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Paul Willis: The achievements of ancient civilisations can seem quite dazzling, and this has led some people to claim that the ancients had help from extraterrestrial sources.
Dr David Dearborne is an astronomer and physicist who's worked extensively on Inca astronomy. So just how good were the ancient Inca stargazers?
David Dearborne: When the Spanish arrived and started writing down books about these people that they conquered, trying to understand how they had ruled this area, they included a great deal of astronomy and they included the astronomy because there were large rituals that involved people observing the sun's rise and set between huge markers that were constructed to mark certain dates. And the Inca were believers that the sun was their patron or father, and that they were intermediaries between man and the sun.
Paul Willis: Were there any advances that the Incas had over western astronomy at that time?
David Dearborne: Basically no. They were very good, practical, night sky observers, they were people clearly who understood the motion of the sun and could tell dates very well; they had an astrology where they looked for signs in the sky, and people still do that in villages today. They will go out and look the first morning at the Pleides rise in the morning ahead of the sun. And depending on how the Pleides look --
Paul Willis: The Pleides being a star cluster next to Taurus.
David Dearborne: That's correct. And depending on how the Pleides look, they will decide what the omens are for this next year's planting.
Paul Willis: OK. Now some people have claimed that the Inca and other South American civilisations such as the Maya, their knowledge of astronomy was so advanced that they must have had some alien help in order for them to figure it out. Have you found any evidence that suggests that case?
David Dearborne: Boy would I love to find such evidence, it would make me one of the greatest researchers of all time down there. But in fact, again it's nothing that you can't imagine they couldn't do on their own.
Paul Willis: What about some of their technologies, there's the crystal skulls and there's the plains of Nazca with the figures which you can only see from the sky. What about those sorts of things?
David Dearborne: I personally feel they were very good artists. When you look at both ceramics and art works, you see the whole range that showed that there were some good artists and some bad artists and there was some learning. And in the case of Nazca, down in Peru, that was a pre-Inca group that lived in the south coast of Peru, there were these large figures that were carved on the earth, and then at a later date there were lines that were put on the earth. The favoured hypothesis among a number of archaeologists is that they were ritual pathways. Now how did they do it physically? It is perfectly do-able by a bright individual, and unless you wish to believe that the people in those days were inherently less intelligent than we are, they probably had some bright individuals and could in fact lay out these figures.
It's true that while I'm standing there in the pampas, it's very difficult to see the whole figure, but when I'm standing on this figure, I can stand there at the head and I can see a big chunk of the body, I can see a big chunk of the wing, I can't really see the tail very much; I can see parts of the legs. And there's a number of places where there are mountains nearby and you can see the whole figures from the mountains. At any one point, I can see enough of that figure that if I wanted to construct it, I could, and so I think that the Nazcainos had a similar ability.
There are some people in Peru when folk show up saying, 'Oh, we think space aliens did this.' They say, 'What's it matter? You racially prejudiced? You don't think our ancestors could do this?'
© 1997 Australian Broadcasting Corporation