IN 1998 AND 1999 legendary explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell led one of the most ambitious expeditions since Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki. It was an epic journey that spanned a continent and provided evidence that ancient South American peoples could have been trading with Africa 1,000 years before Christ.
Intrigued first of all by the idea that Plato's Atlantis might have been on a vast Bolivian plain high in the Andes, then fascinated by the notion that pre-Inca people and their trade goods might have found their way down central South America's massive rivers to the Atlantic and even across it, Blashford-Snell commissioned a fleet of traditional reed boats - the largest named Kota Mama - in which to test these theories. He navigated a route, in two phases, from Lake Titicaca to Buenos Aires, which took him and his companions through terrain of stark contrasts: from Bolivia's high Altiplano, through steamy Brazilian rain-forests and the arid thorn scrub of Paraguay's Gran Chaco, and finally to the Argentinian capital where their achievement was widely acknowledged.
John Blashford-Snell and Richard Snailham recount their amazing story of adventure and discovery, of lost civilizations and little-known archaeological sites, and of seventy-five people whose combined efforts ensured the success of the Kota Mama Expedition.

This novel meant the came back from the political to the literary world of Vargas LLosa. The novel tells the story of a Civil Guard, Lituma, that is sent to a post in Naccos, the Andes. Once in there , he will try to solve what happened to three missing men. The novel is an excellent mix of peruvian mythology, Sendero Luminoso and Love.

I found this book full of very useful information of food plants from the high altitudes of the Andes. The book also has lower altitude plants used by the Incas.

I am a history teacher teacher and bought this book so that I could learn how to make Quipu with my classes. I found it to be extremely thorough. It begins by explaining what Quipu is and how to make quipu out of household items. . .that part was GREAT, although the directions were a bit tricky. It then explores what Quipu was used for and provides numerous examples of different Quipu. The pictures, though they are not in color, are great. This book is excellent for anyone wanting to learn the intricacies of Quipu. It is also an excellent resource for computer and/or math teachers; it explains how Quipu is used in the same way that databases are used. You can't help but notice the similarities between Quipu and an abacus, either. One thing it did appear to lack was any explanation or translation of an authentic Incan Quipu.

For a very long time Enlightenment naturalists in Europe held that the Americas produced only inferior species and individuals; they believed that the climate was detrimental to organisms, and that not only were the lower animals inferior, but that the Europeans and their descendants, as well as the native peoples, were of a lower order than those living in Europe. New World thinkers, in turn, refuted as best they could this idea, and so the Dispute of the Americas raged on for several centuries.

This rather infantile attack on the New World has resulted in several ideas which are, if not patently untrue, at least not supported by evidence. Among these ideas is the belief that Native American cultures were primitive, barbaric, and rude. Another was that humanity could not have originated in the New World.

Both of these ideas are challenged by the information in this book. It is a storehouse of information on the wonderful events and archaeological sites found in the Americas and nowhere else. The New World will show to the Old that pre-Columbian civilizations were not inferior, that they practiced sciences at the same level as the Europeans: they were advanced practitioners of engineering, of medicine, of telemetry, performing feats that are considered impossible for Americans and Europeans of pre-Columbian peoples alike by European historiographers. Robert Charroux, in his book _Mysteries of the Andes_, has given us the information necessary to subvert the dominant paradigms.

One of the reasons that these advances came early to the Americans, Charroux suggests, is that humanity evolved in the New World, and therefore early on discovered knowledge which Europeans would discover independently only later. This idea, if true, would require a vast rearrangement of the human sciences, which are notably Eurocentric--wherever humanity may have evolved, the pinnacle of human thought is certainly considered by European thinkers to be European--with the result that the New World would be considered superior to the Old. The New World in this scheme becomes the womb and cradle of humanity and civilization. It would also require that facts long held by biologists be declared invalid. Despite European efforts to cover up this information, there is considerable evidence for both of these points.

Chief among this evidence are the Ica Stones, a collection of artifacts which demonstrate that the inhabitants of Peru practiced open heart surgery; that they watched the skies through telescopes; that prehistoric creatures such the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Archaeopteryx, the Brontosaurus, and the Australopithecus all co-existed with our species. Dr. Cabrera, curator of the museum where these stones are kept, will in future generations be venerated as a scientist as great as Cuvier, Newton, and Humboldt.

These stones also show that extraterrestrials visited our planet in our prehistory, as do the Nazca lines. They may have helped us evolve from apelike beings into the species as it appears today. In short, these artifacts reveal a brave new world in the Americas of which orthodox European science has long kept us ignorant. It is brave of the author--himself a European--to go up against the establishment and reveal this new information and evidence to the world at last.

These ideas are supported by many photographs, including 34 photographs of those stones which provide proof that humanity and dinosaurs were contemporaries and that early Americans had advanced technology. I had heard of these stones, but had never had an opportunity to see photographs of them, so I was quite thrilled when I finally came across a copy of this book. The book does have several flaws: it lacks an index of any sort, it makes constant references to a French archeological dig named Glozel without explaining what it is (it is a site in France which demands that our ideas about the time and place of the invention and writing be revised) and the author apparently could not decide between the inductive or deductive methods, or even if he could strike his target best with Enlightenment methods (thus stinging the scorpion with its own barb) or by appealing to mysticism and revelation. It also contains very strange phrases which do nothing to give the text an air of authority: how can one read the subchapter title "Santa Claus or the Werewolf of the Cosmos" without doubting the author's sincerity? Still, the information provided here should provide the anomalist and the open-minded archeologist with sources for future research projects for years to come. Future historiographers and scientists will look upon Charroux as another Columbus, disclosing the New World and its wonders yet again to the Old.

This book guided me during my thesis research, it helped me to identify and focus on the major disturbances affecting paramo ecosystems: fire, grazing and agriculture. If you want to understand how unique and threatened are these tropical alpine landscapes, this is the right place to start.

The book gives accurate information concerning select climbs of the Peruvian Andes in three languages (French, english and spanish) from the standard trade routes to classical more demanding routes (such as the route by J.Bouchard and also gives a very good description of the 5400ft high North Face of Huascaran Norte, Paragot Route). Too bad my previous copy was stolen by a french group in Huarez.

This book provides all you need to know to begin making amazing braids. No tools required - just this book and some good thread. Takes a while to follow to begin with, but the diagrams are very useful, and the braiding notation system is very clever.

This is an interesting account of the tragic plane crash in the Andes mountains in October 1972, which saw forty five people go down with the plane, many of them members of a Uruguayan rugby team. Of those forty five, ultimately sixteen would come off the mountain alive, but it would not come to pass until they had spent approximately seventy horrific days and nights trapped in unforgiving and alien territory high in the Andes mountains.

This book recounts for the reader the travails of those trapped in this remote and inaccessible place, as well as the faith that helped see them through their horrific ordeal. A few of the photographs in the book are a little shocking, as they show the remains of the survivors' anthropophagy. They did, however, what they had to do in order to survive. It is definitely an amazing story. It makes one ask of oneself, "What would I have done under the same circumstances?" Read the book to see if you can answer that question.

Given the raft of weirdos who over the years have chosen Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) for their subject, it is a welcome addition to have a serious book by a real scientist who has actually excavated at the site for several years. Tiwanaku is a favorite focus for loonies ranging from the Von Daniken "extra terrestrials are responsible for all the great human achievements of the past" school to the New Age mystic Shirley Maclain's Out on a Limb [Out of your mind!] school. While not explicitly addressing the wacko theories, Kolata's book shows how, contrary to their implicit racism, the indigenous people of the Titicaca basin were more than ingenious enough to come up with ways to contruct major monuments, carve incredible fantastic stone sculptures, and make the high arid plain of the altiplano bloom with potatoes, tubers and quinoa. These people had indoor plumbing and public sewage systems 1500 years ago! The Tiwanaku is a bit simplistic and general for the Andean or archaeological specialist; it is more appropriate for the first year University student or educated layman. Nonetheless, it brings together the current general state of knowledge about this important civilization in a highly readable fashion.