We continue our study of the fourth section of Chapter VI of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Earth in Upheaval.
A Bizarre Theory
Velikovsky next considers a theory that even he finds bizarre and impossible to accept:
Not so long ago an explanation of the mystery of Lake Titicaca and of the fortress Tiahuanacu on its shore was put forward in the light of Hörbiger’s theory:A moon circled very close to the earth, pulling the waters of the oceans toward the equator; by its gravitational pull, the moon held, day and night, the water of the ocean at the altitude of Tiahuanacu: “The level of the ocean must have been at least 13,000 feet higher.” Then the moon crashed into the earth, and the oceans receded to the poles, leaving the island with its megalithic city as a mountain above the sea bottom, now the continent of the tropical and subtropical Americas. All this happened millions of years before our moon was caught by the earth, and thus the ruins of the megalithic city Tiahuanacu are millions of years old, that is, the city must have been built long “before the Flood.” (Velikovsky 77-78)
Hans Schindler Bellamy was an English professor who taught English in Vienna before the Second World War. He is best remembered for popularizing the Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, of the Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger. The latter believed that our current Moon was the Earth’s sixth icy moon and, like its five predecessors, it would one day fall into the Earth. Hörbiger’s credibility is not helped by his admission that his theories came to him in a vision in 1894.
Velikovsky rejects Bellamy’s theory because even he cannot accept such an age for Tiwanaku:
The geological record indicates a late elevation of the Andes, and the time of its origin is brought ever closer to our time. Archaeological and radiocarbon analyses indicate that the age of the Andean culture and of the city is not much older than four thousand years. (Velikovsky 78)
Velikovsky’s source for this date is F C Hibben, a geologist who was first cited on the second page of Earth in Upheaval in connection with the Alaskan Mud. Frank Cumming Hibben was a professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and the first director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. His career was marred by allegations of scientific fraud during the excavation of Sandia Cave, New Mexico, in the 1930s and ’40s. His expedition to Alaska also generated controversy.
In Hibben’s Treasure in the Dust, we read:
Most of the great cultures of the New World flowered around the year 1000 a.d. Even the earliest of them in the highlands of the Andes and possibly also in the Mayan area did not begin much before 2000 b.c. Even with a recent series of C14 dates, especially in the Andean area, the investigators of these later levels could not push the antiquity of the high civilizations of the New World back as early as the Pleistocene. There was a seeming gap of several thousands of years between early Ice Age times and the beginning of the high civilizations in the Pueblo area or many of the other New World centers of development. (Hibben 56-57)
Ollantaytambo and Ollantayparubo
Velikovsky next turns his attention to two other archaeological sites in the Andes, Ollantaytambo and Ollantayparubo. But are these two different places or two different names for the same place?
The Incan settlement of Ollantaytambo is located in the valley of the Urubamba River, in southern Peru, at an altitude of 2800 m. It lies about 500 km northwest of Tiwanaku and 50 km northwest of Cuzco:
The ancient stronghold of Ollantaytambo in Peru is built on top of an elevation; it is constructed of blocks of stone twelve to eighteen feet high. “These Cyclopean stones were hewn from the quarry seven miles away ... How the stones were carried down to the river in the valley, shipped on rafts, and carried up to the site of the fortress remains a mystery archaeologists cannot solve.” (Velikovsky 78)
The quotation is taken from an article by Don Ternel that appeared in the magazine Travel in April 1945. This popular journal was founded in 1901 but went bankrupt in 1946. It was revived two years later and continued to publish articles on travel under various names until 2003. I have no idea who Don Ternel was.
Velikovsky describes Ollantayparubo as Another fortress or monastery ... in the Urubamba Valley. But his description, taken from Bellamy’s Built before the Flood, seems to refer to Ollantaytambo, and I have failed to identify any such place as Ollantayparubo. Is this another name for Ollantaytambo? Is it a misspelling of Ollantaytambo? I suppose it is possible that tambo could be misread as parubo. If you google Ollantayparubo, all the search results seem to be related to this passage in Earth in Upheaval. If the spelling is a typo, then who was responsible: Velikovsky or Bellamy? I haven’t been able to lay my hands on a copy of Built before the Flood, so I can’t tell.
Charles Darwin
In 1834 and 1835, during his circumnavigation of the globe on board the HMS Beagle, the young Charles Darwin visited the west coast of South America. He had leisure to study the geology and setting of the South American Cordillera—ie the Andes Mountains—but he never visited the Altiplano.
Among the works that came out of these experiences were Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and Parts of South America, first published in 1844, and Geological Observations on South America, which appeared two years later. Both volumes were republished together in 1876 as Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and Parts of South America Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. ‛Beagle’, which is the work from which Velikovsky next quotes:
He found that the former surf line was at an altitude of 1300 feet [400 m]. He was impressed even more by the fact that the sea shells found at this altitude were still undecayed, to him a clear indication that the land had risen 1300 feet from the Pacific Ocean in a very recent period, “within the period during which upraised shells remained undecayed on the surface.” And since only a few intermediary surf lines can be detected, the elevation could not have proceeded little by little. (Velikovsky 79)
When he first made these observations, Darwin had not yet been fully converted to Charles Lyell’s Uniformitarianism. Nevertheless, Velikovsky is possibly guilty of putting words in his mouth. In the chapter cited, he does not really put the catastrophist slant on his words that Velikovsky detects:
The nature and grouping of the shells embedded in the old Tertiary formations of Patagonia and Chile, show us, that the continent at that period must have stood only a few fathoms below its present level, and that afterwards it subsided over a wide area, 700 or 800 feet [200-250 m]. The manner in which it has since been rebrought up to its actual level, was described in detail in the Eighth and Ninth Chapters. It was there shown, that recent shells are found on the shores of the Atlantic, from Tierra del Fuego northward for a space of at least 1180 nautical miles [2200 km], and at the height of about 100 feet [30 m] in La Plata, and of 400 feet [125 m] in Patagonia. The elevatory movements on this side of the continent have been slow; and the coast of Patagonia, up to the height in one part of 950 feet [300 m] and in another of 1200 feet [375 m], is modelled into eight great, step-like, gravel-capped plains, extending for hundreds of miles with the same heights; this fact shows that the periods of denudation (which, judging from the amount of matter removed, must have been long continued) and of elevation were synchronous over surprisingly great lengths of coasts. On the shores of the Pacific, upraised shells of recent species, generally, though not always, in the same proportional numbers as in the adjoining sea, have actually been found over a north and south space of 2075 miles [3300 km], and there is reason to believe that they occur over a space of 2480 miles [4000 km]. The elevation on this western side of the continent has not been equable; at Valparaiso, within the period during which upraised shells have remained undecayed on the surface, it has been 1300 feet [400 m], whilst at Coquimbo, 200 miles northward, it has been within this same period only 252 feet [77 m]. At Lima, the land has been uplifted at least eighty-feet [27 m] since Indian man inhabited that district; but the level within historical times apparently has subsided. At Coquimbo, in a height of 364 feet [110 m], the elevation has been interrupted by five periods of comparative rest. At several places the land has been lately, or still is, rising both insensibly and by sudden starts of a few feet during earthquake-shocks; this shows that these two kinds of upward movement are intimately connected together. For a space of 775 miles [1250 km], upraised recent shells are found on the two opposite sides of the continent; and in the southern half of this space, it may be safely inferred from the slope of the land up to the Cordillera, and from the shells found in the central part of Tierra del Fuego, and high up the river Santa Cruz, that the entire breadth of the continent has been uplifted. From the general occurrence on both coasts of successive lines of escarpments, of sand dunes and marks of erosion, we must conclude that the elevatory movement has been normally interrupted by periods, when the land either was stationary, or when it rose at so slow a rate as not to resist the average denuding power of the waves, or when it subsided. In the case of the present high sea-cliffs of Patagonia and in other analogous instances, we have seen that the difficulty in understanding how strata can be removed at those depths under the sea, at which the currents and oscillations of the water are depositing a smooth surface of mud, sand, and sifted pebbles, leads to the suspicion that the formation or denudation of such cliffs has been accompanied by a sinking movement. (Darwin 598-600)
Velikovsky leaves the second quotation from this work to speak for itself:
I have endeavoured elsewhere to show, that the excessively disturbed condition of the strata in the Cordillera, so far from indicating single periods of extreme violence, presents insuperable difficulties, except on the admission that the masses of once liquefied rocks of the axes were repeatedly injected with intervals sufficiently long for their successive cooling and consolidation. (Darwin 602-603 : Velikovsky 79)
But the remainder of this paragraph does not lend much support to Velikovsky’s catastrophist thesis:
Finally, if we look to the analogies drawn from the changes now in progress in the earth’s crust, whether to the manner in which volcanic matter is erupted, or to the manner in which the land is historically known to have risen and sunk : or again, if we look to the vast amount of denudation which every part of the Cordillera has obviously suffered, the changes through which it has been brought into its present condition, will appear neither to have been too slowly effected, nor to have been too complicated. (Darwin 603)
A Vanished Civilization
Velikovsky is on firmer ground when he next draws attention to another of the undoubted anomalies of the Altiplano: the preponderance of abandoned towns and terraces:
The foothills of the Andes hide numerous deserted towns and abandoned terraces, monuments to a vanished civilization. The terraces that go up the slopes of the Andes, and reach the eternal snow line and continue under the snow to some unidentified altitude prove that it was not a conqueror nor a plague that put the seal of death on gardens and towns. (Velikovsky 79-80)
Velikovsky’s source for this is the paper Climatic Pulsations by Ellsworth Huntington, Professor of Geography at Yale University between 1907 and 1913. This paper was Huntington’s contribution to a collection of papers published in 1935 as a birthday tribute to the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin, who turned 70 on 19 February of that year:
- Hyllningsskrift tillägnad Sven Hedin på hans 70-årsdag den 19 febr. 1935 [Tributary Papers to Sven Hedin on his 70th birthday on 19 February 1935]
Velikovsky or his typesetter misspells the Swedish word Hyllningsskrift as Hylluingsskrift, a mistake that does not seem to have been corrected in any subsequent editions of Earth in Upheaval. The work was published as a supplement to Volume 17 of Geografiska Annaler, a scientific journal published in Stockholm by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
Ellsworth Huntington was a climatic determinist: he believed that climatic and environmental conditions determined the course taken by a society or civilization.
Recent exploration has added greatly to the size and importance of the depopulated areas which are known to exist in dry regions. In Peru, for example, aerial surveys in the dry belt west of the Andes have shown an unexpected number of old ruins, and an almost incredible number of terraces for cultivation. In 1928 the writer visited the valleys of the Rimac and Chili Rivers. In their drier portions both show the same phenomena of old irrigation ditches on slopes which are now waterless. The region around Arequipa illustrates the matter especially well. This pleasant little city with nearly 50 000 inhabitants, lies at an elevation of about 2 300 meters in the valley of the Rio Chili. The average rainfall amounts to only 106 millimeters per year, and 83 per cent of this comes in January, February, and March. During 17 of the 35 years for which data are available the rainfall has been less than 75 millimeters. Obviously agriculture is impossible without irrigation. The Rio Chili, however, comes from the lofty volcanoes of El Misti, Pichu Pichu, and Chachani, and provides water for abundant gardens. Nevertheless, even in the immediate vicinity of the city there is much idle land which might be cultivated if there were more water. The surrounding slopes at first sight appear utterly barren and uninteresting. Yet for mile after mile and to an altitude of hundreds of meters above the river practically every slope is covered with terraces, canals, and ancient villages. These neglected and undescribed evidences of a former dense population extend for kilometers on all sides and embrace hundreds and probably thousands of hectares. (Huntington 578)
Velikovsky, however, does not quote the following paragraph, which contradicts his thesis:
In addition to changes of climate many other possible causes of the abandonment of these fields have been suggested. These include recent and amazingly rapid uplift of the Andes, but this is impossible because ruins of similar age lie close to sea level. (Huntington 578)
Huntington believed that these sites were abandoned relatively recently due to climate change acting over scales of centuries and millennia:
In spite of the modern emphasis on climatic cycles, the main topic of controversy concerning historic climates is still whether regions apparently now too dry for agriculture were once moist enough to support a considerable population. Periods of aridity, such as probably occurred in the thirteenth and second centuries before Christ and in the seventh and thirteenth after Christ are of course equally worthy of study. Nevertheless, in the present article we shall confine ourselves to the question of whether there is evidence of climatic cycles lasting hundreds or thousands of years during historic times, and whether the moister phases of these cycles, if such there are, have left clear traces. (Huntington 571)
If Huntington’s claim that settlements of comparable age to those abandoned on the Altiplano can still be found at sea level is true, then it is hard to see how this does not refute once and for all the claim that the Andes rose to their current height within the age of man.
Darwin Again
Velikovsky ends this section with a quotation from Darwin’s Journal of Researches, which describes the scene Darwin beheld when he ascended the Andes in the vicinity of Uspallata, about 150 km northeast of Santiago, and looked down on the Argentinian Cuyo from a little forest of petrified trees (at Agua de la Zorra):
It required little geological practice to interpret the marvellous story which this scene at once unfolded; though I confess I was at first so much astonished that I could scarcely believe the plainest evidence. I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean now driven back 700 miles [1100 km] came to the foot of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths, the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava one such mass attaining the thickness of a thousand feet [300 m]; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had been spread out. The ocean which received such thick masses must have been profoundly deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves, and now I beheld the bed of that ocean, forming a chain of mountains more than seven thousand feet in height [2100 m] ... Vast, and scarcely comprehensible as such changes must ever appear, yet they have all occurred within a period, recent when compared with the history of the Cordillera; and the Cordillera itself is absolutely modern as compared with many of the fossiliferous strata of Europe and America. (Velikovsky 80 : Darwin 30 March 1835)
The omitted passage, indicated above by the ellipsis, reads:
Nor had those antagonist forces been dormant, which are always at work wearing down the surface of the land: the great piles of strata had been intersected by many wide valleys, and the trees, now changed into silex, were exposed projecting from the volcanic soil, now changed into rock, whence formerly, in a green and budding state, they had raised their lofty heads. Now, all is utterly irreclaimable and desert; even the lichen cannot adhere to the stony caste of former trees. (Darwin 30 March 1835)
This Uniformitarian description of the relentless and ongoing work of nature does not serve Velikovsky’s argument, so it must go.
Velikovsky concludes this section with the briefest of perorations:
But how extremely young the Cordillera of the Andes is, only the research of recent years has brought out. (Velikovsky 80)
Conclusions
In my opinion, Velikovsky does not appear in his best light in this section. The archaeological and geological anomalies of the Altiplano remain a favourite stamping ground of catastrophists to this day, but Velikovsky’s careful pruning and editing of his sources smacks of cherry picking. This policy is unlikely to win any converts to the cause.
Furthermore, his thesis—that the Andes rose from sea level to their present lofty altitude within the memory of man, carrying with them numerous ancient cities—is not as cogently argued as it might have been. For example, he does not address Huntington’s observation that settlements as old as those abandoned on the Altiplano can still be found at sea level.
Aside from the usual Uniformitarian objections, one of the strongest arguments against the catastrophist hypothesis is the simple fact that, ruined as it is, much of Tiwanaku still stands. Would not the catastrophic upthrust of one of the tallest mountain ranges on the planet shake the city to such an extent that not a single stone would be left standing? Even Posnansky conceded that human hands had wrought greater destruction upon the ruins of Tiwanaku than Nature ever did:
Cieza de León, who personally visited the celebrated ruins of Tiahuanacu in the year 1540, saw still standing great ramparts and walls which have now disappeared from the surface of the ground and the traces of which the archaeologist can establish only by drawing up topographical maps. Since then, centuries have passed over these venerable spots and in the course of this time, clumsy human hands have accomplished a much more destructive work than was effected in thousands of years, either by the ceaseless action of natural phenomena or the tireless and devastating labor of time itself ...
But even more damaging for the ruins of Tiahuanacu than the devastating action of time, of natural phenomena, the work of the builders of cities and the zeal of fanatic guardians of the Christian religion, have been the excavations of Georges Courty (1904). Of all that which this inept and unscrupulous searcher may have disinterred in his excavations, there remains today not a stone in its place. (Posnansky 1:59-60)
Could the city have survived, perhaps, a more gradual but none the less catastrophic uplift—one, for example, that was completed in decades or centuries rather than in days, weeks, months or years? Or perhaps these cities were built by the survivors of a megatsunami, who retreated to these altitudes out of fear of a similar catastrophe?
But what, then, of all those abandoned agricultural terraces and irrigation canals? Their presence proves, does it not, that when this region was densely populated, the climate was suitable for large-scale agriculture? And their state of preservation argues against any major alteration in their altitude. They look, in fact, as though they were abandoned very recently. To my mind, catastrophic climate change—a Klimasturz—is a better explanation of these facts than catastrophic orogeny.
Nevertheless, Tiwanaku remains an anomaly, as do the abandoned towns and terraces of the Altiplano. There is still much to learn of this vanished civilization.
And that’s a good place to stop.
References
- Alexander Agassiz, Hydrographic Sketch of Lake Titicaca, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Volume 11, Pages 283-292, AAA&S, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1876)
- John Barrett (Director General), Bulletin of the Pan American Union, Volume 32, Government Print Office, Washington, DC (1911)
- Hans Schindler Bellamy, Built before the Flood: The Problem of the Tiahuanaco Ruins, Faber and Faber, London (1947)
- Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches, New Edition, John Murray, London (1852)
- Charles Darwin, Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and Parts of South America Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. ‛Beagle’, Second Edition, Smith, Elder, & Co, London (1876)
- Vincent H Gaddis, American Indian Myths and Mysteries, A Signet Book, New American Library, New York (1978)
- H Cary Gilson, The Percy Sladen Expedition to Lake Titicaca, 1937, The Geographical Journal, Volume 91, Number 6, Pages 533-538, The Royal Geographical Society, London (1938)
- Frank C Hibben, Treasure in the Dust: Exploring Ancient North America, J B Lippincott, Philadelphia (1951)
- Ellsworth Huntington, Climatic Pulsations, Geografiska Annaler, Volume 17, Supplement, Pages 571-608, Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, Stockholm (1935)
- Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, First Edition, Volume 2, Volume 3, John Murray, London (1830-33)
- Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th Edition, Volume 1, Volume 2, John Murray, London (1875)
- Clements Markham, The Land of the Incas and Discussion, The Geographical Journal, Volume 36, Number 4, The Royal Geographical Society, London (1910)
- Clements Markham, The Incas of Peru, Smith, Elder, and Co, London (1910)
- Harold Philip Moon, The Geology and Physiography of the Altiplano of Peru and Bolivia, Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, 3rd Series, Volume 1, Issue 1, Pages 27-43, London (1939)
- Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanacu, the Cradle of the American Man, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, J J Augustin, New York (1945, 1957)
- Immanuel Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, New York (1955, 1977)
Image Credits
- Hans Schindler Bellamy: Anonymous Photograph, Fair Use
- Frank C Hibben: © AfricaHunting.com, Fair Use
- The Wall of the Six Monoliths at Ollantaytambo: © Wolfgang Beyer (photographer), Creative Commons License
- Charles Darwin in the Beagle’s Tender (1834): Conrad Martens (artist), Private Collection, Public Domain
- Darwin’s Travels in South America: © Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc, Fair Use
- Abandoned Agricultural Terraces in the Peruvian Andes: © TerraMetrics, GeoEye, DigitalGlobe, Fair Use
- Disused Contour-Based Irrigation Canals in the Peruvian Andes: © GeoEye, Fair Use
- Ellsworth Huntington: Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Public Domain
- Darwin’s Petrified Forest (Agua de la Zorra, Uspallata Pass): © Mariana Brea, Analia E Artabe, Luis Spalletti (photographers), Fair Use
