America Before
Page 59
56. Interviewed in Sarah Knapton, “Hundreds of Ancient Earthworks Resembling Stonehenge Found in Amazon Rainforest,” Daily Telegraph, February 6, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/02/06/hundreds-ancient-earthworks-resembling-stonehenge-found-amazon/.
57. L. Falconer, “Interactive Virtual Archaeology: Constructing the Prehistoric Past at Avebury Henge,” International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications and 2016 International Symposium on Cyberspace and Security (IUCC-CSS), December 2016, 153–158, esp. p. 155.
58. “‘Secret Square’ Discovered Beneath World-Famous Avebury Stone Circle,” University of Southampton, June 29, 2017, https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/06/avebury-square.page. See also: “Avebury Neolithic Stone Circle Is Actually Square” (BBC, June 28, 2017), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-40431673 and “Avebury Square Discovered Beneath Neolithic Stone Monument” (Live Science, June 30, 2017), https://www.livescience.com/59668-avebury-circle-once-a-square.html.
59. Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Precolumbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil,” 138.
60. T. Darvill et al., “Stonehenge Remodelled,” Antiquity 86, no. 334 (2012), 1021–1040, esp. p. 1028: “Stonehenge first consisted of a circular bank and external ditch with an overall diameter of about 110m. This earthwork was entered by a main access from the north-east and a smaller entrance to the south. It is not technically a henge, because henges have a bank outside the ditch, but it conforms to the emergent class of ‘formative henges’ constructed in the late fourth and early third millennia cal BC.”
61. Interviewed in Knapton, “Hundreds of Ancient Earthworks Resembling Stonehenge Found in Amazon Rainforest.”
62. Pärssinen, Schaan, and Ranzi, “Pre-Columbian Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purús,” 1089.
63. Jennifer Watling et al., “Impact of Pre-Columbian “Geoglyph” Builders on Amazonian Forests, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 8 (February 21, 2017), 1868.
64. Ibid. (Emphasis added.)
65. Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Precolumbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil,” 136, Table I.
66. Ibid.
16: THE AMAZON’S OWN STONEHENGE
1. Marcos Pivetta, “The Sun Stones,” Revista Pesquisa (August 1, 2011), http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/2011/08/01/the-sun-stones/.
2. Ibid. However, the article appears to be inaccurate in that it has both Goeldi and Nimuendajú visiting Rego Grande. According to Mariana Cabral—the leading modern scientific expert on the site—neither of them did so, and I therefore report accordingly.
3. Simon Romero, “A ‘Stonehenge,’ and a Mystery, in the Amazon,” New York Times, December 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/world/americas/brazil-amazon-megaliths-stonehenge.html.
4. Ibid.
5. Pivetta, “The Sun Stones.”
6. Ibid. Other estimates, giving the total number of megaliths at 127, giving a range of heights including 3 meters and 4 meters, and giving the 3 km distance to the quarry can be found, variously, in Romero, “A ‘Stonehenge,’ and a Mystery, in the Amazon”; http://www.blueplanetheart.it/2017/04/rego-grande-chi-ha-eretto-la-stonehenge-dellamazzonia-era-molto-piu-avanzato-di-quanto-immaginiamo/;https://stanflouride.com/2016/12/21/amzonian-stonehenge-the-rego-grande-sun-stones/; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_do_Solst%C3%ADcio. Several of these sources also put the diameter of the circle at 30 meters.
7. Pivetta, “The Sun Stones.”
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1989), 192: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory,’ or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’”
11. Oxford Dictionary definition: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/meme.
12. Pivetta, “The Sun Stones.”
13. Ibid., and see “Amapá: Cradle of the Brazilian ‘Stonehenge,’” Ceticismo, March 16, 2010, https://ceticismo.net/2010/03/16/amapa-berco-do-stonehenge-brasileiro/.
14. Guianas Geographic, “Solstice Megaliths: Calçoene, Amapá, The Amerindian Stonehenge,” http://www.guianas-geographic.com/article-en/solstice-megaliths-calcoene-amapa-the-amerindian-stonehenge/.
15. Pivetta, “The Sun Stones.”
16. Ibid.
17. “Another ‘Stonehenge’ Discovered in Amazon,” NBC News, June 26, 2006, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/13582228/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/another-stonehenge-discovered-amazon/#.WrUQRdPFLUI.
18. Gibby Zobel, “Will Amazon’s Stonehenge Rewrite History?” June 27, 2006, http://www.meta-religion.com/Archaeology/Southamerica/will_amazon_stonehenge.htm.
19. Romero, “A ‘Stonehenge,’ and a Mystery, in the Amazon.”
20. A. C. Roosevelt et al., “Palaeoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas,” Science 272 (April 19, 1996), 380: “The luminescence dates ~ 16,000 to 9500 B.P. overlap the possible range of calendar dates estimated for the radiocarbon dates, ~ 14,200 to 10,500 yr B.P.”
21. See, for example, Christopher Sean Davis, “Solar-Aligned Pictographs at the Paleoindian Site of Painel do Pilão Along the Lower Amazon River at Monte Alegre, Brazil,” PLoS One (December 20, 2016), 2: “Anna Roosevelt and her team (1996) excavated at Caverna da Pedra Pintada, the largest and closest painted cave to the Amazon River, on a hill called Serra da Paituna. There they unearthed evidence of a Late Pleistocene paleoindian occupation period associated with numerous paint drops and lumps of pigment, artifacts, black soil, and other food remains radiocarbon dated to 11,280 to 10,170 uncalibrated years before present (13,630–11,705 cal yr BP—OxCal 4.2).”
22. Davis, “Solar-Aligned Pictographs at the Paleoindian Site of Painel do Pilão Along the Lower Amazon River at Monte Alegre, Brazil,” 7.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 14.
25. Ibid., 7–8.
26. Ibid., 8.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid. It should be noted that since the latitude of Painel do Pilão is some 2 degrees south of the equator, Davis is technically in error to refer to the December solstice as the “winter solstice”—it is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.
29. Ibid., 10.
30. Ibid., 11.
31. Ibid., 16.
32. Ibid., 11.
33. For 2009, see Martti Pärssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi, “Pre-Columbian Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purús,” Antiquity 83, no. 322 (December 1, 2009), 1094. For 2017, see Jennifer Watling et al., “Impact of Pre-Columbian ‘Geoglyph’ Builders on Amazonian Forests,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 8 (February 21, 2017), 1868. See also Pirjo Kristiina and Sanna Saunaluoma, “Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements: Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purús, Brazil,” American Anthropologist 119, no. 4 (August 23, 2017), 615.
34. Jonaas Gregorio de Souza and Denise Pahl Schaan, “Pre-Columbian Earth-Builders Settled Along the Entire Southern Rim of the Amazon,” Nature Communications, March 27, 2018, 1.
35. Ibid., 3.
36. Ibid., 3–4.
37. Ibid., 6.
38. Ibid., 2.
39. Ibid.
40. The feats of cultural memory preservation and effective knowledge transmission over immense time periods that are manifested in the Amazonian geoglyphs—and that provide compelling evidence of the successful replication of geometrical and cosmographic “memes” on a millennial scale—were recognized in 2018 by Jennifer Watling, Francis Mayle, and Denise Schaan, who admit t
hat they are “impressed at the timescale over which the knowledge, behaviours and ideology behind the geoglyphs were transmitted and propagated.” See their paper “Historical Ecology, Human Niche Construction and Landscape in Pre-Columbian Amazonia: A Case Study of the Geoglyph Builders of Acre, Brazil,” Journal of Anthropology, April 26, 2018, 134.
41. Denise P. Schaan, Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia (Routledge, 2012), 170.
42. “Colonel Labre’s Explorations in the Region Between the Beni and Madre de Dios Rivers and the Purus,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 11, no. 8 (August 1889), 498.
17: THE VINE OF THE DEAD
1. Oxford dictionaries: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/celestial_pole.
2. John Francis Carson et al., “Environmental Impact of Geometric Earthwork Construction in the Pre-Columbian Amazon,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 29 (July 22, 2014), 1048. See also Martti Pärssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi, “Pre-Columbian Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purús,” Antiquity 83, no. 322 (December 1, 2009), 1089. Also see Simon Romero, “Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World,” New York Times, January 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/americas/land-carvings-attest-to-amazons-lost-world.html.
3. Denise Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Precolumbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil,” Journal of Field Archaeology 37 (2012), 132–133. See also Jennifer Watling et al., “Impact of Pre-Columbian ‘Geoglyph’ Builders on Amazonian Forests,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 8 (February 21, 2017), 1868.
4. Cited in Romero, “Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World.”
5. Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen and Sanna Saunaluoma, “Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements: Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purus, Brazil,” American Anthropologist 119, no. 4 (August 23, 2017), 622–623.
6. Ibid., 624.
7. Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism: Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor (State University of New York Press, 1993), 69. See also Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion (George Allen and Unwin, 1970), 178.
8. Ibid., 74.
9. Graham Hancock, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (Century, 2005), from which several paragraphs in this chapter are extracted. The US edition was published by the Disinformation Company, New York, 2006.
10. Luis Eduardo Luna, “The Concept of Plants as Teachers,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 11 (1984), 135.
11. Luis Eduardo Luna, “Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon,” Acta Universitatis Stockholmensis, Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion (Almqvist and Wiksell Publishers, 1986), 62. See also Glen H. Shepard Jr., “Psychoactive Plants and Ethnopsychiatric Medicines of the Matsigenka,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 30, no. 4 (October–December 1998), 323ff: “Matsigenka consider hallucinogenic plants to be sentient beings with superhuman souls, described as ‘owner,’ ‘master’ or ‘mother’ of the plant.”
12. Cited in Luna, “Vegetalismo,” 62.
13. Graham Hancock, Supernatural, 44–45. Emphases added. The page numbers are those in the hardcover edition; the page numbers will be different in the paperback editions.
14. Ibid., 46.
15. Ibid., 50.
16. Ibid., 57.
17. Ibid., 45.
18. Though the names ayahuasca and yagé both refer to essentially the same potion made from similar plants, the approach varies greatly between ayahuasca and yagé. For example, yagé bark is usually pounded off, leaving only the woody core of the vine to be boiled; these brews contain less tannins and cause less vomiting than ayahuasca brews, which are usually prepared with the bark left on the vine. Ayahuasca bark is usually only slightly rasped and pounded before being boiled, leaving more tannins in the brew, causing a more powerful purgative effect in the recipient. The DMT element of yagé is not derived from Psychotria viridis (chacruna) but is derived from another vine, Diplopterys cabrerana, which contains both N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Further information available in J. M. Weisberger, Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon (North Atlantic Books, 2013). And for more differences in the preparation and ceremonial practicing of yagé and ayahuasca, see this easily accessible article, “The Difference Between Ayahuasca and Yagé,” Rainforest Medicine Gatherings: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon, accessed July 30, 2018, https://rainforestmedicine.net/the-difference-between-ayahuasca-and-yage/.
19. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic Drugs Amongst the Tukano Indians of Colombia (Temple University Press, 1975), photographic plates between pp. 174 and 175, and 178 and 179.
20. Ibid., 167–173.
21. In this context the different patterns are accorded particular meaning by the Tukano. See Robert Layton in David S. Whitley, (ed.), Handbook of Rock Art Research (Altamira Press, 2001), 314.
22. See Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford University Press, 2002), 13; Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, Shamans Through Time (Thames and Hudson, 2001), 196, 267. See also A. Dawson, “Ayahuasca: The Shamanic Brew That Produces Out-of-Body Experiences,” The Conversation (January 22, 2016), accessed July 23, 2018, https://theconversation.com/ayahuasca-the-shamanic-brew-that-produces-out-of-body-experiences-52836: “Ayahuasca literally translates from the Quechua language of the North Andes as ‘soul vine’ or ‘vine of the dead’ and has traditionally been consumed by indigenous communities such as the Aruák, Chocó, Jívaro, Pano, and Tukano across the upper reaches of the Amazon River system in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.”
23. Sanna Saunaluoma and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, “Variable Models for the Organization of Earthworking Communities in Upper Purus, Southwestern Amazonia: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives,” Tipiti 13 (2015), https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol13/iss1/2/.
24. Ibid.
25. Virtanen and Saunaluoma, “Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements,” 617.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 622.
29. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Beyond the Milky Way: Hallucinatory Imagery of the Tukano Indians (UCLA Latin America Center Publications, 1978), 1.
30. Ibid., 2.
31. Ibid., 1.
32. Ibid., 2.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 3.
35. Ibid. See p. 5 for Reichel-Dolmatoff on the Tukano sacred trumpets. For detailed comparisons between Melanesia and the Amazon, see Appendix 1 herewith.
36. Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar, 98.
37. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Beyond the Milky Way, 13.
38. Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar, 85.
39. See the work of cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon, most notably, “Ayahuasca Visualization: A Structural Typology,” in Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, no. 2 (February 2002), 24. Shanon creates a typology of the structural types or forms in which ayahuasca visions occur. He reports eighteen typological structures, in the order in which they arise during a session, the seventh of which is experience of “patterned geometric designs.”
40. See Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind, 386: “As I have made abundantly clear, this is a psychological book, not a philosophical one. … As described at the outset of this book, what impressed me greatly when I first partook of the brew were the similarities between the experiences I had with it and ones described in the anthropological literature. Some of the images that appeared in my visions were similar, at times identical, to ones reported by indigenous persons and by the first European explorers who encountered Ayahuasca. The extensive empirical research I have subsequently conducted c
orroborated these first impressions and led me to conclude that there are striking cross-personal commonalities in the contents of Ayahuasca visions, in their themes, and in the ideations that are associated with them.”
41. This is the central theme of my 2005 book Supernatural.
42. Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind, 132.
PART V
18: SUN
1. Sharon A. Brown, Administrative History: Jefferson National Expansion Memorial National Historic Site, chapter I: 1933-1935 “The Idea” (National Park Service, 1984). Available here: https://www.webcitation.org/5wUnhhjCR?url=http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/jeff/adhi1-1.htm.
2. William Iseminger, Cahokia Mounds: America’s First City (History Press, 2010), 45–46, and Sally A. Kitt Chappell, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 113.
3. Iseminger, Cahokia Mounds, 46.
4. Ibid.
5. See for example Martin Byers, The Real Mound Builders of North America: A Critical Realist Prehistory of the Eastern Woodlands, 200 BC–1450 AD (Lexington Books, 2018), 21–29. Also see Sarah A. Baires, “White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities” (Smithsonian, February 28, 2018), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/white-settlers-buried-truth-about-midwests-mysterious-mound-cities-180968246/.
6. Henry Brackenridge in 1811, cited in Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American History, 2010), 28.
7. The contrasting alternative to the “Moundbuilder Myth” arose among a set of scholars in the 1890s onward, most of whom were sponsored by the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution, who devoted their attention to surveying, mapping, and excavating earthwork sites. Squier and Davis’s 1848 survey of Serpent Mound was in many ways the precursor to this movement. See Byers, The Real Mound Builders of North America, 22.