The Inca Empire was larger than the Roman Empire at its height, yet had neither wheel nor written language.

The Bolivian ski resort of Chacaltaya, stranded once its 18,000-year-old glacier disappeared in 2009

The Bolivian ski resort of Chacaltaya, stranded like a beached whale once its 18,000-year-old glacier disappeared permanently in 2009

(Note: Since the early 20th century, glaciers around the world have been retreating, presumably as a result of humans burning greater and greater quantities of oil and coal, rampant deforestation, and the raising of livestock, which create greenhouse gases that absorb more sunlight and thus heat the atmosphere. Mt Kilamanjaro’s glacier in Tanzania, for example, which has been around for 12,000 years, is expected to completely disappear by 2020… Read more

 Machu Picchu

You’re invited to an Evening with author and filmmaker Kim MacQuarrie & Writer/Editor Don George

Tuesday February 23rd, 7pm
Herbst Theatre
401 Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street, San Francisco

Please be our guest as Don George and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and author Kim MacQuarrie take the stage for a globe-roaming conversation about indigenous peoples around the world, balancing contradictory creative passions and the allure of Inca history and culture…

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Chilean Police Drag Mapuche Protester

Police arrest a woman who was demonstrating against the arrest of Mapuche Indians involved in a land dispute in Valparaiso, Chile, about 75 miles northwest of Santiago. Dozens of protestors marched through downtown Valparaiso on Dec 13, 2007 to pressure the government to release five Mapuche Indians. The Mapuche had been holding a hunger strike in the south of Chile after being arrested for starting forest fires on land belonging to a logging company whose land they are claiming by legacy.

Prosperous Chile’s Troubling Indigenous Uprising

Dec. 12, 2009

Time Magazine 

Compared to high-profile groups like the Quechua of Peru and the Yanomami of the Amazon rain forest, Chile’s Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks… Read more

Tawa hallae, a meat-eating Theropod dinosaur discovered in New Mexico

Tawa hallae, a meat-eating Theropod dinosaur discovered in New Mexico

New Meat-Eating Dinosaur Alters Evolutionary Tree

December 10, 2009

Esciencenews.com

Paleontologists, aided by amateur volunteers, have unearthed a previously unknown meat-eating dinosaur from a fossil bone bed in northern New Mexico, settling a debate about early dinosaur evolution, revealing a period of explosive diversification and hinting at how dinosaurs spread across the supercontinent Pangaea.

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 Indigenous Brazilian Tribe

December 23, 2009

On Monday, Brazil decreed nine new indigenous reserves covering 51,000 square kilometers (19,700 square miles) of the Amazon rainforest, an areas larger than Denmark or Switzerland, reports the AFP…

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 Nazca Line in SW Peru

An enormous “Nazca Line” as seen from the air on Peru’s SW desert coast; the Nazca civilization, known for its complex weavings, beautiful pottery, and the “Nazca Lines,” visible only from high above the ground, mysteriously collapsed around the middle of the first millennium, A.D.

Logging Caused Nazca Collapse 

BBC News

November 2, 2009

The ancient Nazca people of Peru are famous for the lines they drew in the desert depicting strange animal forms.

A further mystery is what happened to this once great civilization, which suddenly vanished 1,500 years ago….

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 Ukupacha Project Investigators Study Manco Inca Portrait Cliff Site

Ukupacha Project Investigators Study Portrait of the Rebel Incan Emperor Manco Inca

Spanish-Peruvian Team Succeed in Reaching  Rock Art Wall of [Emperor] Manco Inca II

The painting was completed over 400 years ago on a cliff in the Sacred Valley of the Incas

August 9, 2009

(ANDINA)

(Translation: K. MacQuarrie)

(Note: in 1536, a 19-year-old Incan emperor named Manco Inca rose up against the Spaniards and led a massive rebellion that almost succeeded in wiping Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors out. The young Inca king later retreated to the rugged area of Vilcabamba, about 90 miles from Cusco, a region from where the Incas carried out guerrilla warfare against the Spaniards for the next 36 years. The last Incan emperor, Tupac Amaru, was beheaded in Cusco in 1572, ending the Inca Empire: KM).

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 Napalm Explosion

Survival International: Call for Napalm Bombing of  ‘Savages’ in Peru’s Amazon Wins “Most Racist Article of the Year Award”

Peruvian Times

September 2, 2009

An article implying that Peruvian natives should be bombed with napalm has been named by London-based Survival International as the ‘most racist article’ published in the last year by the mainstream media.

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 Hiram Bingham at Machu Picchu in 1912

Hiram Bingham at Machu Picchu in 1912

Bingham Didn’t Dig Up The Yale Huacos –He Just Bought Them

August 6, 2009

Caretas

By Nicholas Asheshov

Here in Urubamba Hiram Bingham’s reputation has taken a knock in the run-up to the centennial of the discovery in 1911 of Machu Picchu.

The revisionists are saying that Bingham was not just a persistent explorer but also, frankly, a humbug.

Bingham’s economical use of the truth has been compounded by the poorly-advised refusal of Yale University and its Peabody Museum of Natural History to return, as promised, what Bingham’s Yale expeditions dug up in the Vilcabamba 1912-15.

The Peruvian government is taking Yale to court but they’re not pushing it.

Here’s why. None of the good pieces in the Yale Machu Picchu collection were actually dug up by Yale archaeologists.

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 Protestors in the Peruvian Amazon

Native Protestors at the entrance of Yurimagua, in the northern Peruvian Amazon

Blood at the Blockade: Peru’s Indigenous Uprising

NACLA (May-June 2009)

Gerardo Rénique

On June 6, near a stretch of highway known as the Devil’s Curve in the northern Peruvian Amazon, police began firing live rounds into a multitude of indigenous protestors – many wearing feathered crowns and carrying spears. In the nearby towns of Bagua Grande, Bagua Chica, and Utcubamba, shots also came from police snipers on rooftops, and from a helicopter that hovered above the mass of people. Both natives and mestizos took to the streets protesting the bloody repression.

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