List Of Pre-Columbian Engineering Projects In The Americas
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List Of Pre-Columbian Engineering Projects In The Americas
Engineering in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus was advanced in agriculture, hydrology, irrigation systems, transportation, mechanical engineering, civil engineering and astronomy. In addition Native Americans made extensive use of fire to change the landscape and to create open areas for farming and hunting. Examples of pre-Columbian engineering from different indigenous civilizations can be found across North and South America. North America *Pueblo Structures *Hohokam Canals *Chaco Canyon *Tenochitlan Flood Gates *Teotihuacan *Serpent Mound *Cahokia Mounds South America *Inca road system *Nazca Lines *Machu Picchu * Sacsayhuaman * Chavin/Inca canals *Tiwanaku *Chan Chan * AndenZenu canals and drains See also *Inca Empire *Incan agriculture * Kuelap *Paracas culture *Nazca culture *Caral The Sacred City of Caral-Supe or simply Caral, is an archaeological site where the remains of the main city of the Caral civilization are found. It is l ...
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Pre-Columbian Era
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the Migration to the New World, original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization of the Americas, European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, the era covers the history of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous cultures until significant influence by Europeans. This may have occurred decades or even centuries after Columbus for certain cultures. Many pre-Columbian civilizations were marked by permanent settlements, cities, agriculture, civic and monumental architecture, major earthworks (archaeology), earthworks, and Complex society, complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had long faded by the time of the first permanent European colonies (c. late 16th–early 17th centuries), and are known only through archaeology of the Americas, archaeological investigations and oral history. Other civi ...
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Serpent Mound
The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,348-foot-long (411 m), three-foot-high prehistoric effigy mound located in Peebles, Ohio. The mound itself resides on the Serpent Mound crater plateau, running along the Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. The mound is the largest serpent effigy in the world. The Serpent Mound is believed to have been built by the Native American Adena peoples around 320 BCE, and then either added to or repaired by the Fort Ancient peoples around 1100 CE. The first published surveys of the mound were by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, featured in their historic volume, ''Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley'', published in 1848 by the Smithsonian Institution. The United States Department of Interior designated the mound as a National Historic Landmark in 1966. The mound is maintained through the Ohio History Connection, a non profit organization dedicated to preserving historical sites throughout Ohio. Description Effigy mounds can be traced ...
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Paracas Culture
The Paracas culture was an Andean society existing between approximately 800 BCE and 100 BCE, with an extensive knowledge of irrigation and water management and that made significant contributions in the textile arts. It was located in what today is the Ica Region of Peru. Most information about the lives of the Paracas people comes from excavations at the large seaside Paracas site on the Paracas Peninsula, first formally investigated in the 1920s by Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello. The ''Paracas Cavernas'' are shaft tombs set into the top of Cerro Colorado, each containing multiple burials. There is evidence that over the centuries when the culture thrived, these tombs were reused. In some cases, the heads of the deceased were taken out, apparently for rituals, and later reburied. The associated ceramics include incised polychrome, "negative" resist decoration, and other wares of the Paracas tradition. The associated textiles include many complex weave structures, as wel ...
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Incan Agriculture
Incan agriculture was the culmination of thousands of years of farming and herding in the high-elevation Andes mountains of South America, the coastal deserts, and the rainforests of the Amazon basin. These three radically different environments were all part of the Inca Empire (1438-1533 CE) and required different technologies for agriculture. Inca agriculture was also characterized by the variety of crops grown, the lack of a market system and money, and the unique mechanisms by which the Incas organized their society. Andean civilization was "pristine"—one of five civilizations worldwide which were indigenous and not derivative from other civilizations. Most Andean crops and domestic animals were likewise pristine—not known to other civilizations. Potatoes, tomatoes, chile peppers, and quinoa were among the many unique crops; Camelids (llamas and alpacas) and guinea pigs were the unique domesticated animals. The Incan civilization was predominantly agricultural. The Inca ...
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Inca Empire
The Inca Empire (also known as the Incan Empire and the Inka Empire), called ''Tawantinsuyu'' by its subjects, (Quechua for the "Realm of the Four Parts",  "four parts together" ) was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was in the city of Cusco. The Inca civilization arose from the Peruvian highlands sometime in the early 13th century. The Spanish began the conquest of the Inca Empire in 1532 and by 1572, the last Inca state was fully conquered. From 1438 to 1533, the Incas incorporated a large portion of western South America, centered on the Andean Mountains, using conquest and peaceful assimilation, among other methods. At its largest, the empire joined modern-day Peru, what are now western Ecuador, western and south central Bolivia, northwest Argentina, the southwesternmost tip of Colombia and a large portion of modern-day Chile, and into a state comparable to the historical empires of Eurasia ...
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Chan Chan
Chan Chan was the largest city of the pre-Columbian era in South America. It is now an archaeology, archaeological site in La Libertad Region west of Trujillo, Peru. Chan Chan is located in the mouth of the Moche Valley and was the capital of the historical empire of the Chimor from 900 to 1470, when they were defeated and incorporated into the Inca Empire. Chimor, a conquest state, developed from the Chimú culture which established itself along the Peruvian coast around 900 AD. Chan Chan is in a particularly arid section of the coastal desert of northern Peru. Due to the lack of rain in this area, the major source of nonsalted water for Chan Chan is in the form of rivers carrying surface runoff from the Andes. This runoff allows for control of land and water through Irrigation in Peru, irrigation systems. The city of Chan Chan spanned 20 km² and had a dense urban center of 6 km² which contained extravagant ''ciudadelas''. ''Ciudadelas'' were large architectural ...
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Tiwanaku
Tiwanaku ( es, Tiahuanaco or ) is a Pre-Columbian archaeological site in western Bolivia near Lake Titicaca, about 70 kilometers from La Paz, and it is one of the largest sites in South America. Surface remains currently cover around 4 square kilometers and include decorated ceramics, monumental structures, and megalithic blocks. The site's population probably peaked around AD 800 with 10,000 to 20,000 people. The site was first recorded in written history in 1549 by Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León while searching for the southern Inca capital of Qullasuyu. Jesuit chronicler of Peru Bernabé Cobo reported that Tiwanaku's name once was ''taypiqala'', which is Aymara meaning "stone in the center", alluding to the belief that it lay at the center of the world. The name by which Tiwanaku was known to its inhabitants may have been lost as they had no written language. Heggarty and Beresford-Jones suggest that the Puquina language is most likely to have been the language of T ...
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Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu is a 15th-century Inca citadel located in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru on a mountain range.UNESCO World Heritage Centre. It is located in the Machupicchu District within Urubamba Province above the Sacred Valley, which is northwest of Cusco. The Urubamba River flows past it, cutting through the Cordillera and creating a canyon with a tropical mountain climate. For most speakers of English or Spanish, the first 'c' in ''Picchu'' is silent. In English, the name is pronounced or , in Spanish as or , and in Quechua (''Machu Pikchu'') as . The Incas, in contrast to the Maya, had no written language, and no European visited the site until the 19th century, so far as is known. There are, therefore, no written records of the site while it was in use. The names of the buildings, their supposed uses, and their inhabitants are all the product of modern archaeologists, on the basis of physical evidence, including tombs at the site. Most recent archaeologists b ...
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