Floating A Big Idea: Ancient Use Of Rafts To Transport Goods Demonstrated

[Judi Lynn]

Floating A Big Idea: Ancient Use Of Rafts To Transport Goods Demonstrated

ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2008) — Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Details of how the ancient trading system worked more than 1,000 years ago were reconstructed largely through the efforts of former MIT undergraduate student Leslie Dewan, working with Professor of Archeology and Ancient Technology Dorothy Hosler, of the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE).

The new work supports earlier evidence documented by Hosler that the two great centers of pre-European civilization in the Americas-the Andes region and Mesoamerica-had been in contact with each other and had longstanding trading relationships. That conclusion was based on an analysis of very similar metalworking technology used in the two regions for items such as silver and copper tiaras, bands, bells and tweezers, as well as evidence of trade in highly prized spondylus-shell beads.

Early Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch accounts of the Andean civilization include descriptions and even drawings of the large oceangoing rafts, but provided little information about their routes or the nature of the goods they carried.

More:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080319114619.htm

[aquart]

1. Finally dumping the land bridge theory? Oh, good.

[semillama]

5. What does this story have to do with any land bridges?

:shrug:

Although the Beringia land bridge theory itself is getting pretty threadbare nowadays, that's true.

There's so much to learn from precolumbian Mesoamerican and South American civilizations. There's some really astounding new information coming out of Amazonia that's turned a lot of the conventional thinking on its head.

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. If microsoft shipped it's software by raft, it would be obsolete before it arrived!

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.
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I finally get a software pro gramme that works half-decent(Win98SE) after all the upgrades and fixes, and then they drop support for it.

We are pretty impatient to get what is "new", and a lot of our foodstuffs are shipped green so they "ripen"(rotting is a more accurate word) along the way so our tomatoes are red, and our bananas are yellow, and so on.

Oh well, pardon my rambling - but the article IS an interesting read.

Having used sailboats of different sizes, mostly small, I found this part interesting - -

" Although the early sketches give a general sense of the construction, it took careful study with a computerized engineering design program to work out details of dimensions, materials, sail size and configuration, and the arrangement of centerboards. These boards were used in place of a keel to prevent the craft from being blown to the side, and also provided a steering mechanism by selectively raising and lowering different boards from among two rows of them arranged on each side of the craft."

I even used a sail set-up on a 20 foot canoe once, the "centre-board" being clamped to one side on the gunnel - never thought of TWO - now that would be real stable.

hmmmmm.

[Peace Patriot]

3. I imagine it will come to that, after the Bushites are through trashing the planet.

Canoes!

[Mika]

4. Too few big trees left to build the 60 foot carved canoes the Native Americans used.

All cut down for deck rails for yachts and hot tub decks, etc.

:(