Museum of Pre - Columbian Culture (these bad boys guarded the graves of the dead and also acted as a gravestone)
My morning was spent visiting this museum which charts the Americas history before the arrival of Columbus and the Spanish. It was very interesting in many respects, though there are only so many pots and tapestries that one can see in one day. Although they were able to fashion gold, silver and copper, until the arrival of the Spanish it was fundamentally a stoneage culture. Tools and weapons were made from stone and the wheel had not been discovered.
The tapestries and earthenware were simple and their decoration was either related to nature and had some spiritual or practical significance. Over the centuries, there were many shifts in the balance of power between different tribes along this western seaboard, of which the Incas are probably the best known. However the Incas are quite (15th century) recent in terms of the thousand of years that this land has been populated.
Two interesting facts I learnt, was that the ruling elite were big on the hallucinagenic drugs (not much changed there then) and certain tribes in what is now Peru, were mummifieing their dead long before the Egyptians, though like the Egyptians they believed in the afterlife. If you were good you went to live amonst the volcanoes of the east and if bad you suffered the poor potatoes and seas of the west!!!
In many ways their culture was very sophisticated as they had a concept of the Universe, which they believed consisted of four elements, all of which crossed at points on the earth. Hence the altar stones of their pyramids (as in Teotihuacan) was placed at the centre of a square, sub divided in four. These peoples were predominantely agragrian, though the Incas began to order and structure production in a more modern way. Workers were deployed in the mining of copper and a reasonably large scale by the standards of the day - with the local brew, being fundamental in the payment of the workers - alongside partying!!
Anyway another cultural day and a quiet one. Argentina tomorrow and the other side of the Andes.
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