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Discovery of vast prehistoric works built by Giants?The Geoglyphs of Teohuanaco Posted: February 24, 2008 1:00 am EasternBy David E. Flynn© 2008 RaidersNewsNetwork The size and scope of David Flynn's Teohuanaco discovery simply surpasses comprehension. Mammoth traces of intelligence carved in stone and covering hundreds of square miles. For those who understand what they are seeing here for the first time, this could indeed be the strongest evidence ever found of prehistoric engineering by those who were known and feared throughout the ancient world as gods. ~ Thomas Horn This satellite image (above) is a portion of the Andean foothills...

With Climate Swing, a Culture Bloomed in Americas by Christopher Joyce Alice Kreit, NPR The mound builders settled in the arid, coastal hills of northwestern Peru. Archaeologist Winifred Creamer works at an excavation in Norte Chico, Peru. Courtesy Jonathan Haas All Things Considered, February 11, 2008 · Along the coast of Peru, a mysterious civilization sprang up about 5,000 years ago. This was many centuries before the Incan Empire. Yet these people were sophisticated. They cultivated crops and orchards. And they built huge monuments of earth and rock. Archaeologists are trying to prove that an abrupt change of climate created...

    Inca Sacrifice Victims "Fattened Up" Before Death Kelly Hearnfor National Geographic News October 3, 2007   Children selected for Inca ritual sacrifice were "fattened up" with high-protein diets in the months leading up to their deaths, a new study has found. Researcher Andrew Wilson and his team conducted DNA and chemical tests of hair samples taken from four child mummies found in the Andes mountains in the 1990s. (See a photo gallery of the frozen Inca mummies.) By studying the ratios of chemicals present in the hair, the team helped show how victims were prepared for death...

A team of Canary investigators is currently in remotest Peru to study a startling new archaeological discovery which came to light recently in Choquequirao, an ancient Inca site which is being described in glowing terms as Machu Picchu’s “twin town”. The find consists of a line of white stone llamas embedded in massive terraced stone walls and which, it is thought, could well form part of the entrance to the sacred valley of the Incas. And make no mistake - the expedition to Choquequirao is no jolly. The three men and two women face a gruelling five days on foot...

Contact: Craig Brierley c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk 44-207-611-7329 Wellcome Trust Scientists uncover Inca children's countdown to sacrifice Hair samples from naturally preserved child mummies discovered at the world's highest archaeological site in the Andes have provided a startling insight into the lives of the children chosen for sacrifice. Researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust used DNA and stable isotope analysis to show how children as young as 6-years old were "fattened up" and taken on a pilgrimage to their death. A team of scientists led by Dr Andrew Wilson at the University of Bradford analysed hair samples taken from the heads and from...

Archeologists in Sarpsborg have found one thousand year old skeletal remains that appear to be Incan. The skeletal remains were found during conservations work at St. Nicolas church in Sarpsborg, a city 73 kilometers (45 miles) southeast of Oslo, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) reports. When archeologists were to move some rose bushes they made the surprising discovery of the remains of two older men and a baby. "When we were about to take hold under the rose bush the skeletal remains slid out. It was quite surprising," Mona Beate Buckholm, archeologist at the Borgarsyssel Museum, told NRK. One of the skulls...

Norwegian arhaeologists are puzzled by a find which indicates an Inca Indian died and was buried in the Oestfold city of Sarpsborg 1000 years ago. The remains of two elderly men and a baby were discovered during work in a garden, and one of the skulls indicates that the man was an Inca Indian. There is a genetic flaw in the neck, which is believed to be limited to the Incas in Peru, says archaeologist Mona Beate Buckholm. The Norway Post suggests that maybe the Vikings travelled even more widely than hitherto believed? Why could not the Viking settlers in...

First Known Gunshot Victim in Americas Discovered Kelly Hearn in Buenos Aires, Argentina for National Geographic News June 19, 2007 The first known gunshot victim in the Americas was an Inca Indian killed by a musket-wielding Spaniard nearly 500 years ago in Peru, scientists announced today. (See pictures and watch video.) The casualty's skeleton was discovered in 2004 while excavating an Inca cemetery in the Lima suburb of Puruchuco—less than a mile from thousands of Inca mummy bundles discovered by Peruvian archaeologist Guillermo Cock. The individual may have been killed during an Inca uprising against Spanish conquistadors in 1536, according...

Kenya: Maasais, Canaanites And the Inca Connection 5 June 2007 Posted to the web 5 June 2007 Philip Ochieng Nairobi WHY IS ENKAI, THE Creator god of the Maasai, almost the same as Enki, who created the Sumerians, as well as Enoch, the Canaanite hero who stormed heaven, and Inca, the divine chief of the ancient Andeans? Is it accidental that if you reverse the syllables of those names - a word-game which ancient societies played all the time - you get Ka'in of the Sumerians, Kainan of the Canaanites, Cain of Genesis and Chanes of Mesoamerica? Thus, although Genesis...

Inca Leapt Canyons With Fiber BridgesMIT Students Plan to Stretch 60-Foot-Long Fiber Bridge Between Campus Buildings By John Noble Wilford May 8, 2007 CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw, and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail. Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had...

Dung-eating mites throw light on Inca civilisation Mark Henderson, Science Editor Mites that eat llama dung are providing scientists with critical new clues to the rise and fall of the Inca empire and the civilisations that preceded it. The soil invertebrates are allowing researchers to trace the growth and decline of the peoples of the Andes several centuries before the Spanish conquest in 1532 brought written records to the region for the first time. The evidence gleaned from fossilised mites, preserved in sediments at a lake about 50km (30 miles) from the Inca capital of Cuzco, has shown how the...

THE HAGUE -- Bolivian President Evo Morales, on a state visit to the Netherlands, said he is searching for a new model of democracy that could include reviving the ancient tradition of whipping petty criminals as an alternative to jail. "When I was a kid I was punished several times, being whipped and lashed," the leftist president said Monday... "Whenever I did something wrong, I received punishment with a chicote [the loose end of a rope], and always believed that the system our ancestors used was better than the system in the northern justice system....," he said. Meanwhile, some 5,000...

Even after decades of study, Yale University's collection of relics from Machu Picchu continues to reveal new details about life in the Incan city in the clouds. The bones tell stories about the health of the Incan people. The metal tools hint at the society's technological advancement. The artifacts help scientists reconstruct ancient trade routes. Archaeologists say they've even learned that the Incan diet revolved not around the Peruvian staple of potatoes, but was based largely on maize. All this from restudying a collection that's nearly a century old. The government of Peru wants it back, saying it never relinquished...

The archipelago is named after Robinson Crusoe, but perhaps it should have been called Treasure Island. A long quest for booty from the Spanish colonial era appears to be culminating in Chile with the announcement by a group of adventurers that they have found an estimated 600 barrels of gold coins and Incan jewels on the remote Pacific island. "The biggest treasure in history has been located," said Fernando Uribe-Etxeverria, a lawyer for Wagner, the Chilean company leading the search. Mr Uribe-Etxeverria estimated the value of the buried treasure at US$10bn (£5.6bn). The announcement set off ownership claims. The treasure...

Knotted threads carry signs of ancient accountancy.Scientists have picked apart some 500-year-old calculations from the Inca empire. The team deciphered the maths from a series of 'khipus': elaborate structures of coloured, knotted strings. Researchers have long known that the Inca, who lived along the west coast of South America from AD 1400-1532, used such cords to record numbers. But this is the first mathematical relationship found between khipu. And that may help to work out what kind of information they stored. Khipus encode numbers as knots in strings hanging from a cord. The closer a knot is to the cord,...

WASHINGTON — Three figure-eight knots tied into strings may be the first word from the ancient Inca in centuries. While the Incan empire left nothing that would be considered writing by today's standards, it did produce knotted strings in various colors and arrangements that have long puzzled historians and anthropologists. Many of these strings have turned out to be a type of accounting system, but interpreting them has been complex. Now, Gary Urton and Carrie J. Brezine of Harvard University say they have found a three-knot pattern in some of the strings, called khipu, that they believe identifies them as...

Archaeologists have uncovered a multi-level grave site at Peru’s ancient ruins of Pachacamac, including mummy bundles containing whole families. There were also bodies of pilgrims who presumably sought cures from an oracle deity for diseases like syphilis, tuberculosis and cancer, the project’s leader said. “What is interesting in this cemetery is that it is totally intact, and we have mummies of different epochs, different periods, and they have their burial goods with them,” archaeologist Peter Eeckhout, of the Free University of Brussels, told The Associated Press.

An Oregon State University researcher is using modern technology to unravel the mysteries of an ancient South American culture. The Inca empire marked momentous state occasions with a ritual called capacocha. These ceremonies linked the capital of Cuzco to remote Inca provinces through the sacrifice of children and the burial of precious objects. OSU researcher Leah Minc used neutron activation analysis to identify the compositional elements of 15th century pottery found in several sacred burial sites. Establishing the artifacts' makeup allowed her to pinpoint their origins, and ultimately to better understand the capacocha. The findings were published in the March...

CORVALLIS - Researchers have applied a unique nuclear analytic technique to pottery found at an ancient burial site high in the Andes mountains, and believe that the girl buried at this site was transported more than 600 miles in a ceremonial pilgrimage - revealing some customs and rituals of the ancient Inca empire. The findings are being published by scientists from Oregon State University in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. On the highest peaks of the Andes, sacrificial burial sites have been discovered since the early 1900s. In one of them was the fully intact, frozen body of a girl...

The high-resolution QuickBird satellite images of the tsunami impact on Sri Lanka are just a few of the images on the Digital Globe web site that made me stop and say "Wow!" For example, check out the images on the links below:

Incan Counting System Decoded? By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Learn how to add 9+7 on the yupana abacus. Jan. 29, 2004 ? The Inca invented a powerful counting system that could be used to make complex calculations without the tiniest mistake, according to an Italian engineer who claims to have cracked the mathematics of this still mysterious ancient population. Begun in the Andean highlands in about 1200, the Inca ruled the largest empire on Earth by the time their last emperor, Atahualpa, was garroted by Spanish conquistadors in 1533. Long been considered the only major Bronze Age civilization without a...

Incan Counting System Decoded? By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Learn how to add 9+7 on the yupana abacus. Jan. 29, 2004 — The Inca invented a powerful counting system that could be used to make complex calculations without the tiniest mistake, according to an Italian engineer who claims to have cracked the mathematics of this still mysterious ancient population. Begun in the Andean highlands in about 1200, the Inca ruled the largest empire on Earth by the time their last emperor, Atahualpa, was garroted by Spanish conquistadors in 1533. Long been considered the only major Bronze Age civilization without a...

Machu Picchu Comes to L.A. Largest U.S. Exhibition of Inca Treasures Makes Only West Coast Stop at Natural History Museum (http://www.nhm.org/) . June 22 to September 7, 2003. This is the first stop on the exhibition’s national tour, after its debut at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Following the Los Angeles presentation, the exhibit will travel to Pittsburgh, Denver, Houston and Chicago. The enduring allure of Machu Picchu, the 15th-century Incan ruins nestled into Peru's Andes Mountains, is its mystery. Why and how did the Incas build such an impressive estate -- a five-acre city, really, with 150...

Inca may have used knot computer code to bind empire By Steve Connor, Science Editor 23 June 2003 They ran the biggest empire of their age, with a vast network of roads, granaries, warehouses and a complex system of government. Yet the Inca, founded in about AD1200 by Manco Capac, were unique for such a significant civilisation: they had no written language. This has been the conventional view of the Inca, whose dominions at their height covered almost all of the Andean region, from Colombia to Chile, until they were defeated in the Spanish conquest of 1532. But a leading...

Scott Peterson arrives at the county jail in Modesto, Calif., Friday, April 18, 2003 after he was arrested in the death of his wife, Laci, who was eight months pregnant when she vanished on Christmas Eve. (AP Photo/Modesto Bee/Al Golub, pool) MODESTO, Calif. - Authorities said genetic odds "in the billions" proved that two bodies that recently washed ashore were those of Laci Peterson and her baby, in an announcement that came hours after the missing woman's husband was arrested in their deaths. Scott Peterson, 30, arrived at the Stanislaus County jail just before midnight after being driven there...

Introduction - Investigations of Bolivia Fuente Magna and the Monolith of Pokotia The following material is reprinted by permission from Bernardo Biadós Yacovazzo & Freddy Arce, OIIB - Omega Institute Investigations (Bolivia), INTI - NonGovernmental Organizacion (Bolivia). A large stone vessel, resembling a libation bowl, and now known as the Fuente Magna, was originally discovered in a rather casual fashion by a country peasant from the ex-hacienda CHUA, property of the Manjon family situated in the surrounding areas of Lake Titicaca about 75/80 km from the city of La Paz. The site where it was found has not been...

Archeologists found several offerings of "exceptional quality" in the mortuary chamber. Tomb with three bodies found in abandoned city of Teotihuacan Monica Medel, EFE - 9/30/2002 A tomb containing the remains of three bodies has been discovered in the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan, the well-known ruins outside Mexico City. The find is one of the most important in recent years and will provide valuable information on the lives led by the people of Teotihuacan, who disappeared in the mists of history after the city was abandoned in the year 600. The remains were found by a multidisciplinary...

Unpublished document sheds light on Peru's Inca rulersGonzalo Castillero, EFE - 8/18/2002 LIMA - An unpublished 19th-century manuscript rescued from oblivion by a collector contains depictions of Inca rulers that clear up centuries-old questions. The manuscript, entitled "Memories of the Peruvian Monarchy or Outline of Inca History," was written in 1838 by Justo Apu Sahuaraura, a direct descendant of Pachacutec, the last Inca of royal stock. Born in 1775 to a noble Indian family, Sahuaraura illustrated his manuscript with watercolor portraits of the 17 Inca rulers and included his own. "Many doubts remained as to what the Incas looked...

Explorers View 'Lost City' Ruins Under Caribbean FROM REUTERS CUBA, Dec 8 (VNN) — Author: Andrew Cawthorne HAVANA (Reuters) - Explorers using a miniature submarine to probe the sea floor off the coast of Cuba said on Thursday they had confirmed the discovery of stone structures deep below the ocean surface that may have been built by an unknown human civilization thousands of years ago. Researchers with a Canadian exploration company said they filmed over the summer ruins of a possible submerged ''lost city'' off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on the Caribbean island's western tip. The researchers cautioned that they did...

Explorer: Legendary El Dorado Pinpointed By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News normalize font   |   increase font Aug. 9 — The fabled treasure of El Dorado may lie in tunnels and caves at the bottom of a lake in the Peruvian Amazon, according to a Polish-Italian explorer who has returned from a three-week reconnaissance trip in search of the legendary city. Called Paititi by the Incas and El Dorado by the Spaniards, the mythical city is thought to have been the last place of refuge for the Incas when they fled with their treasures ahead of the advancing Spanish...

"El Dorado" discovered in Peruvian Amazon, explorers claim Story Filed: Saturday, July 27, 2002 5:02 PM EST Lima, Jul 27, 2002 (EFE via COMTEX) -- An international team of explorers claims to have found the legendary Inca city of gold that the Spanish knew as "El Dorado," deep in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. The quest began on June 30, when more than two dozen researchers began combing the wild and unexplored jungle region along the basin of the Madre de Dios River. El Dorado, called "Paititi" by the region's Indian population, is known as the last bastion...

Machete-wielding team discover Inca fastness lost for four centuries By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 06/06/2002) One of the last Inca strongholds against the conquering Spanish has been uncovered in cloud-forest by a British and American expedition investigating a rumour of lost ruins, the Royal Geographical Society will announce today. Called Cota Coca, after the coca grown there, the site is more than 6,000ft up in a valley near the junction of the Yanama and Blanco rivers in Vilcabamba, one of the least understood and most significant areas in the history of the Incas, rulers of the last great empire...