Peru: 'sensational' Inca find for British team in Andes

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Dalya Alberge
The Observer, Sunday 5 December 2010

The Inca platform where the ancestor stones were found. Photograph: Observer


A British team of archaeologists on expedition in the Peruvian Andes has hailed as "sensational" the discovery of some of the most sacred objects in the Inca civilisation – three "ancestor stones", which were once believed to form a precious link between the heavens and the underworld.

The find, which was made on an isolated Andean mountainside, provoked joy among local specialists and the experts present from, among others, the British Museum, Reading University and Royal Holloway, University of London. No examples of the stones were thought to have survived until now.

"It was a very moving moment," said Dr Colin McEwan, the British Museum's head of the Americas, as he recalled seeing the stones for the first time.

Dr Frank Meddens, research associate of Royal Holloway, who was also on the expedition, said they had "danced a little jig on top of the mountain" after discovering the objects that they had only read about in 16th-century Spanish documents.

The Incas would have been just as overawed. The conical-shaped stones were among the most significant items in Inca society and religion. Key elements in ritual events, they were thought to facilitate a connection between different realms of the world – the celestial and the underworld of the ancestors – with the Inca king, as the divine ruler, acting as intermediary. And they were considered more precious than gold.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/inca-ancestor-stones-andes

[RandomThoughts]

1. I been thinking on some of the stories about older cultures.

Things like child sacrifice would require a lack of 2nd and 3rd defense. I know it is wrong because its intent, it is to break empathy, since love of family is some of the strongest feeling in people. It is like the story of breaking of a mord sith in a novel where they were told they had to be mean or hurt their own parents. Same thing in the movie quick and the dead, and some other concepts. Stealing someones life by getting them to make regrettable hurtful mistakes, and then not letting them find forgiveness in the heart for mistakes.

But here is the other thing, it is also a smear, we all know that in Jewish tradition you don't sacrifice your children, and in the new testament, not even the sacrifice of animals is needed anymore.

However even though it is clearly said in Jewish tradition not to sacrifice children, what was the smear used on them, eating babies.

So I often wonder that if people had more information about some cultures if they would find that was not what was happening, maybe it was metaphor. Or maybe they were messed up, besides is it any different to send children off to war for the gain of someone else? Although war as protection might be different, or those that fight for the love of comrades and fellow soldiers, then it would be an empathy circle size problem.


And if you are going to blame those cultures for such things, then you have to blame a lack of education as the problem, since Abraham was going to do the very same thing till he was taught that he did not have to. Although he was acting with only first defense, then something stepped in to teach him it was not necessary.


Shrug, or maybe they were messed up like some stories of other groups talk about.

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2. kick n/t

[rabs]

3. Pleasant read with the first Sunday morning cup of coffee

Thanks for posting, K&R

As a university student from NM in Quito, a group of us once went by bus from Ecuador to Peru all the way to Cuzco, Sacsayhuaman and of course Machu Picchu, so this article reawakened those memories.



Sacsayhuaman just outside Cuzco.


How the Incas were able to stack those stones is still debated. Some of them weigh multi-tons.


Machu Picchu