1,200-year-old Phone in the Smithsonian Collections South American

[Ichingcarpenter]

The gourd-and-twine device, created 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, remains tantalizingly functional—and too fragile to test out. “This is unique,” NMAI curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist who specializes in the study of the central Andes, tells me. “Only one was ever discovered. It comes from the consciousness of an indigenous society with no written language.”

We’ll never know the trial and error that went into its creation. The marvel of acoustic engineering—cunningly constructed of two resin-coated gourd receivers, each three-and-one-half inches long; stretched-hide membranes stitched around the bases of the receivers; and cotton-twine cord extending 75 feet when pulled taut—arose out of the Chimu empire at its height. The dazzlingly innovative culture was centered in the Río Moche Valley in northern Peru, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the western Andes. “The Chimu were a skillful, inventive people,” Matos tells me as we don sterile gloves and peer into the hollowed interiors of the gourds. The Chimu, Matos explains, were the first true engineering society in the New World, known as much for their artisanry and metalwork as for the hydraulic canal-irrigation system they introduced, transforming desert into agricultural lands.

The artifact’s recent past is equally mysterious. Somehow—no one knows under what circumstances—it came into the hands of a Prussian aristocrat, Baron Walram V. Von Schoeler. A shadowy Indiana Jones-type adventurer, Von Schoeler began excavating in Peru during the 1930s. He developed the “digging bug,” as he told the New York Times in 1937, at the age of 6, when he stumbled across evidence of a prehistoric village on the grounds of his father’s castle in Germany. Von Schoeler himself may have unearthed the gourd telephone. By the 1940s, he had settled in New York City and amassed extensive holdings of South American ethnographic objects, eventually dispersing his collections to museums around the United States



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ideas-innovations/Theres-a-1200-year-old-Phone-in-the-Smithsonian-Collections-231152081.html#ixzz2nFEJsb2I



The capital of the empire Chan Chan


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Chan



Chimú culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chim%C3%BA_culture


Kingdom of Chimor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimor



One of the walls discovered at chan chan

[Judi Lynn]

1. Wonderful! Who would have expected to hear this? Our views have been so limited!

Returning to read the information you provided later this evening.

Flawless image you've posted at the bottom. Thank you so much.