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A rockslide in the Andes mountains of Peru swept away a truck like its a toy. Thankfully no one was injured in the slide.

The use of high technology in the form of small, all-terrain robots has made it possible to shed light on possible human sacrifices as much as 3,000 years old in the temple of Chavin de Huantar in Peru, the first major religious and pilgrimage center in South American history. The Chavin Rovers, as the robots are called... edged through the narrow channels that lead to the galleries of the complex, many of which remain hidden to this day, and came upon the most important discovery on this site in the last 50 years. These robotic four-wheel-drive vehicles, guided by remote...

One of the world's greatest ancient civilisations may have been built on llama droppings, a new study has found.Machu Picchu, the famous Inca city set in the Peruvian Andes, celebrates the centenary of its "'discovery" by the outside world this July. Dignitaries will descend on site for a glitzy event in July marking 100 years since US explorer Hiram Bingham came upon the site, but the origins of Machu Picchu were far less glamorous. According to a study published in archaeological review Antiquity, llama droppings provided the basis for the growth of Inca society. It was the switch from hunter-gathering...

A group of archaeologists has discovered the remains of more than 50 children who were ritually sacrificed by the pre-Columbian Chimu culture on the northern coast of what is now Peru. The site is located a close to another where evidence of the biggest-ever sacrifice of children was found, with more than 140 youngsters were slain. But the most recent discovery may be even bigger. “So far we have found the remains of 56 children who were sacrificed by the Chimu culture,” archaeologist Gabriel Prieto told AFP. “At this new site, we can easily double the number of remains we...

PALPA, Peru, May 28 (Reuters) - Archaeologists using drones have discovered more than 25 geoglyphs etched into a swath of coastal desert in southern Peru near the Nazca Lines, a culture ministry official said Monday. Most of the newly found geoglyphs, which include figures of a killer whale and a woman dancing, appear to have been made by the Paracas culture more than 2,000 years ago, hundreds of years before the Nazca people created similar giant drawings nearby, said Johny Isla, an archaeologist who heads the culture ministry's conservation efforts in the region. An additional 25 geoglyphs that had previously...

The mysteries of the Nazca Lines carved into the Peruvian desert have intensified after gales and sandstorms revealed previously unseen ancient designs. A pilot discovered a geoglyph of what appears to be a 196ft-long (60 metre) snake, as well as a type of camelid - such as a llama - above an unidentified bird. These new lines join existing geoglyphs of a dog, hummingbird, condor and a monkey, thought to have been drawn by the ancient Nazca people between the first and sixth centuries The discovery was made by pilot Eduardo Herrán Gómez de la Torre as he flew over...

Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on Peru's northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic. More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire. Scientific investigations by the international, interdisciplinary team, led by Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University, are ongoing. The...

A semitrailer driver ignored warning signs and drove over Peru's famous Nazca Lines on Saturday, causing significant damage to the UNESCO World Heritage site. The driver, identified as 40-year-old Jainer Jesús Flores Vigo, was detained and released, according to newspaper Peru21. The lines were scratched into the ground approximately 2,000 years ago and depict animals, plants, imaginary creatures and geometric figures miles long. Nazca's lines and geoglyphs stretch across an area of about 280 square miles. A magistrate concluded that there wasn't sufficient evidence to indicate the driver acted with intent, Peru21 reports. Peru's public minister announced that Nazca's prosecutor's...

A new analysis of the topography of the central Andes shows the uplifting of Earth's second highest continental plateau was driven in part by a huge zone of melted rock in the crust, known as a magma body. The Altiplano-Puna plateau is a high, dry region in the central Andes that includes parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, with vast plains punctuated by spectacular volcanoes. In a study published October 25 in Nature Communications, researchers used remote sensing data and topographic modeling techniques to reveal an enormous dome in the plateau. About 1 kilometer (3,300 feet) high and hundreds of...

Russell Mapes, a graduate student from Grass Valley, Calif., ...explains that these sediments of eastern origin were washed down from a highland area that formed in the Cretaceous Period, between 65 million and 145 million years ago, when the South American and African tectonic plates separated and passed each other. That highland tilted the river's flow westward, sending sediment as old as 2 billion years toward the center of the continent. A relatively low ridge, called the Purus Arch, which still exists, rose in the middle of the continent, running north and south, dividing the Amazon's flow - eastward toward...

American researcher David Johnson has advanced a theory that Nasca Lines may be related to water. He thinks that the geoglyphs may be a giant map of the underground water sources traced on the land. The Nasca Lines are located in the Peruvian desert, about 200 miles south of Lima. The assortment of perfectly-straight lines lies in an area measuring 37 miles long and 1-mile wide... While looking for sources of water, he noticed that ancient aqueducts, called puquios, seemed to be connected with some of the lines... Johnson gave each figure a meaning: the trapezoids always point to a...

When the first prehistoric people trekked into South America toward the end of the Ice Age, they found a wondrous, lush continent inhabited by all manner of strange creatures like giant ground sloths and car-sized armadillos. But these hunter-gatherers proceeded to behave like an "invasive species," with their population surging then crashing as they relentlessly depleted natural resources. Only much later did people muster exponential population growth after forming fixed settlements with domesticated crops and animals... The researchers identified two distinct colonization phases: the first unfolding about 14,000 to 5,500 years ago, with the human population hitting around 300,000; the...

LIMA (AFP) – Archeologists have discovered a group of ancient tombs in the mountainous jungle of southeastern Peru they say is as important as the discovery of the lost city of Machu Picchu. The tombs belonging to the Wari culture were found on the jungle-covered eastern slope of the Andes in Cuzco department at a long-abandoned city thought to be the last redoubt of Inca resistance to Spanish colonial rule. The Waris, a pre-Inca civilization, had an enormous cultural impact in the Andean region between 600 and 1200. The Inca empire (around 1400 to 1532) was the largest pre-Columbian empire...

Squash grown 10,000 years ago in Peru By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Thu Jun 28, 6:09 PM ET WASHINGTON - Agriculture was taking root in South America almost as early as the first farmers were breaking ground in the Middle East, new research indicates. Evidence that squash was being grown nearly 10,000 years ago, in what is now Peru, is reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science. A team led by anthropologist Tom D. Dillehay of Vanderbilt University also uncovered remains of peanuts from 7,600 years ago and cotton dated to 5,500 years ago in the floors...

Andean Crops Cultivated Almost 10,000 Years Ago by Michael Abrams Archaeologists have long thought that people in the Old World were planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting for a good 5,000 years before anyone in the New World did such things. But fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower...

Trying to fathom farming's origins Tuesday, August 14, 2007 3:22 AM By Bradley T. Lepper Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist with Vanderbilt University, and several colleagues announced last month in the journal Science that they had recovered remarkably early evidence for agriculture in South America. Working at several sites in the Nanchoc Valley of northern Peru, they found squash seeds that were more than 9,000 years old. This is nearly twice as old as previously reported farming evidence in the region. Dillehay and his co-authors point out that one of the most important aspects of this discovery is that "horticulture and...

The discovery by Vanderbilt University anthropologist Tom Dillehay and his colleagues, Herbert Eling, Instituto Naciona de Anthropolotica e Historia in Coahulila, Mexico, and Jack Rossen, Ithaca College, was reported in the Nov. 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The anthropologists discovered the canals in Peru's upper middle Zana Valley, approximately 60 kilometers east of the Pacific coast. Preliminary results indicate one of the canals is over 6,700 years old, while another has been confirmed to be over 5,400 years old. They are the oldest such canals yet discovered in South America... Dillehay and his team...

Photograph courtesy of Tom D. DillehayRUNNING 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,...

--snip-- we're taking a virtual journey down what was once more than 20,000 miles of road traversing some of the world's most challenging terrain — mountains, forests and deserts. The Inca road began at the center of the Inca universe: Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, said to be built in the shape of a crouching puma. It actually was not a single road but a network of royal roads, an instrument of power designed for military transport, religious pilgrimages and to move supplies.

Japanese geologists have found that the earth beneath the ruins is shifting at an alarming rate. They say a major landslide could split the ruins in two at any time... Researchers from the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University set up 10 extensometers to measure the rate of surface movement. They found that one section of back slope was moving downwards at a rate of up to one centimetre per month... Sassa estimates that the landslide will be around 100 metres deep, enough to destroy all of Machu Picchu. The two-ridge structure of the site - with a concave...