| Related sites for http://kyapa.tripod.com/ingprehisp/eng-summ.htm |
| Dr__Schneider_and_His_Cure_for_Road_Rage? Humorous article explores ways to de-fuse road rage. From The Cincinnati Enquirer. (November 9, 1998) | | Looking_For_The_Light_in_The_Port_of_Indecision It is worthwhile to look at one's religious, ethical and moral beliefs once in a while to see where one is doing well and where one falls short. Questioning and reflection are an important part of Uni | | Rangayyan,_Venkatesh Picture, contact information, resume, and links. | | Tietbohl,_Fred_-_Colorado_USA Family history and pictures, and outdoor activities in the state. | | Bay_Area_Real_Estate_Council,_Inc_ Organization of attorneys who specialise in real estate transactions. Information promoting organisations goals, expected benefits to clients, membership directory. | | Kalayaan_(Philippines) An activist political organization with common principles and vision, and a comprehensive program and strategy for social transformation. | | Binnie Family history of Pippa Binnie including surnames Barker, Barnes, Casey, Doyle, Edmondson, Groves, Hagan, Heeney, Hill, Little, Makin, McDonough, Meehan, Pickston, Warburton, Whittaker and Williams. F | | Weispfenning Web ring dedicated to the name and its application. | | Brent\'s_Web_Page Thoughts on the unification of science and religion with consideration of cosmology and evolution. | | Echo_Science_and_Technology_Virtual_Center Annotated catalogue of history of science, technology, and medicine resources. | | Your_share_in_God\'s_promises What Christadelphians believe God has promised to those who try to follow Christ. From the Christadelphian booklet of the same name. | | Seals_Web_Site Videos, pictures and information about the seal hunt in Canada. | | Center_for_Buddhist_Studies,_National_Taiwan_University Online Buddhist texts. Many in Chinese. | | Buros_Institute The Buros Institute, publishers of The Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print, provides critical analyses of tests and testing instruments. | | American_Jewish_Committee Membership organization with thirty-two chapters nationwide and more than 100,000 members and supporters. | | Identifying_and_Deploying_Your_Spiritual_Gifts A basic overview of the theology of spiritual gifts, what they are, what the importance of them is, how to use them, and how to identify your spiritual gifts. | | Questico_UK_Life_Advise Questico operates a network of qualified life advisors and counsellors on astrology and horoscopes, tarot and card reading and clairvoyance and psychic readings. Advice sessions are given after previo | | Four_Directions_Institute__Dakota Tribal profile, timeline, and links. | | Temple_Baptist_Church Lodi, California. Statement of purpose, schedule of services, contact information, statement of beliefs, history, staff profiles, newsletters, information on missionary activities. | | Library_of_Pentecostal_Manifestation_Heresy Shows the spiritual excesses of faith healers like Benny Hinn, John Arnott, "Dad" Hagin, and Kenneth Copeland, caught on audio and video. |
|
EL DIARIO DE UN POLIT
THE
DIARY OF
A POLIT-ECO TOURIST
PREHISPANIC
AMERICAN CIVIL ENGINEERING
AND
LESSONS FOR TODAY
By
KASHYAPA
A. S. YAPA
(Summary of "Ingenieria
prehispanica americana y sus lecciones para hoy", presented at
49th Congress of Americanists,
Quito, Ecuador, July 1997)
Prehispanic civil engineering
works of the American continent have yet to receive the attention and
the respect they deserve. Since the Conquest, not only the western intellectuals
and builders, but also the continent’s own population ignored them.
The westerners, because they aimed at firstly in looting the continent’s
immense mineral wealth and secondly at transplanting a political scheme,
dependent totally on western economic power centers, assuring a continuous
flow of wealth in their direction. The American population, the majority
mestizos, who received the politico-economic reins from the colonial administrations
glorifying the western "civilization", not only ignored their
own past beyond the Conquest but also destroyed it, at times intentionally.
Only recently, specifically during the last mid-century, has surged among
the American populations an interest in seeking an own identity based
on prehispanic cultures. Hence, the need to rediscover and reevaluate
the ancient systems of political and economic development.
However, the majority of the investigations about ancient engineering
works deal with their anthropological or archaeological aspects. Hardly
any had focused the attention on analyzing the technological know-how
possessed by the ancient cultures for the benefit of modern engineers
and political decision-makers.
The
donors' skewed "aid" schemes convert poor countries into museums
of white elephants.
The planning and design of public
infrastructure works should agree with the political and economic structure
of the host country, because they form the backbone of its economic development.
The geography and the climate of a region also bear strongly on the feasibility
and the effectiveness of a development project. However, powerful donors
usually force upon the impoverished countries of the American continent
engineering plans and designs prepared for Europe and the United States,
whose socioeconomic, political, geographic and environmental conditions
are starkly different. The imported "experts," inherently tied
to financial aid, insist on transplanting familiar schemes that, in the
end, convert the donor the net beneficiary, in terms of the flow of sales
and wages. Such "aids" have transformed these poor countries
into museums of white elephants, and as a consequence, into eternal debtors.
The teaching and the practice of civil engineering throughout the American
continent also imitate to the letter the technology evolved in the last
couple of centuries in Europe and in the US. The local engineers, indoctrinated
through imported textbooks, feel more at ease with imported "solutions"
in resolving problems than adapting their knowledge to local conditions.
This article reevaluates the current practice of American civil engineering
in order to improve it incorporating the local technology of the past.
An analysis of the basic principles of prehispanic engineering practice,
that considers ancient public works in general, sets the background. In
the complete document, we will next examine the design and construction
techniques of specific prehispanic civil engineering projects. We will
also analyze alongside some large recent civil works, mainly to point
out the incompatibilities with local conditions of their design criteria
or construction techniques.
Basic engineering concepts
Two important principles: the efficient use of the resources available
and the effectiveness of a project design, set the foundation of modern
engineering.
A deep analysis of prehispanic engineering works shows
us that those engineers also had adhered strictly to above concepts. Of
the resources available then, the tools were quite rudimentary: none of
iron, some of copper and other metals, but mostly of wood and stone. Nor
they had sophisticated means of transportation, only animals for carrying
cargo and even that only in certain regions. The manual labor, abundant
when mobilized by a strong socio-political organization, produced the
bulk of the work. Another abundant resource then, compared to now, was
time: the construction of many ancient works seems to have prolonged for
decades, if not centuries.
Engineers of the
past used manual labor & time efficiently to build structures that
remained effective over long periods.
In the past the engineers must have efficiently managed these two resources,
time and manual labor, because imitating their monumental works poses quite
a challenge even today, despite the availability of sophisticated machinery.
Unconstrained by time, they would design a project allowing a series of
construction stages, each stage furnishing a stand-alone, full-fledged public
use structure. Whenever the rulers decide on extending, enlarging or enhancing
the structure, they could build the next stage without destroying any part
of the preceding.
Huaca del Sol
of millions of bricks laid in segments
Managing the labor force presented a problem of another dimension:
agglutinating around a grand task the massive army of workers, composed
of many small groups proceeding from distinct villages. Primarily because
they contributed labor not for money, but to fulfill collective tributary
obligations. Thus, each group would respond only to the orders of its own
leader. In addition, each group probably substituted its workers rotationally,
from others originating from the same village. To solve such a complex labor
management problem, the past engineers divided the work, at least in certain
projects, into segments or tasks, each more or less independent, relatively
small and simple in carrying out. To accelerate the construction, they probably
competitively organized these tasks, now assigned to individual groups.
Obviously, they had to employ specialized groups for unifying the segments
and for final touch-ups. Such segmentation could have forced the designers
to sacrifice a project’s structural complexity. However, as Uceda and
others (1994) witnessed in the pyramid Huaca de la Luna in Peru, the designers
had creatively used certain architectural elements of one stage for different
purposes in the next, preserving the utility and the complexity of the structure.
The effectiveness of a project design depends on its capability
to solve the initial problem in the long run. In evaluating the efficacy
of a structure, we need to consider the realities of the ancient societies
as well as their aspirations. The Inca Kingdom conceived its monumental
highway system, which extends for more than 23,000 kilometers, to satisfy
the need to maintain a rapid communication system between the capital city
and the remote corners of its immense empire. The well-designed road system,
supported by numerous tambos (rest houses), could sustain an agile mail
transfer system through the chasquis (runners). They could, for example,
communicate between Quito and Cuzco (the Inca capital) in less than 5 days:
only several centuries later would the western societies match such a speed
(von Hagen 1977).
The Inca road system
Artificial canals of Momposina swamp
The vast plains around the lake Titicaca, at the frontier
between Bolivia and Peru, once covered almost entirely by camellones (artificial
ridged fields), lie abandoned today due to water logging and frost. Experimental
fields built imitating the ancient system of ridged fields demonstrated
that the technique not only prevents frost damage, but also yields harvests
greater than what the modern technology could achieve there (Kolata 1991).
In Colombia, the vast Momposina swamp today cannot sustain more than 1 person
per sq. km because of prolonged inundations. Yet, the archaeological evidence
indicates that, 2000 years ago, during the golden era of the Zenu society,
an extended system of canals and elevated fields supported a population
of about 170 persons per sq. km (Plazas & Falchetti 1986).
Certain prehispanic works, especially some agricultural development projects,
continue to function even today. (Obviously, here we speak of a selected
group of works that survived the ordeal of the Conquest and hence cannot
generalize this analysis to all the ancient works, but it does not prevent
us from examining the reasons behind their extraordinary effectiveness.)
In the Peruvian coast, for many centuries, local farmers have used irrigation
canals and ground water recollection systems for cultivation. Their effectiveness
and continuity depend on:
1) farmers understanding the technology involved,
2) the continuing need of such systems for villagers’ survival and
3) the farmers’ ability to operate and maintain the system by themselves.
Though the colonial rulers dismantled the traditional socioeconomic structure,
the agricultural communities could preserve these projects because the effort
involved lied within their technical and organizational capacity. In other
words, these projects could be sustained using locally available resources,
a concept frequently heard in relation to modern development projects as
well, but limited mostly to paper.
In modern times, when a project fails, we blame
the nature first. Paradoxically, mostly all modern development projects
profess to fight against the nature or conquer it. Even after many costly
failures, we have not yet learned that "conquering the nature"
is only an illusion, sold by the manufacturers of expensive machines and
materials. In tackling the nature, prehispanic engineers seemed to have
used a nonconfronting, nonconquering philosophy –one of conviviality.
For example, the ancient system of flood control in the lower Guayas river
basin in Ecuadorian coast, which had modified more than 50,000 hectares
of swamp land with canals and ridged fields, never contemplated blocking
off those high flowing rivers in the catchment. Instead, that system allowed
the peak floods to enter wide, artificial canals either side of the river,
and thus lowered the flood water level keeping the farmlands and residential
areas safe and dry. We cannot say that the ancient systems never suffered
damages from the fury of the nature, yet they apparently tried to understand
the nature and learn from their failures.
A delusive attempt at "conquering the nature"
Bajo Guayas, Ecuador
Conclusion
The prehispanic civil engineering works deserve recognition not only for
their historical value, but also for what they can contribute to improve
modern engineering: specifically, their emphasis on
1. long-term planning
2. efficient use of local resources
3. the philosophy of living in harmony with the nature
4. the willingness to learn from the errors and
5. the true sustainability of the projects.
In future investigations of prehispanic works, engineers should play an
active role, in directing them towards obtaining greater information on
design concepts and construction techniques.
Unfortunately, very few engineering projects, like the recovery of the techniques
of terracing (Valerza 1993) and of chinampas (Gómez-Pampa et al.
1982), use this age-old wisdom today. We can best promote an interest on
prehispanic engineering experiences among modern engineers through academic
institutions, by including such themes in academic curriculum, so that we
can change the current attitudes of disrespect towards local techniques
and knowledge. Hopefully then, the engineers would contemplate before making
crucial technical decisions, how their ancestors acted in resolving problems,
and not simply promote "imported solutions" as the only way to
progress.
Bibliography:
Gómez-Pampa, Arturo, Hector Luis Morales, Epifanio
y Julio Jiménez Avia
1982 Experiences in traditional hydraulic agriculture. En Maya subsistence,
edit: Kent V. Flannery, Academic Press. p. 327-342.
Kolata, Alan L.
1991 The Technology and organization of agricultural production in the Tiwanaku
state. Latin American Antiquity 2(2): 99-125.
Plazas, Clemencia y Ana María Falchetti
1986 La cultura del oro y el agua, un proyecto de reconstrucción.
Boletin Cultural y Bibliografico, Banco de la República, Bogotá,
vol. 23(6): 57-72.
Uceda C., Santiago, Ricardo Morales G., José Canziani A. y María
Montoya Vera
1994 Investigaciones sobre la arquitectura y relieves polícromos
en la Huaca de la Luna, Valle de Moche. En Moche: propuestas y perspectivas,
edit: Santiago Uceda C. y Elías Mujica, Universidad Nacional de la
Libertad - Trujillo, Perú, p. 251-303.
Valerza, Galo Ramón
1993 Tierras y manos indias. COMUNIDEC, Quito.
von Hagen, Victor W.
1977 La Carretera del Sol. Editorial Diana, México.
Feel free to send me email if you'd like to begin a
dialogue. Write to me
Back to the top
|
|
