I’m reminded of the Florida Everglades. Where did all the people who built this ‘stuff’ go?
Where did all the people who built this 'stuff' go?
I ask myself that same question every time I look at anything to do with pre-Columbian South America.
for example, the above image of Saxsayhuaman shows how massive the complex really is. That jigsaw outline in the above image is the wall we usually see depicted:
have you downloaded Google Earth yet? I can give you some links to truly stunning images. Massive earthern walls, hundreds of miles of canals...ancient terraces and ruins.
I'm still thinking about that. Here's an excerpt from Worlds In Collision that might provide a clue. Throughout the book, there are many other pre-Columbian legends...
POPUL-VUH, the sacred book of the Mayas, narrates: "It was ruin and destruction ... the sea was piled up ... it was a great inundation ... people were drowned in a sticky substance raining from the sky. ... The face of the earth grew dark and the gloomy rain endured days and nights. ... And then there was a great din of fire above their heads." The entire population of the land was annihilated.
The MANUSCRIPT QUICHÉ perpetuated the picture of the population of Mexico perishing in a downpour of bitumen: "There descended from the sky a rain of bitumen and of a sticky substance. ... The earth was obscured and it rained day and night. And men ran hither and thither and were as if seized by madness; they tried to climb to the roofs, and the houses crashed down; they tried to climb the trees, and the trees cast them far away; and when they tried to escape in caves and caverns, these were suddenly closed."
A similar account is preserved in the ANNALS OF CUAUHTITLAN. The age which ended in the rain of fire was called QUIAUH-TONATIUH, which means "the sun of fire-rain".
And far away, in the other hemisphere, in Siberia, the Voguls carried down through the centuries and millennia this memory: "God sent a sea of fire upon the earth. ... The cause of the fire they call 'the fire-water'."