest Peruvian civilization, one of the few major cultures in the ancient world to rise independent of outside influence.
It was assumed that by 4,000 years ago, perhaps 1,000 years earlier, large-scale irrigation farming was well under way in Peru, as suggested by the indirect evidence of urban ruins of increasing size and architectural distinction. Their growth presumably depended on irrigation in the arid valleys and hills descending to coastal Peru. But the telling evidence of the canals had been missing.
Then Tom D. Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, started nosing around the Zaña Valley, about 40 miles from the ocean and more than 300 miles north of Lima.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Pinging...
"... as early as 6,700 years ago ..."
Muslims???
No animals to pull carts. Wheels weren't that effective without animals. They did have wheels on children's toys in at least some of the cultures.
The only animal that makes my wheelbarrel go is me...puzzling that they did not figure that one out.
That's a lot of digging with just bare hands and stones.
BTT.
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related, regarding 3100 BC:
Archaeologists push back beginning of civilization in Americas 400 years
The Daily Telegraph | Dec. 23, 2004 | Nic Fleming
Posted on 12/22/2004 6:09:11 PM PST by bruinbirdman
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1306976/posts
also related:
Human settlements far older than suspected discovered in South America.
DISCOVER Vol. 23 No. 5 (May 2002) | (May 2002) | By John Dorfman
Posted on 04/21/2002 5:41:59 PM PDT by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/670296/posts
That child's toy is mystifying. Perhaps it was not a child's toy at all, and perhaps it did not originate in South America but was imported from Egypt. It would be amazing if such a capable civilization did not instantly make the leap from that object to the idea of animal-drawn carts at least. They had roads, and probably beasts of burden, but why such roads if they did not use wheeled vehicles?
From: http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/g/h/ghb1/anth2/ant2-16.htm
"In the New World, it took much longer for civilizations to develop. This is due to several factors: First, remember that humans have only been on this continent for the last 12,000 years of so. Thus, it took awhile longer for the same pressures, such as population, to build up to driving cultural development. Also, New World cultures had to make due with several severe constraints that were unique to the New World: First, there were no draft animals that could be domesticated. Thus, transportation and agricultural intensification were extremely limited. I've mentioned before how the wheel wasn't used for more than children's toys in the New World...What's the point if you have only human transport? Also, the plow was never used, either...very difficult to plow by human-power alone. Thus, the establishment of civilizations was limited only to those few locations that were extremely productive by nature."
From:http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_250.html
"Now, then: let's not be too critical of the Incas. First of all, we note a peculiar pattern here. It wasn't just the Incas who failed to invent the wheel; every other civilization in the New World (with one exception, which we'll get to in a minute) managed to overlook it as well. For that matter, the ancient Americans also had to struggle along without the true arch, the cart, the plow, the potter's wheel, the bellows, glass, iron, and stringed instruments. But it's unfair to attribute this sorry technological record to either lack of IQ or (as far as the wheel was concerned) an infatuation with transport via brute strength. The fact is that most civilizations in the Old World didn't invent the wheel either--instead, they borrowed it from some other culture. The wheel appears to have been first used in Sumer in the Middle East around 3500 BC, whence it spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It didn't arrive in Britain until 500 BC. This orderly diffusion pattern makes it conceivable that all the wheels in use today are directly descended from the invention of a single gifted individual--an individual, however, who was such a dope that he failed to sign his name on the patent application, thus assuring his (or her) eternal anonymity. We might therefore attribute Inca wheellessness to the absence of a pre-Columbian Thomas Edison.
But there are other factors involved. The principle of rotary motion, as you point out, is pretty obvious, and was well known throughout the New World as well as the Old. The Incas, for instance, are thought to have used wooden rollers to haul the giant stones they used to build their cities. Unfortunately, the New World suffered from a conspicuous scarcity of draft animals. The only beast of burden known in the Americas was the llama, a delicate critter restricted to certain parts of the Andes, which was used solely as a pack animal. Without draft animals you cannot do extensive hauling with sledges, and without sledges it will never occur to you that the wheel would be a handy thing to have. When the Incas had to transport heavy objects, they relied on manpower, often to the considerable sorrow of the men doing the powering (some 3,000 of 20,000 workers died dragging one particularly massive stone, according to chronicles). Consequently heavy hauling in the New World was restricted to the occasional special project. The Sumerians, on the other hand, had considerable experience with what we might call regularly scheduled sledge service, and even so it took them 2,000 years of fumbling before the idea of the wheel finally dawned. Not that it just popped out of the blue. The general sequence of friction-reducing inventions is thought to have been runners, rollers, rollers held in place by guides, rollers held in place by guides and thickened on the ends to make them roll straighter, the wheel and axle, and from there it's pretty much a straight shot to the Chevy Impala.
But you wanted to know about that exception I mentioned. The wheel evidently was familiar to the ancient Mexicans, the only known instance of its having been invented independently of the Sumerian version. Unfortunately, it apparently never occurred to anyone at the time that wheels had any practical application, and their use was confined to little clay gadgets that are thought to be either toys or cult objects. Another example of good technology gone to waste. Reminds me of Pac-Man."
This abstract: http://spp.pinyin.info/abstracts/spp099_wheeled_vehicles.html entitled Wheeled Vehicles in the Chinese Bronze Age (c. 2000-741 b.c.) is pretty interesting about the development of the wheel around the world.
I suspect all history is wrong, especially the undocumented parts.
Even if they ask some Incas, and there are some left here and there, they don't have much to say about the old days, but it is possible that the Spanish didn't get everything and that there is some documentation left but is being carefully guarded. Don't know, but heard some speculation recently; it is possible, anyway.
Have heard that name. Anyway, the book is not closed. SunkenCiv and Blam are doing yoeman work pulling these archy threads together; it is amazing what story is developing of times back into the Ice Age even though some chapters will probably always remain missing. Lake Titicaca is still a huge mystery; they ought to drain it temporarily.
Plato's description of Atlantis was most likely to be taken metaphorically, especially as Greek mythology was transcendent in those day. The real Atlantis might have been nothing like that.
wheels without animals to pull the carts is difficult. wheels without animals to pull the carts in mountainous and rocky terrain are pointless except on children's toys.
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