Re: ANCIENT MARINERS: Andean-Mexican seagoing trade

From: Seppo Renfors (Renfors_at_not.com.au)
Date: 07/06/04 

Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 07:10:32 GMT

Yuri Kuchinsky wrote:
>
> Greetings, all,
>
> Here's some interesting info about the ancient Andean-Mexican seagoing
> trade, bringing into focus especially the importance of metalwork for
> tracing these cultural links.
>
> All the best,
>
> Yuri.
>
> =================
>
> ANCIENT MARINERS: Strong evidence of Andean-Mexican seagoing trade as
> early as 600 A.D. by David L. Chandler
>
> The Boston Globe, August 14, 1995. Pp. 25-27.
>
> Archeologists studying the ancients empires of Central and South
> America have long noticed similarities in some pottery designs and
> food crops and wondered whether mariners from the Andean coast traded
> with their counterparts 2,000 miles to the north. Now, an MIT
> researcher says she has strong evidence they did.
>
> Sophisticated and unique metalworking techniques, developed in
> South America as far as 1200 B.C., suddenly appeared in Western Mexico
> in about 600 A.D. - without ever being seen anywhere in between. The
> only reasonable explanation, according to archeologist Dorothy Hosler,
> is seaborne trade.
>
> As far back as the Spanish conquest it was clear that the South
> American cultures had the capability for such trade. When Francisco
> Pizarro approached Peru in 1527, he saw large sailing rafts traveling
> along the coast. But until now, there was little evidence of how far
> they travelled, or the fact that there was any significant contact
> between the two great civilizations of that era, the Mesoamerican
> (including the Mayans and other groups) to the north and the Andean
> (including the Incas) in South America.
>
> It took Hosler's innovative, detailed metallurgical analysis of
> ancient bronze and copper artifacts to provide the convincing evidence
> that this trade ranged over thousands of miles.
>
> Hosler, an associate professor of archeology and ancient
> technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent
> years studying the composition, design and metalworking technologies
> used to make a variety of bells, ornaments and small tools found in
> Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Western Mexico.
>
> Centuries after their development in South America, metal objects
> appeared suddenly on Mexico's west coast. But the absence of any
> metal artifacts from that period in all of Central America in between,
> or in the interior and east coast of Mexico, indicates that these
> casting methods, alloys and designs could not have been exported via
> overland trade.
>
> "Her findings have been very important, I think, in the New World
> picture," said Gordon Willey, professor emeritus of Mexico and Central
> American, archeology at Harvard University. "What she has shown
> without much doubt is that metallurgical technologies were diffused
> from the south, probably carried by travelers on rafts."
>
> "There has always been a lot of speculation on the relationship
> between Mesoamerica and the cultures further south," Wiley added.
> "But to pin anything down as tightly and specifically as this
> metallurgical technology is very unusual."
>
> The fact that the South American civilizations had coastal trade
> and fishing routes is well known from the writings, and at least one
> drawing, of 16th century European voyagers. They described oceangoing
> balsawood sailing rafts, capable of carrying anywhere from a dozen to
> 40 people and laden with goods, plying the coasts of present Peru and
> Ecuador. Some archeologists had speculated, on the basis of
> similarities in pottery designs, that these South American marine
> traders made it as far north as Mexico, but the evidence was ambiguous
> because pottery-making was so universal at the time.
>
> "The Mexican case is very interesting," Hosler said last week in
> an interview at MIT, during a brief break from her fieldwork in
> Mexico. "It's one of the few places where advanced civilization arose
> without metallurgy.
>
> "And then suddenly, around this area which was not a primary area
> of state-level society" - that is, not part of one of the great
> empires but rather a region of smaller chiefdoms - "metal artifacts
> start to show up around 600 to 700 A.D."
>
> At the time, she said, there was "nothing with respect to
> metallurgy going on in eastern Mexico or Central America," where Mayan
> civilization, among others, was in its heyday, whereas the peoples of
> Peru, Ecuador and Colombia had thriving metallurgical traditions.
>
> Unlike the use of metals elsewhere in the ancient world, where
> the focus was usually on weapons and agricultural tools, much of the
> emphasis of both the Mexican and Andean metallurgists was on
> decorative and ceremonial objects such a bells and jewelry, and small
> tools such as needles and tweezers.
>
> That emphasis led them to develop metal alloys quite different
> from those found in other areas. Their bronze, for example, appears to
> have been formulated specifically for its color and sound qualities,
> rather than for mechanical strength, Hosler found. Bronzes used for
> ornamental bells and other items were formulated to give the
> appearance of gold (by adding larger than necessary amounts of tin to
> copper) or silver (by adding more arsenic than necessary to the
> copper).
>
> Among the extraordinary similarities Hosler found between metal
> working in the two regions:
>
> The use of the "lost wax" technique for casting distinctive
> ceremonial bells, a method that allows greater control over the
> thickness and sound properties. This involves carving the bell's
> shape from beeswax, then casting a hard mold (sometimes of clay and
> ash) around it. Molten metal poured into the mold melts away the wax
> and assumes its shape inside the mold, which is broken away after the
> metal hardens. Identical techniques and designs are found in Columbia
> and Mexico.
>
> -- The design and manufacturing methods for producing items such as
> needles and tweezers out of hammered copper or bronze.
>
> Distinctive methods, which Hosler describes as "very
> idiosyncratic," such as the way a needle's eye is made by folding,
> are found in both places. And unique designs of tweezers, used by men
> to pluck beard hairs, also are found in both regions. In Mexico, the
> tweezers became ceremonial objects, worn by priests as pendants.
>
> "There's a whole constellation of artifact designs that were
> common to both areas," Hosler says. "They were used the same way, and
> the objects were fashioned the same way."
>
> Hosler's detailed analysis of the metals themselves proved that
> it was mainly the knowledge of metallurgical techniques, rather than
> the metal objects themselves that was transported from the
> civilizations to the south; virtually all the objects found in Mexico
> were made from native Mexican ores.
>
> "We know they weren't trading in ores," Hosler said,"because
> Ecuadorian and Mexican ores are very different in their isotope
> ratios. What seems to have been introduced was technological
> know-how."
>
> In order to have imparted such detailed technological knowledge,
> she concludes, the visits must have been much longer and more
> extensive than would have been needed simply to trade finished goods.
>
> What motivated the far-flung trading? Hosler speculates that the
> South American mariners may have been searching for a much prized
> bright-orange seashell, the spondylous, that was used to make beads
> and ornaments and for rain-making rituals.
>
> The idea gets some support from Spanish records. Pizarro's chief
> pilot, Bartolome Ruiz de Estrada, describes capturing off the
> Ecuadorian coast a balsa raft carrying 20 men and trade goods that
> included "tiaras, crowns, bands, tweezers and bells, all of this they
> brought to exchange for some shells."
>
> Another possible trade item was the hallucinogenic peyote cactus,
> which is prevalent in Mexico and may have figured in religious
> ceremonies among the South American people, where the use of
> psychoactive substances was widespread.
>
> The evidence for extensive trade could affect the whole picture
> of how the great civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes developed,
> said Hosler, whose analysis of her evidence is detailed in a book,
> "The Sounds and Colors of Power," published by MIT Press this year.
>
> "One of the aspects that's very interesting for archeologists,"
> Hosler said, "is that we tend to think these two great civilizations"
> - the Mesoamerican and the Andean - "grew without much influence from
> one another... This is fairly unambiguous evidence that there was more
> extensive interaction than was thought."
>
> Others who specialize in Pre-Columbian American archeology agree.
> Michael Smith, associate professor of anthropology at the State
> University of New York at Stony Brook, says "the evidence she has, the
> evidence from metallurgy, is the strongest evidence. I don't doubt at
> all what happened... I don't know what more you could hope for, other
> than finding a boat with a sign that says 'this way to Acapulco'."

Hmmmm perhaps this might do instead?

http://www.rocklakeresearch.com/history.htm 

-- 
SIR - Philosopher unauthorised 
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The one who is educated from the wrong books is not educated, he is
misled.
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