Peru: Machu Picchu is named one of the New 7 Wonders

BREAKING NEWS! 7 July, 2007 [ 19:00 ]

(LIP-ir) -- The sacred Incan Sanctuary, located in Qosqo, Peru -¨bellybutton of the world¨- , is now one of the New 7 Wonders of the world. Machu Picchu, pride of every Peruvian, was chosen as one of the New 7 Wonders in a spectacular event held at Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, Portugal today.

Machu Picchu was first chosen as one of the 21 finalists for the New 7 Wonders contest, organized by the New Open World Corporation (NOWC). It was among other internationally recognized architectural wonders such as: Mexico with Chichen Itze, Brazil with Christ the Redeemer, Chile with Easter Island Moais and Spain with Alhambra.

Before the New 7 Wonders were presented it was announced that the list was not given in any special order and that the seven were greatly appreciated. The Great Wall of China was the first to be named followed by the Petra ruins in Jordan and Christ the Redeemer in Brazil.

Machu Picchu was the fourth to be announced followed by Chichén-Itzá in México, the Roman Colosseum in Italy and the Taj Mahal in India.

Although contest organizers do not want to release how many votes each monument received it was stated that over 100 million votes were cast through the internet and over the phone.

The huge event, compared by some to the opening of the Olympics, was hosted by British actor Ben Kingsley, American actress Hilary Swank and one of Asia's sexiest women, Indian supermodel/Bollywood actress, Bipasha Basu. The contest was broadcast to over 170 countries and is estimated to have had a viewing audience of 1.6 million.

Earliest-known Evidence Of Peanut, Cotton And Squash Farming Found

Source: Vanderbilt University
Date: June 29, 2007

Science Daily — Anthropologists working on the slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming dating back 5,000 to 9,000 years. Their findings provide long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements in the Andes.

The discovery was published in the June 29 issue of Science.

The research team made their discovery in the Ñanchoc Valley, which is approximately 500 meters above sea level on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru.

"We believe the development of agriculture by the Ñanchoc people served as a catalyst for cultural and social changes that eventually led to intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and new towns in the Andean highlands and along the coast 4,000 to 5,500 years ago," Tom D. Dillehay, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and lead author on the publication, said. "Our new findings indicate that agriculture played a broader role in these sweeping developments than was previously understood."

Dillehay and his colleagues found wild-type peanuts, squash and cotton as well as a quinoa-like grain, manioc and other tubers and fruits in the floors and hearths of buried preceramic sites, garden plots, irrigation canals, storage structures and on hoes. The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to determine the radiocarbon dates of the materials. Data gleaned from botanists, other archaeological findings and a review of the current plant community in the area suggest the specific strains of the discovered plant remains did not naturally grow in the immediate area.

"The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in the wild in that area," Dillehay said. "We believe they must have therefore been domesticated elsewhere first and then brought to this valley by traders or mobile horticulturists.

"The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area, such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials, building mounds and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts."

The researchers dated the squash from approximately 9,200 years ago, the peanut from 7,600 years ago and the cotton from 5,500 years ago.

Dillehay published the findings with fellow researchers Jack Rossen, Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y.; Thomas C. Andres, The Curcurbit Network, New York, N.Y.; and David E. Williams, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.

Dillehay is chair of the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt, Professor Extraordinaire at the Universidad Austral de Chile and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

The research was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Lima; the National Science Foundation; the Heinz Foundation; the University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt University.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Vanderbilt University.

The Possessed

By ARTHUR LUBOW
Published: June 24, 2007

The stones at Machu Picchu seem almost alive.

They may be alive, if you credit the religious beliefs of the ruler Pachacuti Yupanqui, whose subjects in the early 15th century constructed the granite Inca complex, high above a curling river and nestled among jagged green peaks.

To honor the spirits that take form as mountains, the Inca stoneworkers carved rock outcrops to replicate their shapes. Doorways and windows of sublimely precise masonry frame exquisite views. But this extraordinary marriage of setting and architecture only partly explains the fame of Machu Picchu today.

Just as important is the romantic history, both of the people who built it in this remote place and of the explorer who brought it to the attention of the world. The Inca succumbed to Spanish conquest in the 16th century; and the explorer Hiram Bingham III, whose long life lasted almost as many years as the Inca empire, died in 1956. Like the stones of Machu Picchu, however, the voices of the Inca ruler and the American explorer continue to resonate.

Imposingly tall and strong-minded, Bingham was the grandson of a famous missionary who took Christianity to the Hawaiian islanders. In his efforts to locate lost places of legend, the younger Bingham proved to be as resourceful. Bolstered by the fortune of his wife, who was a Tiffany heiress, and a faculty position at Yale University, where he taught South American history, Bingham traveled to Peru in 1911 in hopes of finding Vilcabamba, the redoubt in the Andean highlands where the last Inca resistance forces retreated from the Spanish conquerors.

Instead he stumbled upon Machu Picchu. With the joint support of Yale and the National Geographic Society, Bingham returned twice to conduct archeological digs in Peru. In 1912, he and his team excavated Machu Picchu and shipped nearly 5,000 artifacts back to Yale.

Two years later, he staged a final expedition to explore sites near Machu Picchu in the Sacred Valley.

If you have visited Machu Picchu, you will probably find Bingham's excavated artifacts at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven to be a bit of a letdown. Mostly, the pieces are bones, in varying stages of decomposition, or pots, many of them in fragments.

Unsurpassed as stonemasons, engineers and architects, the Incas thought more prosaically when it came to ceramics.

Leaving aside unfair comparisons to the jaw-dropping Machu Picchu site itself, the pottery of the Inca, even when intact, lacks the drama and artistry of the ceramics of earlier civilizations of Peru like the Moche and Nazca.

Everyone agrees that the Machu Picchu artifacts at Yale are modest in appearance. That has not prevented, however, a bare-knuckled disagreement from developing over their rightful ownership.

Peru says the Bingham objects were sent to Yale on loan and their return is long overdue. Yale demurs.

In many ways, the dispute between Yale and Peru is unlike the headline-making investigations that have impelled the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to repatriate ancient artifacts to their countries of origin.
It does not revolve around criminal allegations of surreptitious tomb-raiding and black-market antiquities deals. But if the circumstances are unique, the background sentiments are not.

Other countries as well as Peru are demanding the recovery of cultural treasures removed by more powerful nations many years ago. The Greeks want the Parthenon marbles returned to Athens from the British Museum; the Egyptians want the same museum to surrender the Rosetta Stone and, on top of that, seek to spirit away the bust of Nefertiti from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.

Where might it all end? One clue comes in a sweeping request from China. As a way of combating plunder of the present as well as the past, the Chinese government has asked the United States to ban the import of all Chinese art objects made before 1911. The State Department has been reviewing the Chinese request for more than two years.

The movement for the repatriation of ''cultural patrimony'' by nations whose ancient past is typically more glorious than their recent history provides the framework for the dispute between Peru and Yale. To the scholars and administrators of Yale, the bones, ceramics and metalwork are best conserved at the university, where ongoing research is gleaning new knowledge of the civilization at Machu Picchu under the Inca.

Outside Yale, most everyone I talked to wants the collection to go back to Peru, but many of them are far from disinterested arbiters. In the end, if the case winds up in the United States courts, its disposition may be determined by narrowly legalistic interpretations of specific Peruvian laws and proclamations.

Yet the passions that ignite it are part of a broad global phenomenon. ''My opinion reflects the opinion of most Peruvians,'' Hilda Vidal, a curator at the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru in Lima, told me.

''In general, anything that is patrimony of the cultures of the world, whether in museums in Asia or Europe or the United States, came to be there during the times when our governments were weak and the laws were weak, or during the Roman conquest or our conquest by the Spanish.
Now that the world is more civilized, these countries should reflect on this issue. It saddens us Peruvians to go to museums abroad and see a Paracas textile.
I am hopeful that in the future all the cultural patrimony of the world will return to its country of origin.''

Behind her words, I could imagine a gigantic sucking whoosh, as the display cases in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Louvre and the other great universal museums of the world were cleansed of their contents, leaving behind the clattering of a few Wedgwood bowls and SÃ

Recently Excavated Headless Skeleton Expands Understanding Of Ancient Andean Rituals

Science Daily — Images of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a culture based on the southern coast of Peru from AD 1 to AD 750. But despite this evidence and large numbers of trophy heads in the region's archaeological record, only eight headless bodies have been recovered with evidence of decapitation, explains Christina A. Conlee (Texas State University). Conlee's analysis of a newly excavated headless body from the site of La Tiza provides important new data on decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and regeneration.

As Conlee outlines in the June issue of Current Anthropology, the third vertebrae of the La Tiza skeleton has dark cut marks, rounded edges, and no evidence of flaking or breakage, indicating decapitation occurred at or very soon after the time of death. A ceramic jar decorated with an image of a head was placed next to the body. The head has a tree with eyes growing out of it, the branches encircling the vessel.

"Ritual battles often take place just before plowing for potato planting, and trees and unripened fruit figure in these rituals, in which the shedding of blood is necessary to nourish the earth to produce a good harvest," Conlee writes. "The presence of scalp cuts on Nasca trophy heads suggests the letting of blood was an important part of the ritual that resulted in decapitation."

Conlee also points to damage on the jar that indicates it had already been handled and used before being included in the tomb. This was only the third head jar found with a headless skeleton. Most are found at domestic sites, and prior research has concluded that they were probably used to drink from, most likely in connection with fertility rituals. "If the head jar was used to drink from during fertility rituals, then its inclusion in the burial further strengthens the relationship between decapitation and rebirth," Conlee explains.

Notably, there is also no evidence of habitation in the La Tiza region during the Middle Nasca period (AD 450-550), to which the head jar dates. All of the Nasca domestic sites in the area date to the Early Nasca, indicating that the La Tiza skeleton may have been deliberately buried in an abandoned settlement that was associated with the ancestors.

"Human sacrifice and decapitation were part of powerful rituals that would have allayed fears by invoking the ancestors to ensure fertility and the continuation of Nasca society," Conlee writes. "The decapitation of the La Tiza individual appears to have been part of a ritual associated with ensuring agricultural fertility and the continuation of life and rebirth of the community."

Reference: Christina A. Conlee, "Decapitation and Rebirth: A Headless Burial from Nasca, Peru." Current Anthropology 48:3.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Chicago Press Journals.

Peru: Tomb believed to be older than "Señor de Sipan" found in northern Peru

Art/Culture/History 3 July, 2007 [ 10:45 ]

(LIP-ir) -- A team of archaeologists, led by Walter Alva, have discovered the wooden tomb of another member of the Mochica culture's elite - older than the "Señor de Sipan" (Lord of Sipan).

These findings belong to the Moche civilization, which ruled the northern coast of Peru from the time of Christ to 800 AD, centuries prior to the Incas.

Alva has stated that he and his team are investigating and within the next few days will know the role of this noble in the Mochica society.

"We have found the tomb of a person that belonged to Mochica nobility. Inside the coffin, discoveries of copper and copper-plated decorations - covered in rust, demonstrate that this person was not a Lord but was among the Mochica elite," Alva explained.The archaeologist, who discovered the "Señor de Sipan" (Lord of Sipan) in 1987, has said that this discovery will provide valuable information about the Mochica culture.

The mummy is estimated to be 1,800 years old, whereas it is estimated that the "Señor de Sipan" was buried 1,700 years ago."The tomb is of a person that appears on Mochica artwork, which shows he participated in important rituals. His headdress, which is V-shaped, identifies him as such," explained Alva.

The archaeologist explained the value of this discovery, "This is the tomb of a person we hadn't found, now we have the Mochica elite complete."40 workers and 6 archaeologists are taking part in this work funded by the Ítalo Peruvian Fund and the government. This years budget is 600 thousand soles.

Pharmacy student learns about medicine in Peru

Monday, July 02, 2007

College group also explores foreign culture, canoes down Amazon and climbs Machu Picchu.
By GINA VASSELLI
The Express-Times

Ryan Toth canoed down the Amazon, stood on top of Machu Picchu and got class credit for doing it.

The 23-year-old Phillipsburg man traveled to Peru this summer as part of his studies as a pharmacy student at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

The study abroad program was organized through the Global Awareness Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the rainforest, according to its Web site.

Toth and 11 other pharmacy students from across the country returned June 25 from their three-week trip.

Shelli Holt-Macey, director of Wilkes University's Experiential Programs for the pharmacy school, said the students were selected by the institute's founder, Dr. Barbara Brodman.

The students flew June 1 into Lima, Peru.

"That was basically the last city I saw," Toth said. "The rest was more or less all jungle."

Toth said they visited the GAI's Center for Natural Medicine in Iquitos to learn about natural medicine and drug discovery.

While the group was in Iquitos, it was visited by a shaman who talked about the plants used by the different tribes.

Toth said after her speech, the shaman stayed at the center because of a national workers strike in Peru and demonstrations in Iquitos.

"I guess she was scared to go back," Toth said.

He said the strike was unexpected and surreal.

"That was weird. It happened like two days after we got there," Toth said.

The group left the center a few days later and traveled to Cusco, Peru. It arrived there in time to experience the winter solstice at Machu Picchu.

"It's so huge you just wonder how they could build it," Toth said. "They didn't use mortar and the stones fit so perfectly together you can't fit a credit card between them."

But his parents, Brenda and Dale, had other concerns about the Incan city.

"I knew he was going there but I didn't realize how steep it was. So when I saw those pictures it made me a little nervous," Brenda Toth said.

Ryan Toth said the group traveled down the Amazon in canoes for about three days, which was not always easy.

"One time we were rowing as hard as we could with the current and we weren't moving because of the wind coming against us," he said.

Along the river they met three different native tribes: The Bora, Huitoto and Yagua.

Ryan Toth said he became friends with a river guide from the Bora tribe named Wellington.

"He spoke a little English and I speak a little Spanish so we became friendly," he said.

Wellington hand-carved a mask for him and it became one of many tribal souvenirs Toth took home.

Holt-Macey said the program was a great success because "it's directly related to the study of pharmacy and understanding how other cultures work without a system like the U.S.," she said.

Ryan Toth said the trip "was not the kind of thing you can do as a tourist. We got to see places and people that barely anyone ever sees."

Gina Vasselli is a staff writer. She can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at gvasselli@express-times.com.