South America’s largest trove of religious monuments and megalithic sculptures isn’t on Easter Island, nor even in Peru or Chile, as most travellers might assume. It’s Tierradentro’s 162 underground tombs carved into solid volcanic bedrock, and the more than 500 monolithic stone statues and tumuli (ancient burial mounds) surrounding the nearby town of San Agustín, sprinkled throughout 2,000 sq km of the serried mountains and highland plateaus of the Upper Magdalena Valley in southern Colombia.
These mementoes of an advanced, yet unknown (and unnamed), pre-Columbian, northern Andean culture had largely been off-limits during five decades of civil war. Now that the region is finally safe from Farc guerrilla activity, the awe-inspiring, yet little-known, Unesco World Heritage sites are easily visited and are guaranteed to amaze and inspire.
At the top of a large knoll, half screened by masses of overhanging foliage, we came upon a solitary statue – nicknamed Doble Yo (Double Self) – staring dead ahead, a perverse smile carved upon his lips. He wore a carved jaguar fur, its large head resting atop his own head and topped, in turn, by the skin of a crocodile. “This statue fuses male and female,” Pérez said. “It also symbolises the coupling of human and animal spirits upon which shamans relied for sorcery and power.”
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181209-south-americas-other-easter-island
Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
An Astonishing Level of Humanisation
I've mentioned the difficulties of both promoting/censoring violent action on social media before and I can't really think of much ...
-
"To claim that you are being discriminated against because you have lost your right to discriminate against others shows a gross lack o...
-
Where Americans think Ukraine is These are the guesses of 2066 Americans as to where Ukraine is. Only 1 in 6 were correct. Presumably the...
-
Hmmm. [The comments below include a prime example of someone claiming they're interested in truth but just want higher standard, where...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.