Gabriel Vanegas & Siegfried Zielinski BACK to the FUTURE IN
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Gabriel Vanegas & Siegfried Zielinski BACK TO THE FUTURE IN A PLACE CALLED AMERICA: ANCIENT LOGICS, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGIES APRJA Volume 2, Issue 1, 2013 ISSN 2245-7755 CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Gabriel Vanegas & Siegfried Zielinski: BACK TO THE FUTURE ... Introduction new lands, did not arrive in America because America did not yet exist. What Europeans conceived as the New World was thoroughly Our media and current technologies are reshaped by the project called , the New the result of a global form established by Spain; languages, religion, science, tech- Western thought. This thought, as in many nologies, political concepts like freedom and parts of the world was imposed particularly in modernity—all were imported with the inten- The New Spain in the discovery by Christoph tion of wiping out the preexisting civilization. Columbus in the late 16th century. Before the America was newly created as the holy ver- European contact, pre-America had a differ- sion of Europe and Christianity. ent way of thinking to the West and therefore The vast majority of indigenous cul- a different development and understanding tural artifacts found until now, contain some of concepts such as media, technology, time, degree of post-Colonialist intervention and body and space. On one hand the offcial his- much of our comprehensive knowledge tory shows a pre-Columbian poor picture in comes out of the combination of both purely technological developments, but on the other indigenous and Europeanized artifacts; in- hand archaeological discoveries demonstrate deed, it is almost impossible to get closer to an illuminated past with a more sustainable their original concepts. and different form of “hight technology.” To For pre-Columbian Mesoamerican get closer to this form, we have to consider records including the Codex Dresden, indig- the worldview of pre-Columbian cultures enous documented their history for over ten as the central matrix for their technological centuries before the Spanish colonization by developments. The aim of this research is to using a more robust paper than the Egyptian extend the pre-Columbian understanding so papyrus called Huun[1]. Almost ten centuries that we could approach archaeological dis- of knowledge are lost between the Spanish coveries and access to alternative forms of burning and trades, leaving only few invalu- knowledge to expand Western boundaries. able codices. Mayan media also included stones, buildings, clothing, jewelry, and painted ce- Approach ramics (the ceramic codex). This multiplicity of media raises the question of whether the Maya dealt with concepts such as media, Upon reaching the Americas, Christopher multimedia, mass media, and information Columbus initially believed that he had arrived overload. In the Andes, the Inca Empire used at the Asian Islands imagined by Europeans a tactile writing system called Quipu. The as beyond the Ganges River. This scenario Inca Quipu of Quechua language Knot, also was legalized by the Spanish Crown and burned in the conquest of the area, used this Church, who declared themselves landown- complex three-dimensional medium together ers of these (imaginary) territories eventu- with a mathematical device called Yupana ally conceived of as New Spain, and, later, Inca, a three-dimensional abacus, to form America in the name of Americo Vespucio. a complete and precise record of events. In The Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman theory, the Quipu stores the mathematical has argued that America was not discovered, data derived from the Yupana. This unusual but rather created, molded by Europeans. In form of documentation complicates a broader this sense, Columbus, in his desire to fnd understanding of Inca Empire; therefore, 133 APRJA Volume 2, Issue 1, 2013 most historical knowledge is based on post- way that even a paper cannot ft between the colonialist codices such as the Murua Codex, fssures, and theoretically is positioned as- dating from 1590 and reedited in the 17th tronomically with the movements of the sun century. annually. The Tiwanaco ruins, together with There are many theories for how to un- similarly sophisticated constructions includ- derstand the Quipu and Yupana, but most fall ing the Nazca lines, may have been erected within mathematical decimal reality, simple by earlier civilizations, with the Incas inherit- mnemonic techniques, or binary theories that ing, restoring, interpreting, and adopting them are ground on Western reality and production. to their contemporary culture. Indeed, when In 2002, the Italians researchers Nicolino de the Spaniards came to the ruins of Tiwanaco Pascuale and Mauricio Orlando tested the in Bolivia for the frst time, they asked the abilities of the Yupana Inca, performing astro- indigenous people how they had built the nomical calculations, complex mathematical structures; “[t]hey laughed at the question, operations, and even applying the Yupana to affrming that they were made long before a modern microprocessor architecture that the Inca reign… .” (Cieza de Leon) Likewise, would result in a much more powerful design “Garcilaso de la Vega… gave an account than the current binary architecture of the of how, in historical times, an Inca king had computer. Pascuale and Orlando provided a tried to emulate the achievements of his pre- very interesting approach since they distrust decessors who had built Sacsayhuaman… text created by Spanish-colonizers by trying this boulder was hauled across the mountain best to fnd clues hidden in the texts made by more than 20,000 Indians, going up and by natives, patterns in the fabrics, ceramics, down very steep hills… At a certain spot, it planets, constellations and stars. fell from their hands over a precipice crush- Archeological evidence, such as the al- ing more than 3000 men.” (233). Based on ready mentioned Quipu and Yupana, reveals the study of the forms of the ruins of this a technological heritage that required much lost civilization, the Bolivian theoretical longer than just 400 years of the Inca Empire Jorge Emilio Molina proposed a logic called to develop this technology. Rather, the Tetralectics (Tetraléctica) that seeks a new Tiwanaco civilization, Andean precursors of way of understanding indigenous worldview the Incas, originally developed these highly separated from the Old World perspectives. sophisticated mathematical and astronomical This theory explored a new paradigm, a new technologies. Their civilization is potentially logic that points to deal better to the context of the oldest on earth; using archaeo-astro- pre-colonial times to reinterpret the vestiges nomical techniques and investigations of and concepts. The Tetralectic theory also the ruins, the Inca expert Arthur Posnansky suggests that the peoples of the Andean and hypothesized in 1945 that the Tiwanacotas Amazonian, and possibly Central and North culture was almost 13,000 years old (Hays America as well, worked with a logic of four 1125). dimensions. In the Tetralectica, ideas are The technology used to build some of expressed through a union of geometry and the Tiwanaco ruins is comparable to that reality. Furthermore, rather than the two -di- used to make the Pyramids of Egypt. Similar mensional dialectic, four conditions rule their to the Pyramids, the Kalassaya temple in reality: the certain thing, the false thing, the Tiwanaco is a megalithic construction, cre- possibly certain thing, and the possibly false ated from stones weighing over 400 tonnes thing. It is also related to Tiwanaco because which are stacked against one another in a Tawa means in Quechua language “Four” 134 Gabriel Vanegas & Siegfried Zielinski: BACK TO THE FUTURE ... as well as Tiwana in Aymara language, both as Ayahuasca, Peyote, San Pedro, between languages of the region. others. Animism, a source of knowledge The three-dimensional abacus called was almost exterminated, giving the task of Yupana Inca, might had worked under this understanding to a technological media, ex- theory, being his three-dimensionality and ternal to the body, minimizing the possibilities different levels the factor of unsertanty, result- of uncertainty. ing in more complex operations. This could Scientifc drawings, microscopes, be also related to the fact that pre-Columbian telescopes, cameras, and other media are way of writing was metaphoric, open by us- external technologies reaching for an ideal ing images, or three-dimensional forms. This objective entity supposedly providing pure openness in their way of writing, including truth and pure control. Nature as a machine the possibility or uncertainty factor intuit in was broken in to parts. God, external to na- the Tetralectics, could give us more ideas on ture was his new designer and later human how did the indigenous peoples understood kind, but for indigenous we are not external and conceptualized their technologies. to nature (Pachamama), we are born of her and we are part of her, everything is inter- connected. Knowledge is considered a living organism as the indigenous thinker Fausto Reinaga argued. Folk taxonomies (folkxonomies) used by the natives lost importance and were replaced by names settle by the conquerors to be considered as illegitimate. Antonio de Ulloa, scientifc, military and Spanish writer says, “the Quechua language of the Incas is closer to the language of children.” (van Kessel 37) Similarly, the way of documentation was Yupana, Abacus Inca. Image. Wikipedia. standardized, in order to eliminate subjective interpretations on each species found. We see the idea of uncertainty of equal form in their way of thinking. For the Aymaras, The scope of study should be limited to the cultural group descendant of Tiwanakotas copy nature with accuracy, especially his thought is seminal, as the biological pro- in plants, without adding adjectives cesses where the things are given in events. and attributes with their imagination “Sprout by the life force of the universe and (Ortega). generating divine: Pachamama.”(van Kessel 37). There is not a priori or a control of the In pre-Columbian times the body was results, and everything spins or depends on understood as a medium that connects the relation body and environment.