Rock Art
Moderators: MichelleH, Minimalist, JPeters
Back to Las Lunas;
The fact that it is a mix of languages and is not “pure” in it’s verbiage doesn’t mean that it is not real. It just means that it wasn’t carved or dictated by someone with a degree in religion.
Why New Mexico? First, it was a much nicer climate back then. And it was a known source gold, silver, copper and other good stuff.
Second, it was a real long way from the Assyrians. It sure was not a secret that they were on their way.
If I was a well off trader, with access to boats with experienced crews, and with knowledge of a place to start over again, I sure wouldn’t sit around and wait for a conquest to happen. I would pack up the family and bail out. It would not have been the first time, or the last time, people with money and ability exited before something bad happened.
And I probably wasn’t alone. I would have friends in the same situation and with the same desires.
What God, or gods, did we worship? Like any good business men we covered our risk. And, as a business man, I spoke Greek, Hebrew, maybe even a bit of Egyptian and others. Like many a multi lingual, I slipped from one language to another in speech as well as in writing.
Could it be defaced and altered since it was discovered. Sure, it could. But no one who has visited it over the years has reported anything different from what was reported from it’s first discovery. Other than it slipping farther down the hill, everybody seems to agree as to being unchanged.
I just see it as real good evidence of regular contact across the Atlantic prior to Columbus. Most of that trade went away with Rome detroying Carthage. Even though they have found Roman shipwercks in the Amazon, Rome was much more Europe oriented, and the trans Atlantic trade died off.
Although Columbus, in his dirary, admits to having maps to follow. But that should be another thread.
The fact that it is a mix of languages and is not “pure” in it’s verbiage doesn’t mean that it is not real. It just means that it wasn’t carved or dictated by someone with a degree in religion.
Why New Mexico? First, it was a much nicer climate back then. And it was a known source gold, silver, copper and other good stuff.
Second, it was a real long way from the Assyrians. It sure was not a secret that they were on their way.
If I was a well off trader, with access to boats with experienced crews, and with knowledge of a place to start over again, I sure wouldn’t sit around and wait for a conquest to happen. I would pack up the family and bail out. It would not have been the first time, or the last time, people with money and ability exited before something bad happened.
And I probably wasn’t alone. I would have friends in the same situation and with the same desires.
What God, or gods, did we worship? Like any good business men we covered our risk. And, as a business man, I spoke Greek, Hebrew, maybe even a bit of Egyptian and others. Like many a multi lingual, I slipped from one language to another in speech as well as in writing.
Could it be defaced and altered since it was discovered. Sure, it could. But no one who has visited it over the years has reported anything different from what was reported from it’s first discovery. Other than it slipping farther down the hill, everybody seems to agree as to being unchanged.
I just see it as real good evidence of regular contact across the Atlantic prior to Columbus. Most of that trade went away with Rome detroying Carthage. Even though they have found Roman shipwercks in the Amazon, Rome was much more Europe oriented, and the trans Atlantic trade died off.
Although Columbus, in his dirary, admits to having maps to follow. But that should be another thread.
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Forum Monk
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- Location: USA
KB
I was wondering if you could post some links or references to support these statements:
Thanks.
I was wondering if you could post some links or references to support these statements:
Second, it was a real long way from the Assyrians. It sure was not a secret that they were on their way.
Even though they have found Roman shipwercks in the Amazon
the trans Atlantic trade died off
Some of things are interesting to me and I would like to read them myself.Columbus, in his dirary, admits to having maps to follow
Thanks.
Monk and KB, I don't think distance is too much of a problem in some of these potential voyages, look how long Magellan took on his voyage around the world, and as far as I know he had no press gang to fill his fleet. Despite all the tales of press gangs and so on in the Napoleonic wars the Royal Navy actually rarely resorted to this action, prize money insured that there was rarely a shortage of men to man the fleet. Press gangs make good novels, rather like poor old Captain Blye supposedly being a swine.
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Forum Monk
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- Location: USA
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marduk
whats an "poor old Captain Blye" is that the guy with the fish fingers
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bligh
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Eye# ... ish_Sticks
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bligh
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Eye# ... ish_Sticks
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clubs_stink
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I should insert that disclaimer that someone suggested on the other page, but I cannot remember what it was so I'll make up my mind.Digit wrote:Monk and KB, I don't think distance is too much of a problem in some of these potential voyages, look how long Magellan took on his voyage around the world, and as far as I know he had no press gang to fill his fleet. Despite all the tales of press gangs and so on in the Napoleonic wars the Royal Navy actually rarely resorted to this action, prize money insured that there was rarely a shortage of men to man the fleet. Press gangs make good novels, rather like poor old Captain Blye supposedly being a swine.
CAUTION, WANDERING INTO WORLD OF SPECULATION
WHAT IF...there was a land mass between there and here? Wouldn't that not shorten the distance one would have to travel in one fell swoop? Would't that make the trip easier, and more likely to have been made?
If there were such a missing land mass might not that lend a simple explanation to HOW, and WHY? Not to mention make it far easier to explain the out-of-place, far-earlier-than-expected finds which are currently being shoved under the rug of inconvenience?
Might it not help explain this freaky little timeline and structures?
http://www.rocklakeresearch.com/history.htm
end of WHAT IF.
It's safe to come out now.
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Forum Monk
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Minimalist
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Digit wrote:Sorry Monk, I got tripped by my own enthusiasm, I was referring the comment about Roman ships in the Amazon and so on and suggesting that explorers sometimes seem unbothered by distance and that crewing these ships has never seemed to be a problem.
Greco-Roman ships tended to sail along the coast whenever possible and to put into shore or a port, if available, at night. Most likely this is a result of poor navigation tools. That is not to say that a ship could not have been blown off course and ended up in the Americas but that is a far cry from intentionally setting out to go there.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
-- George Carlin
-- George Carlin
OK, I will try and tie it all together. This will be long, so bear with me.
First, a whole lot of the rock art spread around the country is clearly not Amerindian work. The symbols, writing, astrological knowledge etc. involved just do not match. Plus many of the old reports of interviews with tribal elders show that Amerindians acknowdged that the art was there when they moved in.
Thus then brings up the question of who did it and why. In the South West, at least, a lot of the symbols show a North African, or Carthage, relationship. Some of these carving are just explorers graffiti, but others show a well established knowledge of astrology and the need to determine solstices, equinoxes, etc. So we have a spread of knowledge and purpose.
Why would Carthagians come to the South West? The same reason the white man did centuries later. Gold, silver, copper, and good land to set up settlements on to feed the miners.
So now we have established settlements supporting established trade. But, admittedly, at the literal ends of the earth from a Mediterranean point of view.
Most of this is built in the premise that there was not enough copper in the Old World to make all the bronze used in the Bronze Age. Thus the need for the mines on Lake Superior and in the South West.
Second, as far as knowledge of the Assyrians coming is concerned. It is pure conjecture on my part. But I find it hard to believe that they could assemble a multi hundred thousand man army in secret. And world politics was as much a topic of conversation then as now. Especially among traders who had to buy and sell stuff coming from and going to far away places.
The fact that they were willing to take the short, fast, direct route across the water has been shown by Ballard and his discoveries in the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and even Atlantic Ocean. He has found wrecks of merchant ships that were far out of sight of land. His conclusion is that they were so heavily loaded that they were not blown far off course before they went down. But that the went down pretty much when they were pretty much on course.
The need for this long distance, and both physical and financially dangerous, trade died off with the discovery off how to make iron weapons and tools. Iron was better, it was cheaper, and you could find it locally. There just wasn’t enough money in it to make it worth while anymore.
I have to take back the Roman shipwreck in the Amazon statement. It was in Rio de Janeiro. That is much further south. But what is important it that it was there and that it was a merchant ship, not military. This guy was not out for glory, god and country. He was out to make money. And there were people there to trade with. In the Amazon basin and he seemed to think further on as well.
I think the important lesson to be learned by all this is that history is written by historians who are most often employed by the governments of the time. So it is written from the governments point of view, usually military. But these explores were outside that box. They were looking for a profit. And if the found a new source for a commodity, or a shortcut that saved travel time and money, they didn’t brag about it. It was a trade secret and kept close to the vest.
ROMANS IN RIO?
In 1976, diver Jose Roberto Texeira salvaged two intact amphorae from the bottom of Guanabara Bay, 15 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Six years later, archeologist Robert Marx found thousands of pottery fragments in the same locality, including 200 necks from amphorae.
Amphorae are tall storage vessels that were used widely throughout ancient Europe. These particular amphorae are of Roman manufacture, circa the second century B.C. Much controversy erupted around the finds because Spain and Portugal both claim to have discovered Brazil around 1500 A.D. Roman artifacts were distinctly unwelcome. More objectively, the thought of an ancient Roman crossing of the Atlantic is not so farfetched. Roman wrecks have been discovered in the Azores; and the shortest way across the Atlantic is from Africa to Brazil -- only 18 days using modern sailing vessels.
(Sheckley, Robert; "Romans in Rio," Omni, 5:43, June 1983.)
From Science Frontiers #28, JUL-AUG 1983. © 1983-2000 William R. Corliss
News in Science - Ancient Amazon home to large 'cities' - 19/09/2003
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s949687.htm]
Ancient Amazon home to large 'cities'
Maggie Fox
Reuters
Friday, 19 September 2003
Brazil's northern Amazon region, once thought to have been pristine until the encroachment of modern development, actually hosted sophisticated networks of towns and villages hundreds of years ago, according to a new study by U.S. and Brazilian researchers.
A report by Dr Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida and colleagues, published in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests the society was advanced and complex, and had worked out ways of using the Amazon forest without destroying it.
WASHINGTON, DC Sept. 18, 2003 —
The Amazon River basin was not all a pristine, untouched wilderness before Columbus came to the Americas, as was once believed. Researchers have uncovered clusters of extensive settlements linked by wide roads with other communities and surrounded by agricultural developments.
The researchers, including some descendants of pre-Columbian tribes that lived along the Amazon, have found evidence of densely settled, well-organized communities with roads, moats and bridges in the Upper Xingu part of the vast tropical region.
Michael J. Heckenberger, first author of the study appearing this week in the journal Science, said that the ancestors of the Kuikuro people in the Amazon basin had a "complex and sophisticated" civilization with a population of many thousands during the period before 1492.
"These people were not the small mobile bands or simple dispersed populations" that some earlier studies had suggested, he said.
Instead, the people demonstrated sophisticated levels of engineering, planning, cooperation and architecture in carving out of the tropical rain forest a system of interconnected villages and towns making up a widespread culture based on farming.
Heckenberger said the society that lived in the Amazon before Columbus were overlooked by experts because they did not build the massive cities and pyramids and other structures common to the Mayans, Aztecs and other pre-Columbian societies in South America.
Instead, they built towns, villages and smaller hamlets all laced together by precisely designed roads, some more than 50 yards across, that went in straight lines from one point to another.
"They were not organized in cities," Heckenberger said. "There was a different pattern of small settlements, but they were all tightly integrated.
He said the population in one village and town complex was 2,500 to 5,000 people, but that could be just one of many complexes in the Amazon region.
"All the roads were positioned according to the same angles and they formed a grid throughout the region," he said. Only a small part of these roads has been uncovered and it is uncertain how far the roads extend, but the area studied by his group is a grid 15 miles by 15 miles, he said.
Heckenberger said the people did not build with stone, as did the Mayas, but made tools and other equipment of wood and bone. Such materials quickly deteriorate in the tropical forest, unlike more durable stone structures. Building stones were not readily available along the Amazon, he said.
He said the Amazon people moved huge amounts of dirt to build roads and plazas. At one place, there is evidence that they even built a bridge spanning a major river. The people also altered the natural forest, planting and maintaining orchards and agricultural fields and the effects of this stewardship can still be seen today, Heckenberger said.
Diseases such as smallpox and measles, brought to the new world by European explorers, are thought to have wiped out most of the population along the Amazon, he said. By the time scientists began studying the indigenous people, the population was sparse and far flung. As a result, some researchers assumed that that was the way it was prior to Columbus.
The new studies, Heckenberger said, show that the Amazon basin once was the center of a stable, well-coordinated and sophisticated society.
On the Net:
Science: www.sciencemag.org
Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
I hope this helps. I will have to dig up the Columbus and his maps reference. But any good search on his name should find it. It is well known by historians if not by storytellers.
First, a whole lot of the rock art spread around the country is clearly not Amerindian work. The symbols, writing, astrological knowledge etc. involved just do not match. Plus many of the old reports of interviews with tribal elders show that Amerindians acknowdged that the art was there when they moved in.
Thus then brings up the question of who did it and why. In the South West, at least, a lot of the symbols show a North African, or Carthage, relationship. Some of these carving are just explorers graffiti, but others show a well established knowledge of astrology and the need to determine solstices, equinoxes, etc. So we have a spread of knowledge and purpose.
Why would Carthagians come to the South West? The same reason the white man did centuries later. Gold, silver, copper, and good land to set up settlements on to feed the miners.
So now we have established settlements supporting established trade. But, admittedly, at the literal ends of the earth from a Mediterranean point of view.
Most of this is built in the premise that there was not enough copper in the Old World to make all the bronze used in the Bronze Age. Thus the need for the mines on Lake Superior and in the South West.
Second, as far as knowledge of the Assyrians coming is concerned. It is pure conjecture on my part. But I find it hard to believe that they could assemble a multi hundred thousand man army in secret. And world politics was as much a topic of conversation then as now. Especially among traders who had to buy and sell stuff coming from and going to far away places.
The fact that they were willing to take the short, fast, direct route across the water has been shown by Ballard and his discoveries in the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and even Atlantic Ocean. He has found wrecks of merchant ships that were far out of sight of land. His conclusion is that they were so heavily loaded that they were not blown far off course before they went down. But that the went down pretty much when they were pretty much on course.
The need for this long distance, and both physical and financially dangerous, trade died off with the discovery off how to make iron weapons and tools. Iron was better, it was cheaper, and you could find it locally. There just wasn’t enough money in it to make it worth while anymore.
I have to take back the Roman shipwreck in the Amazon statement. It was in Rio de Janeiro. That is much further south. But what is important it that it was there and that it was a merchant ship, not military. This guy was not out for glory, god and country. He was out to make money. And there were people there to trade with. In the Amazon basin and he seemed to think further on as well.
I think the important lesson to be learned by all this is that history is written by historians who are most often employed by the governments of the time. So it is written from the governments point of view, usually military. But these explores were outside that box. They were looking for a profit. And if the found a new source for a commodity, or a shortcut that saved travel time and money, they didn’t brag about it. It was a trade secret and kept close to the vest.
ROMANS IN RIO?
In 1976, diver Jose Roberto Texeira salvaged two intact amphorae from the bottom of Guanabara Bay, 15 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Six years later, archeologist Robert Marx found thousands of pottery fragments in the same locality, including 200 necks from amphorae.
Amphorae are tall storage vessels that were used widely throughout ancient Europe. These particular amphorae are of Roman manufacture, circa the second century B.C. Much controversy erupted around the finds because Spain and Portugal both claim to have discovered Brazil around 1500 A.D. Roman artifacts were distinctly unwelcome. More objectively, the thought of an ancient Roman crossing of the Atlantic is not so farfetched. Roman wrecks have been discovered in the Azores; and the shortest way across the Atlantic is from Africa to Brazil -- only 18 days using modern sailing vessels.
(Sheckley, Robert; "Romans in Rio," Omni, 5:43, June 1983.)
From Science Frontiers #28, JUL-AUG 1983. © 1983-2000 William R. Corliss
News in Science - Ancient Amazon home to large 'cities' - 19/09/2003
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s949687.htm]
Ancient Amazon home to large 'cities'
Maggie Fox
Reuters
Friday, 19 September 2003
Brazil's northern Amazon region, once thought to have been pristine until the encroachment of modern development, actually hosted sophisticated networks of towns and villages hundreds of years ago, according to a new study by U.S. and Brazilian researchers.
A report by Dr Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida and colleagues, published in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests the society was advanced and complex, and had worked out ways of using the Amazon forest without destroying it.
WASHINGTON, DC Sept. 18, 2003 —
The Amazon River basin was not all a pristine, untouched wilderness before Columbus came to the Americas, as was once believed. Researchers have uncovered clusters of extensive settlements linked by wide roads with other communities and surrounded by agricultural developments.
The researchers, including some descendants of pre-Columbian tribes that lived along the Amazon, have found evidence of densely settled, well-organized communities with roads, moats and bridges in the Upper Xingu part of the vast tropical region.
Michael J. Heckenberger, first author of the study appearing this week in the journal Science, said that the ancestors of the Kuikuro people in the Amazon basin had a "complex and sophisticated" civilization with a population of many thousands during the period before 1492.
"These people were not the small mobile bands or simple dispersed populations" that some earlier studies had suggested, he said.
Instead, the people demonstrated sophisticated levels of engineering, planning, cooperation and architecture in carving out of the tropical rain forest a system of interconnected villages and towns making up a widespread culture based on farming.
Heckenberger said the society that lived in the Amazon before Columbus were overlooked by experts because they did not build the massive cities and pyramids and other structures common to the Mayans, Aztecs and other pre-Columbian societies in South America.
Instead, they built towns, villages and smaller hamlets all laced together by precisely designed roads, some more than 50 yards across, that went in straight lines from one point to another.
"They were not organized in cities," Heckenberger said. "There was a different pattern of small settlements, but they were all tightly integrated.
He said the population in one village and town complex was 2,500 to 5,000 people, but that could be just one of many complexes in the Amazon region.
"All the roads were positioned according to the same angles and they formed a grid throughout the region," he said. Only a small part of these roads has been uncovered and it is uncertain how far the roads extend, but the area studied by his group is a grid 15 miles by 15 miles, he said.
Heckenberger said the people did not build with stone, as did the Mayas, but made tools and other equipment of wood and bone. Such materials quickly deteriorate in the tropical forest, unlike more durable stone structures. Building stones were not readily available along the Amazon, he said.
He said the Amazon people moved huge amounts of dirt to build roads and plazas. At one place, there is evidence that they even built a bridge spanning a major river. The people also altered the natural forest, planting and maintaining orchards and agricultural fields and the effects of this stewardship can still be seen today, Heckenberger said.
Diseases such as smallpox and measles, brought to the new world by European explorers, are thought to have wiped out most of the population along the Amazon, he said. By the time scientists began studying the indigenous people, the population was sparse and far flung. As a result, some researchers assumed that that was the way it was prior to Columbus.
The new studies, Heckenberger said, show that the Amazon basin once was the center of a stable, well-coordinated and sophisticated society.
On the Net:
Science: www.sciencemag.org
Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
I hope this helps. I will have to dig up the Columbus and his maps reference. But any good search on his name should find it. It is well known by historians if not by storytellers.