Re: Amerindian navigators

[agdndmc@showme.missouri.edu (Domingo Martinez)]

No more corn?  Or sweet potatoes?  (Luckily, the Kensington thing is not in 
s.a.meso-american!)

Questions for Mr "What a moment" Kuchinksy (see 
http://www.andes.missouri.edu/personal/dmartinez/diffusion/msg00079.html), now 
becoming an instant expert in  (his words, not mine) "amazing maritime 
civilizations":

1. Have you read articles criticizing Heyerdahl?   Or you take him verbatim, 
as an act of scholarly faith and wishful thinking?

2. Do you know the difference between a "reed boat", as used in the Titicaca 
Lake, and a "caballito de totora" ("reed pony" would be a nice translation), 
as used in the Lambayeque coast?. "You see, Yuri," the caballito de totora is 
mounted like a horse: it is no raft, or boat, or anything like that, being its 
use closer to that of a Hawaiian surfing board before it reached LA ("There 
you have it: contact between Hawaii and the Redondo Beach and the Andes!").  I 
really doubt that Heyerdahl mentions "reed boats" in Lambayeque today, really.

3. Did the "amazing maritime Chincha civilization" (cf. one of Yuri's dozens 
of recent scholarly posts) use reed or balsa-wood rafts?  If they used balsa 
wood, wher did they get it? "You see, Yuri,"  there are no too many balsa 
trees in the Peruvian Coast, especially around Chincha, which sits in a 
riverine oasis in one of the driest deserts of the world, and which also is 
the coastal region which is among the farthest away from any jungle. (The 
Chincha, by the way, were co-opted by the Inca to carry our trade in both land 
--cotton, camelid fiber, and so on-- and along the Coast, to get the very 
valuable Spondylus shells from what today is Ecuador. Maria Rostworowski 
mentions, if my memory does not fail, around 6,000 traders.  They were 
important, of course, so much so that during the Cajamarca tragedy, the 
Spaniards could not very well tell who was more important: the Inca, or the 
Apu of Chincha.  Later, Atawallpa, a friend of tall tales, would tell the 
Spaniards that the Chincha had a float of 100,000 rafts!)

4. What are the best hypotheses to explain the paucity of archaeological 
indications of trade between Mesoamerica and the Andes, let alone between 
Polynesia and the Andes? (Question that arises from the purported "evidence" 
of large trade networks by "amazing maritime civilizations" around the 
Pacific.) Trade most likely happened, but there does not seem evidence of it 
being an established fact.

5.  In the chronicles, there is only, I believe, one account (among thousand 
of pages and hundreds of chroniclers) of one Inca, T�pac Yupanqui, I believe, 
that mentions an expedition to the Western seas.  Heyerdahl was basically 
inspired by that account to carry out the Kon-Tiki expedition.

Nobody doubts that the basic technology to attempt explorations existed,  but 
that does not automatically translate in those explorations taking place.  The 
Chinese case, in which explorations were stopped abruptly due to internal 
political causes, should be sufficient to make one more careful before 
throwing assertions like "it could be done, then it was done", which was the 
case of the Kon-Tiki and Rah expeditions.  Heyerdahl understood, later, that 
some archaeology was also in order, but his intensive excavations in Easter 
Island and T�cume have yielded --for his hypotheses of exchanges between those 
areas--, so far, only some friezes of birdmen in T�cume (subject to 
interpretation: they are not hard evidence of anything!, besides the pictures 
do NOT look similar!)  and birdmen in the Orongo site in Easter I.  They are 
stylistically different, very different.

The other piece of "evidence" is a paddle, *one* small wooden paddle 8 cm 
long.

I got some of this info in the Kon Tiki web site.  On T�cume and Easter 
Island, read (basically reed boats and birdmen with lots of preaching 
included):

http://www.media.uio.no/kon-tiki/tucume/modus_vivendi.html

where author Johansen, curiously, complains about how closed and overzealous 
some archaeologists are (in this case, he refers to Polynesian archaeologists, 
but it sounds mighty familiar in some newsgroups).

I strongly recommend everybody to read that article, as it may be a good 
summation (including the language and the choice of words) of what takes place 
in these newsgropus regarding pre-Columbian post-Pleistocene pre-Columbian 
contacts, namely:

1. conspiracy of statu-quo archaeologists who don not allow new points of view

2. statues that purportedly provide "evidence"

3. Sentences like "This bead probably belongs to the same
                           cultural and chronological tradition as the T�cume
                           relief, even if its provenance is rather obscure. "

in which the author (referring to a Pun� pot) cannot hide a lot of wishful 
thinking.  The provenance is obscure (ergo not any good to make major 
assertions), but I throw my interpretation anyway (so I can strengthen my 
case, or at least create the illusion I am doing it).

4. Or sentences like:

                           "Primarily from
                           a purely logical point of view. I find it quite
                           unlikely that the highly civilized peoples who
                           dominated South America from the time before
                           our era and until the arrival of the Spaniards, did
                           not know how to build sea-worthy craft, let alone
                           use them in open waters. This is pure logic,
                           which always comes in handy in archaeology, but
                           I am also of the opinion that it can be proved as
                           far as archaeology is concerned."

I will take him by his word.  It can be proved, yes.  Has it been proved?  
Not.

Regards,

Domingo.


-----
Domingo Martinez-Castilla
agdndmc@showme.missouri.edu

An archive of discussions on pre-Columbian inter-continental
diffusion can be found at:

http://www.andes.missouri.edu/personal/dmartinez/diffusion/
-----