La Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City of Colombia, South America, Marks the Stars of Corvus as a Heart, plus a Southern Hemisphere Sky Map Megalith

La Ciudad Perdida, "The Lost City", also known as Teyuna or Buritaca, is located in the Magdalena Department of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, South America, and has the GPS coordinates 11°2′16.79″N 73°55′30.69″W. It predates Machu Picchu in Peru by many centuries and has one of the most magnificent ancient megalithic stones we have seen.

The Global Heritage Fund (GHF) in partnership with the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History are involved with the management, documentation, and conservation of the Teyuna-Ciudad Perdida Archaeological Park.

Archaeology magazine, Volume 57 Number 5, September/October 2004, has an article by Toby Muse titled Lost City, who writes about Ciudad Perdida that the native inhabitants of the region, the Tairona (also written "the Tayronas"), call the center of their extremely remote 15000 square mile area in the Sierra Nevada "Teyuna", "the HEART of the world", even though its first modern discoverers called it a "green hell" for its ever-present mosquitoes, thick impenetrable jungles, and densely covered steep mountains.

Even today tourists can not get to the "Lost City" independently but only as part of organized ca. 4-to-5-day hiking tours, which reportedly cover anywhere from  23 kilometers to 44 kilometers of extremely tough jungle hiking, including river crossings and very steep terrain. Suited only for the very fit!

At Ucros Travel, which also has some marvelous photographs, it is written:

"Lost City Colombia - Ciudad Perdida  was discovered in 1976 by a team of archaeologists from the Colombian Institute of Anthropology led by Gilberto Cadavid Luisa Fernanda Herrera.... Recent (2006) Archaeological investigations at the site indicate that this town was founded around 660 AD and abandoned sometime between 1550 and 1600 AD.... It is known as Teyuna by Indians...."

According to our analysis of the ancient land survey of Native America by astronomy, the Lost City of Santa Marta represented the stars of Corvus seen as a "heart", as evidenced in the large arguably "heart"-sculpted stone at the main location of the site. Perhaps these stones were at some time also viewed as a toad, or frog, as seen in those or neighboring stars by Inca cosmology.

The Ciudad Perdida, Colombia, South America

Corvus Heart Stone

See also http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YAEL_PHOTOS_898.jpg, which appears to be a similar stone at a different location in Ciudad Perdida.

Ciudad Perdida also has a fantastic megalithic "sky map stone". See  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YAEL_PHOTOS_819.jpg.

That megalith is currently thought to have been a "local" map of the region, created using a "slashed line" stone marking technique also found in the Pacific Northwest, e.g. in Oregon (name origin via "Virgo", so we allege) and Alaska.

Note that in Inupiaq Eskimo language an inuksuk was "a native Alaskan cairn built to mark pathways". See Behind the Name. On one level that is what the ancient land survey of Native America by astronomy was all about.

The Ciudad Perdida Megalith of Colombia, South America suggests that Ciudad Perdida (marking Corvus as a heart) was the top of the stone and that the megalith was marked as a sky map of stars of the southern hemisphere. See photos of the stone by Stan James and Yael Zwighaft of YAEL-PHOTOS, 2008 at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YAEL_PHOTOS_819.jpg.

This has to be one of the most spectacular of all the megaliths we have thus far seen, apparently carved in the shape of a human head, with the top of the head as the stars of Centaurus and the chin fairly clear, but with asymmetrical star-mandated positioning.

We see the eyes at Volans and Musca, the cheek at Carina, the nose at Mensa and the mouth at Reticulum, which then makes LMC, the Large Magellanic Cloud the moustache. Obviously, the ancients created these anthropomorphic figures in the stones to mark the stars and to make it easier to remember them, just as we do today with the stellar constellations.

The La Ciudad Perdida, Colombia, South America

Southern Hemisphere Sky Map Megalith

(click the graphic for a larger image)

We found the Colombian and Alaskan megaliths by following an "idealized" diagonal line of land survey by astronomy that runs northwest to Alaska from the Herschel Petroglyphs and southeast from the Herschel Petroglyphs through Cahokia to the Miami Circle and approximately through Ciudad Perdida, and then on to the far east coast of South America. We think that this line could be marked as one of two lines marked at the bottom of the Cahokia Birdman Tablet that are perpendicular to the ca. seven horizontal levels found there, which mark the main horizontal survey levels on land in North America. We will post about how that land survey may have looked in a coming posting.

We emphasize again that the ancients may not have used totally straight lines in doing their astronomical land surveys, but rather line and/or angle approximations that were guided by measurements of the stars, Earth topography, resulting Indian trails and other practical considerations. Nevertheless, such lines are useful for analysis in practice for us in doing the decipherments. Exactly what the ancients did still remains open.

THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 109 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America

La Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City of Colombia, South America, Marks the Stars of Corvus as a Heart, plus a Southern Hemisphere Sky Map Megalith

The Due Process of Law and the Magna Carta

The Economist explains the massive importance of the Magna Carta to the development of the then revolutionary concept of the due process of law, which significantly curtails the absolute powers of the sovereign and is at the root of the modern concepts of democracy and human rights, such as are in the current world substantially under siege.  See Magna Carta at the Economist

Cognition of Geographic Information and Human Spatial Orientation and Navigation in an Age of GIS and Virtual Reality: Locomotion Wayfinding and Systems of Reference

One critical area of scientific inquiry that bears directly on our ongoing analysis of ancient rock art, megaliths, mounds, earthworks etc. as land survey markers sited by astronomy is the question of human spatial and geographic orientation in a given environment and the role of systems of reference used for this purpose. Far too little research has been devoted to this topic and it is the kind of thing that research foundations should be sponsoring and funding.

We refer here to fundamental articles in Robert B. McMaster & E.Lynn Usery (eds.), 2004/2005. A Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 402 p., ISBN-13: 978-0849327285 ISBN-10: 0849327288, eBook ISBN 978-1-4200-3833-0

and especially to Chapter 3 by Daniel R. Montello and Scott Freundschuh on the Cognition of Geographic Information, where they write, inter alia:

"Cognitive research about space and place has focused on several issues:  the responses of sensory systems that pick up spatial information, the development of spatial knowledge from birth to adulthood (ontogenesis) and upon first exposure to a new place (microgenesis), the accuracy and precision of knowledge about distances and directions, spatial language, cognitive structures and processes used during navigation, and perceptual and cognitive issues in cartography, and very recently, GIS. With the advent of new technologies like GIS, new questions about spatial perception and cognition develop, and old questions (both basic and applied) become focused in new ways. 

One of the most basic concepts in this area is that of the cognitive map. Introduced by Tolman (1948) in his work with rat spatial behavior, the cognitive map is a mental representation, or set of representations, of the spatial layout of the environment. According to Downs and Stea (1973), “cognitive mapping is a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in his [or her] everyday spatial environment” (p. 9). The cartographic map thus serves as a metaphor for spatial and environmental knowledge. Other metaphors have been offered as well, from topological schemata to cognitive collage (see Montello & Freundschuh, 1995). GIS and virtual reality provide our latest metaphors for environmental knowledge. 

Cognitive researchers are interested in comparing various sources of geographical knowledge. Montello and Freundschuh (1995) review the characteristics of acquiring knowledge from direct environmental experience, static pictorial representations such as maps (see Thorndyke & Hayes-Roth, 1982), dynamic pictorial representations (movies, animations), and language (see Taylor & Tversky, 1992). Montello and Freundschuh listed eight factors that may play roles in differentiating these sources of geographic information: sensorimotor
systems involved, static vs. dynamic information, sequential vs. simultaneous acquisition, the arbitrariness of symbols, the need for scale translations and their flexibility, viewing perspective, precision of presented information, and the inclusion of detail varying in relevance.

It is commonly thought that spatial knowledge of the environment consists of three types of features: knowledge of discrete landmarks, knowledge of routes that connect landmarks into travel sequences, and configurational or survey knowledge that coordinates and metrically scales routes and landmarks. In fact, inspired by Piagetian theory, it has often been suggested that these features represent a necessary learning sequence (Siegel & White, 1975; for an opposing view, see Montello, 1998). Landmarks in particular are thought to play an important role as anchor-points or reference points for the organization of environmental knowledge (Sadalla, Burroughs, & Staplin, 1980; Couclelis, Golledge, Gale, & Tobler, 1987).

Spatial cognition researchers have studied human navigation and orientation (Golledge, 1999). Navigation is coordinated and goal directed movement through space. It may be understood to consist of both locomotion and wayfinding processes.

Locomotion refers to perceptual-motor coordination to the local surrounds, and includes activities such as moving towards visible targets and avoiding obstacles.

Wayfinding refers to cognitive coordination to the distant environment, beyond direct sensorimotor access, and includes activities such as trip planning and route choice. Humans navigate and stay oriented both by recognizing landmarks (piloting) and by updating their sense of location via dead reckoning processes
(Gallistel, 1990; Loomis, Klatzky, Golledge, & Philbeck, 1999). Some of these processes are relatively automatic (Rieser, Pick, Ashmead, & Garing, 1995), while others are more like conscious strategies (Cornell, Heth, & Rowat, 1992).
 
A fundamental issue about human orientation concerns the systems of reference that people use to organize their spatial knowledge. Various possible systems have been discussed, including those that encode spatial relations with respect to the body, with respect to an external feature with or without differentiated appearance, or with respect to an abstract frame like latitude-longitude (Hart & Moore, 1973; Levinson, 1996). Several researchers have investigated reference systems within the context of verbal route directions (Allen, 1997)."