The amazing and remarkable engineering designs of Tiahuanaco blog.ericadventures/the-amazing-and-remarkable-engineering-designs-of-tiahuanaco/ Tiahuanaco is an important Pre-Columbian archaeological site in western Bolivia, South America. Tiwanaku is recognized by Andean scholars as one of the most important precursors to the Inca Empire, flourishing as the ritual and administrative capital of a major state power for approximately five hundred years. The basin floors on which the Tiahuanaco lived were marshy and flooded seasonally because of snow melt from the Quelcceya ice cap. The Tiwanaku farmers used this to their advantage, constructing elevated sod platforms or raised fields on which to grow their crops, separated by canals. The Tiahuanaco culture, as it is called, is unique in its sculpture and its style of stone construction. The most famous icon of the archaeological site at Tiahuanaco is the Sun Gate. This structure has been described as a “calendar” almost as long as the monolithic gateway has been known to exist; thus the Sun Gate has also been called ‘the Calendar Gate’. This calendar sculpture, though it undoubtedly depicts a “solar year,” cannot however be made to fit into the solar year as we divide it at present. The calendar has only 290 days, divided into 12 “twelfths” of 24 days each, plus 2 intercalary days. Analysis of this culture has shown that ancient Tiahuanacan scientists knew that the earth was a globe which rotated on its axis and they calculated exactly the times of eclipses — even those not visible at Tiahuanaco but visible in the opposite hemisphere. The Tiahuanaco Empire dominated portions of what is now Peru, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia in South America.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 16:13:10 +0000
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