Canals discovered in the Peruvian Andes dating back over 5,400 years offer long-sought proof that irrigation was at the heart of the development of one of the earth's first civilizations.
The discovery by Vanderbilt University anthropologist Tom Dillehay, distinguished professor of anthropology and chair of the department, and his colleagues reported in the Nov. 22, 2005, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The anthropologists discovered the canals in Peru's upper middle Zana Valley, approximately 60 kilometers east of the Pacific coast. Preliminary results indicate one of the canals is over 6,700 years old, while another has been confirmed to be over 5,400 years old. They are the oldest such canals yet discovered in the Americas.
"Peru is one of the few places on the planet where there was independent development of civilization. One of the signatures of the beginning of civilization and complex society is intensive agriculture, where you have not only crops but also irrigation technology. “It was believed that elementary irrigation technology was always missing from early Andean civilization, however, we found it by looking farther up the valley away from the coastal plains and by excavating more deeply."
Anthropologists first discovered the canals in 1989 and have been working since to uncover the broader picture of the canals and the civilization that they supported. "Our findings indicate that people were building these canals and creating artificial wetlands and essentially garden plots in the Andes over 5,400 years ago—and this was an important moment for this civilization as it established a codependency between the crops and the people, which allowed and encouraged larger groups of people to begin to settle down in one place.”
The team uncovered four canals ranging in length from one to four kilometers, which were narrow, symmetric, shallow and U-shaped. They were lined with stones and small pebbles, and appear to be individually designed to take advantage of different periods of water availability. The canals were built along the edge of a terrace above a nearby stream and used gravity to deliver water downhill to the agricultural fields. A striking feature of the canals is that they are located on a very slight slope, indicating that their builders were able to engineer them to function hydraulically in a relatively sophisticated manner.
It would seem that ancient acqueducts and irrigation are found in many lands, not just in Peru. There are ancient canals in Mesoamerica, as well as all over Europe.
ReplyDeleteThis is true, however, irrigation in making "the desert bloom like a rose" has always been an earmark of the Lord's people. And Peru has the most extensive, greatest engineered, and highly effective prehistoric irrigation system found anywhere. The number of irrigation canals in Peru well outstrips any other area, especially in the Western Hemisphere, and suggests the home of the Nephites for all their energy and success in bringing water to parched lands and to extensive terraces found nowhere else. Coupled with all the other fine points illustrated in the Book of Mormon, it is merely another example of the Nephite lands of antiquity.
ReplyDeleteUh, these were dated to 5400 BC...LONG before Nephi OR Mulek, the surviving son of Zedekiah. Get your facts straight or continue making the rest of your faith look foolish.
DeleteDRave: Thank you for your view and comment. When we write about matters, it is on top of the past eight years of articles on various, but often overlapping subjects. In this case, the dating of the Earth has been covered numerous times from various sources and views. We have shown from various scientific views that the Earth is approximately 13,000 years old as the Lord dictated to Moses who wrote in Genesis and the Book of Moses, the dates given him of the Patriarchs. The dating sequences used by science in general have been shown to be well in error, beginning with Carbon-14, which we have detailed here numerous times, including statements from it inventor, Willard F. Libby and his self-admitted results showing the Earth to be only about 10,000 years old, but adjusted his findings and clock to read differently to adjust to “everyone knows the Earth is millions of years old.” We do not use Earth-dating systems here that have been proven time and again to be in error, except to show what is older and what is younger than one another. Before you start casting stones, you might want to know what it is that has been said on the matter you think you understand from one article regarding the number of more than 2400 articles here over the years. We appreciate you have a different view and that is fine, but at least appreciate the fact that we are not writing about things we know nothing about. In fact, I personally have spent more than 30 years studying the subjects written about here.
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