Grid of the Gods (29 page)

However, this method of dating by the level of the shoreline soon compounded the difficulty, and the mystery, of the entire Tiahuanaco-Puma Punkhu complex. When one examines the entire vicinity of the sites, there are clear indications that “the end of the ‘Golden Era’ must have had a rather sudden character,” for scattered about it, “there were numerous large stone blocks just abandoned in various phases of cutting.”
⁴⁵
This was not the only indicator of sudden destruction, nor was it the only
problem.

The old shoreline was also clearly visible, as if the change came almost overnight. It was plotted on a map and with this came the first surprise It turned out that the old shoreline was significantly
inclined to the present level… in the scale of the entire lake the difference amounts to around 1000 feet… It appeared, moreover, that the old coastline doesn’t form a closed loop, but is open on the south; it simply ends, some distance from the ruins. It other words, had the lake’s surface been that much higher, its waters would have spilled over the southern part of the altiplano, towards Lake Poopo; there was no natural barrier. But there must have been something! The only reasonable explanation in this situation was that there must have been a glacier, which could stop the waters. No one knew how long ago such conditions existed, but it was a kind of confirmation that the ruins were indeed quite old.
⁴⁶

The circumstantial evidence for a glaciers was not the only thing pointed to Tiahuanaco’s “extreme antiquity,” for also found on the Gate of the Sun — the Gate with the image of Viracocha discussed above — are the representations of elephant heads. And yet another relief at Tiahuanaco shows “quite clear bas-reliefs of
mastodons.
”
⁴⁷
The youngest known fossils of mastodons in South America are some 10,400 years old.
⁴⁸

To make the dating of the site even more difficult, radiocarbon dating places the site to about 1500BC!
⁴⁹

So on the one hand, the geological and indirect evidence points to a site of great antiquity, to the period of the end of the last Ice Age and to a period when the last mastodons were known in the region, that is, to a period of ca. 10,500 BC (there’s that date again!), while the radiocarbon dating points to something much more recent, and hence, becomes the
terminus ante quem
for conventional archaeology. Before considering an extremely speculative resolution of this difficulty, however, it is worth looking at more recent moves within
conventional
archaeology to redate the site to a far earlier period than 1500 BC.

This shift began in ca. 1996–1997 when Dr. Oswaldo Rivera, the Director of Bolivia’s National Institute of Archaeology, and “one of
the world’s leading experts on Tiahuanaco,”
⁵⁰
made an announcement confirming his belief that the site was some 12,000 years old.
⁵¹

Moreover, this new dating was based on an examination of
existing
structures at the site. But Rivero went on to explain that there was in all likelihood
another
Tiahuanaco buried beneath the present ruins.
⁵²

The implications of all this were and are enormous, for this means that if Tiahuanaco is some 12,000 years old, then Puma Punkhu is even older than that!

6. Back to the Technology of Puma Punkhu

So we return to Puma Punkhu, to observe even more mystifying evidence of advanced technological machining, bearing in mind we are now looking at a technology in use
before
Tiahuanaco.

Examination of the blocks reveals also the use of one more unconventional technology. In some places one can observe groups (usually rows) of very precisely made holes. The precision is so great that it
rules out
manual processing. First and foremost, they generally have exactly the same diameter, the sides are very smooth (if the holes are not damaged, of course) and precisely parallel. The deviations in this respect — i.e., differences of the diameter between the top and the bottom of the hole — are on the order of 0.1 mm. This corresponds with drilling by a machine fixed on some mount, for it could not be done by holding the tool in one’s hands, especially working a very hard stone.
⁵³

The evidence of such technology is, indeed, overwhelming, but Witkowski is acutely aware that there is a type of “scholarship” that balks at concluding the obvious, and that proposes ludicrous
alternative theories. Witkowski’s proposed method of persuading them of the error of their thinking is somewhat novel:

From skeptical scientists, the “debunkers,” we often hear that all the wonders of prehistoric construction were accomplished only (by) very simple stone or copper hand tools, accessible to primitive peoples. I would propose to chain such a scholar to a comparatively hard and large stone block, along with such primitive tools, until he turned it into a block such as one just described.
⁵⁴

Worse yet, Witkowski made a series of very exact measurements of the dimensions incorporated into the various surfaces of the H Blocks, and discovered, to his astonishment, that many of them incorporated a significant number: 3.1418, differing only from the ideal of π by .0002!
⁵⁵

As if that were not enough, other recurring measures resulted in values that were exactly one fourth of the Sumerian unit of measure, the “ell”.
⁵⁶

There is a final thing testifying to the high technology surrounding Puma Punkhu, and this time it comes from Andean tradition itself, and in it, we see the glimmer, perhaps, of a solution to the radiocarbon dating which was at such odds with the geological and indirect evidence for its antiquity. According to those legends, Puma Punkhu, with its large precisely-cut multi-faced stone blocks — some of which were simply abandoned in the middle of machining, as if some sudden catastrophe had overtaken the site — was “destroyed by Viracocha with ‘deadly rays’ before the deluge.”
⁵⁷

In other words, its destruction was
deliberate and accomplished by means of a technology, and with an apparent suddenness.
One is, perhaps, looking at the South American version of some primordial “Tower of Babel Moment,” when whatever was being constructed there was perceived as a threat to someone else, who intervened, and ended the project.

Moreover, the
type
of technology is even suggested by those legends; it was a technology involving electromagnetic
radiation.
Exposure to concentrated radiation would, indeed, massively distort radiocarbon dating efforts, making old things
appear far younger
than they actually were.

Maybe the comparison of the image of Viracocha on the Sun Gate at Tiahuanaco with a modern three-stage hydrogen bomb is not so fanciful after all.

C. The Axis of the World Across the Pacific
1. The Mystery of Easter Island

For the careful reader familiar with standard explanations of how mankind came to the Americas — the celebrated “land bridge” across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska — the paradox of Puma Punkhu raises significant difficulties. Those difficulties are massively compounded when one considers the context of Tiahuanaco and Puma Punkhu within the context of the Grid system that stretches from South America, across the Pacific — in nearly a straight line as we shall see, or what Witkowski calls “the Axis of the World” — to the Indian subcontinent.

We have seen how local traditions concerning Puma Punkhu and Tiahuanaco conjoin two things: (1) a sudden and deliberate destruction by the means of an implied technology and an implied act of war, and (2) a subsequent catastrophe in the form of a flood.

One finds these two traditions coupled, once again, in the very unlikely place of Easter Island. There, the flood story is cast in the wider context of a lost land that sank under the sea, never to be seen again:

The young man Tea Waka said:

    — In the old times our land was large, very large. Kuukuu asked him a question:

    — Why it turned small then? Tea Waka replied:

    —
Uwoke has lowered his stick on it.
He has lowered his stick on the Ohiro town. Big waves raised and the land became small. It has
been named Te-Pito-o-te-Henua
. Uwoke’s stick was broken on the Puku-Puhipuhi mountain.

Tea Waka and Kuukuu talked about the Ko-te-Tomonga-o-Tea-Waka village (the place where Tea Waka has reached the shore). Then the Hotu Matua king came ashore and settled on the island. Kuukuu said to him:

— Once this land was greater.

The friend Tea Waka said:

— The land sunk.

Then Tea Waka added:

— This town is now called Ko-te-Tomonga-o- Tea-Waka.

Hotu Matua Asked:

— Why the land sunk?

—
Uwoke did this, he has pushed the land —
replied Tea Waka. The land was named Te-Pito-o-te-Henua.
When Uwoke’s stick was long, the land has collapsed into the abyss.
Puku-Puhipuhi — that’s how the place where Uwoke’s stick was broken is now called.

— The Hotu Matua king said to Tea Waka:

— My friend, it was not Uwoke’s stick.
It was the thunder of the Make Make god.
⁵⁸

While at first glance this Easter Island Flood legend might seem rather simplistic, a closer examination reveals some interesting details that parallel the Andean legends of Viracocha, the Flood, and the destruction of Puma Punkhu and Tiahuanaco:

1) The flood is brought about by the deliberate action of a god or gods, in this case, Uwoke, and Make Make;

2) Both gods use some sort of technology to do so, Uwoke a “stick,” and Make Make uses “thunder;” and finally,

3) Note the association of Uwoke’s
stick
with a
mountain,
an unusual association, for effectively this means we have the association of a
god
with a
weapon
with a
mountain.
This is a formula that has been seen before, for it is a formula seen in the ancient epics of Mesopotamia describing an ancient
“cosmic war of the gods,” where the same association of mountains with gods with
pyramids
occurs.
⁵⁹
To put it succinctly, one is in the presence, once again, of more or less the same association and constellation of relationships in Easter Island, and far-off Mesopotamia. And that means that the loss of land spoken of in the Easter Island version of the legend somehow fits into the wider context of a global deluge and a war of the gods.

The end result of this technological intervention was the loss of a “large” land. One cannot help but think how closely this legend resembles Plato’s allegory of Atlantis, where, following a devastating war, the fabled continent is overcome by disasters, and sinks into the ocean.

That such a legend would arise on such an isolated and small island with almost no resources, such as Easter Island, and that it would so closely parallel — even in its “formula” of associating gods with weapons with mountains — Mesopotamian myths and the Platonic allegory, highlights the problem, for the chances of these specific details arising by mere coincidence is almost nil. The problem is further compounded by the fact that Easter Island actually developed a rather sophisticated form of writing, well in advance of anything exhibited or developed in North America, which, if the standard theory of a “land bridge” by which the native populations of the Americas came to the continents, spreading from north to south, is true, meant that the northern tribes had far longer a time to develop sophisticated writing. Yet they did not do so, but the Easter Islanders did!
⁶⁰

It is in fact this script that demonstrates that the original settlement of Easter Island was anything but an isolated affair, or that it was disconnected from civilization elsewhere. The connections to “civilization elsewhere” in Easter Island’s case are, however, quite problematical, for the script connects it to one side of the Pacific, but the construction in evidence on it connects it to the other.

This may most easily be illustrated, again, by pictures of the type of “jigsaw” construction methods that we have already encountered in Peru: