p It well may be that only underwater exploration, whether at the bottom of Lake Titicaca or in the Pacific deeps, will solve the riddle of the ancient civilisations of South America. When conquered by the Spaniards in the 16th century, the Incas ruled a territory of some 2,000,000 square kilometres, stretching for more than 4,000 kilometres along the Pacific coast.

p The unique civilisation of the Incas, which the conquistadors barbarously destroyed, was based on still older cultures. Some scholars are inclined to think that the roots of the latter go back^to the civilisation of Ancient Egypt which, they hold, lies at the foundation of all the great cultures of antiquity. Some believe that the roots go back still farther, to Mesopotamia. And some think 70 the civilisations of South America owe 1heir origin to the most ancient culture of the New World, remains of which are hidden in the "green hell" of the Amazonian jungle.

p Professor Posnansky concluded that not only the Sun Gate at Tiahuanaco hut (he entire complex of monumental structures represents "a gigantic stone calendar reflecting astronomical phenomena" that took place about 20,000 years ago. Indian legends say that the first human settlement on earth arose at, Tiahuanaco and that human culture was born there. In his book Tiahuanaco, the Cradle of American Man, Professor Posnansky maintains that the archeological findings and his "deciphering of the complex" prove that the Indian legends are true.

p The earliest Old World sites date back no more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. If Posnansky is to be believed, they are half as old as Tiahuanaco. Bellamy increased the age of the Tiahuanaco complex to 250,000 years, while the French writer Denis Saurat estimated it to be as much as 300,000 years. Finally, Alexander Kazantsev, Soviet science-fiction author, announced that the famous Sun Gate calendar was not made here on earth at all but had been left as a memento by visitors from Venus.

p As the reader can see, it is not such a long way from shaky hypotheses to the realm of pure fantasy. But let us leave the realm of fantasy to the science-fiction writers.

p Americanists now believe that the Sun Gate and other Tiahuanaco monuments were built between the 6th and 10th centuries A.D., and by the local inhabitants, the Indians, instead of by Egyptians, Mesopotamians or visiting Venusians,

p Indeed, why look for outsiders who might have built Tiahuanaco? Might it not have been the other way round, that the builders of that great architectural complex, people possessing a high culture, influenced other cultures? Archeologists have found undisputed evidence that the Tiahuanaco civilisation strongly influenced the later cultures of ancient Peru and Bolivia. At the edges of the area over which the Tiahuanaco culture spread, in Colombia, individual centres of this civilisation lasted right up until the Spanish invasion. Could it have spread even farther, not only through South America but also westwards, into the ocean, until it reached the islands of Polynesia?

p This question was posed by the famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. There is no need to retell his fascinating book The Kon-Tiki Expedition, for all his arguments in support of that hypothesis are set forth in it with sufficient clarity. The next step was taken during excavations on the Galapagos Islands.

p These islands in the eastern part of the Pacific occupy a splendid strategic position. But that is not why they interest scientists. Oceanographers closely study the interaction of two powerful currents, the warm South Equatorial Current and the cold Peru Current, which meet at the Galapagos. The flora and fauna provide naturalists with rich material for comparisons and generalisations. It is not surprising that the remarkable world of the Galapagos, where flora and fauna of the tropics and the arctic regions live side by side, helped Darwin to arrive at his theory of evolution. (Darwin stopped at the islands during his voyage on the Beagle.)

p Tropical lianas and arctic mosses, 72 bright-coloured jungle birds and antarctic seagulls, parrots and penguins, cold-loving seals and heatloving giant tortoises are some of the striking contrasts found on the Galapagos Islands. But perhaps the best known of the Galapagos fauna are the iguanas, large lizards that look like mythological dragons.

p It was long thought that the Galapagos Islands were a unique preserve unknown to man until the arrival of Europeans. Only recently, however, it was discovered that not only oceanographers and naturalists but archeologists as well can find much of interest there.

p Botanists were the first to point this out. Among the flora of the archipelago they found a number of species that were cultivated by the coastal Indians of Northern Peru. From this they concluded that people had once lived on the islands.

p The hypothesis was confirmed during archeological excavations organised and headed by Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-Tiki fame. It seems that men visited the Galapagos Islands many centuries before the islands were discovered by Europeans.

p The Heyerdahl expedition found about 2,000 objects on the islands, including stoneware, potsherds, vases and vessels covered with decorative patterns. The objects were made in different styles of workmanship and belong to various periods and to the various cultures that existed along the Peruvian coast before the Spanish conquest. The Galapagos Islands must have been well known to the Indians who sailed the ocean on their balsa rafts.

p Why did they abandon the islands? The layers of lava covering the remains of some of the ancient sites suggest the reason. Volcanic 73 eruptions some centuries ago evidently forced the Indians to leave the islands and return home. Or perhaps lava flows wiped out the inhabitants. The Galapagos flora and fauna suggest that the archipelago was once connected with the mainland. True, the fact that relict flora and fauna are preserved there indicates that the land bridge must have sunk very long ago. It may be, though, that some bridges, in the shape of islands and islets, remained on the surface for a long time, and it was by way of these that Indian seafarers made their way to the Galapagos archipelago.

p Europeans were unable, for a very long time, to find the Galapagos Islands and for that reason called them the Enchanted Isles. Yet they had compasses and well-equipped ships. How, then, could Indians with their vastly inferior navigational techniques have made regular voyages over the course of a long period, as is shown by the pottery found on the islands? It is quite possible that dry tracts, now at the bottom of the Pacific, served them as reference landmarks and even stopping places.

p A long underwater ridge named after Cocos Island, the only patch of land remaining above the water, stretches from the shores of South America to the Galapagos archipelago. Cocos Island is famous for treasure which, say old maps and documents, is hidden in its caves or buried along its shores. But underwater research may bring treasure of another kind—- archeological treasure—to light on this "treasure island”. It may be that Cocos Island and the Galapagos group served, along with other islands and islets in this part of the Pacific, as way stations for Indian navigators.

p Two chapters of Thor lleyerdahl’s recent book, Das Abenteuer einer Theorie (The Adventures of a Theory), convincingly support thai idea. Traces of visits by Indians have been found on the Galapagos. Another piece of evidence are the plantations of coconut palms that must have been laid out on Cocos Island long before Europeans first came there. In Heyerdahl’s opinion, Gocos Island, which lies on the route from Ecuador to Guatemala, was an ideal intermediate harbour in the open sea between the two great cultural areas of pre-Columbian America, the Andean and the Central American. Today scholars are finding more and more evidence of the contacts that existed between those two cultural areas many centuries ago. It is quite possible that contacts were maintained not via land— through the almost impenetrable forests of Colombia and Panama—but via the sea. Other islets, which are now submerged, as well as Cocos Island, may have helped to make the water route easier.

p The Andes is the name applied to the great mountain system which extends along the full length of the Pacific coast of South America. The eminent Soviet geologist V. Belousov believes that this range is only the eastern part of a vast zone, the western part being under water. Of the submarine mountains and the Albatross Plateau that were once above water, says Belousov, only the Galapagos Islands and tiny Cocos Island, summit of the Cocos Ridge, remain. Investigation has shown that the ridge sank comparatively recently.

p Indian mariners could have used other islets that were part of the Cocos Ridge as “landmarks” when they sailed their rafts over the Pacific. 75 They could have sailed in two directions: northward from the coast of Peru and Ecuador to the coast of Central America, where the Mayan and Zapotecan cultures existed, or westward, to the islands of Oceania inhabited by Polynesians.

p Only underwater archeology can confirm this. The volcanic eruptions and cataclysmic earthquakes that took place in this area both on land and on the ocean floor show that the earth’s crust here is still unquiet.

p Describing excavations on Easter Island and on Rapa and other islands in the eastern Pacific, Ileyerdahl expounds in his book Aku-Aku the theory that the first inhabitants of eastern Polynesia were seafarers from ancient Peru. Islands now sunken may have helped them to get across the ocean. An underwater ridge runs south-west from the coast of Peru from 15° to 28°S. Here a large group of guyots, flattopped seamounts, was discovered not long ago, some of them at a depth of only 200 to 500 metros, which means they were mountains above water, or perhaps islands, in the recent past.

Not far from where this underwater ridge ends another begins. It runs almost parallel to 25°S for a good 2,000 kilometres. Only the sullen cliffs of Sala-y-G6mez, an island after which the ridge is named, appear above the water. Other peaks may have been visible not so very long ago. To sum up, a long chain of underwater ridges stretches from the coast of Peru straight to Easter Island, which is not far from Salay-G6mez Island. Islands arid islets now under water may have been used by the Indians as stepping-stones and landmarks when they sailed the Peru-Easter Island route. Underwater 76 archeology may give us the answer to this question, a question that interests both historians and oceanographers.