Provincia de Osorno

Puerto Montt. Day at sea. Cruise the Pacific. 14 degrees C.

Today we will be sailing through the last of the Fjords out to the South Pacific Ocean towards Valparaiso. Our Viking Daily brochure outlined some of the early statistics of Viking explorers. While other Viking explorers in the eighth and 11th century discovered Iceland, it fell to Leif Erickson the son of Eric the Red, with a crew of 35 in a 42-foot boat to discover L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland in the year 992. Hard to imagine!

The lecture this morning by Dr. Mark Callaghan, was on the Age of the Inca, the people, cultures and beliefs.
Some of the points made during this lecture were as follows:
-The Incas, a South American Indian people, were originally a small tribe in the southern highlands of Peru near Cusco, around the 12th century.
-In the 1400’s an Inca ruler, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui led a campaign which conquered the Chimú and in less than a century he and then his son, Topa Inca Yupanqui built one of the largest, most tightly controlled empires the world has ever known. The capital was in Cusco.
- Tawantinsuyu, (Quechua for 4 parts) was the name of the state they governed that spread North, South, East and West over parts of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina that by the 1460s, was all part of a single Inca state.
-The Inca reign covered only a brief 100-year span between 1438 and 1533
-Their skill in government was matched by their feats of engineering.
- around Cusco it is said that the Inca Empire constructed 25,000 miles of roads and switchbacks in only 100 years.
- there are 348 known sites of Inca origin with religious significance all around the area of Cusco.
-The area under the Inca influence stretched 2500 miles north to south and encompassed geographic levels from sea level to 22,800 feet.
-as the Incas took over increasing areas, the new people under their empire were not subjugated. They could remain living with their own cultures and traditions but men between the ages of 15 and 50 years old were compelled to do farm work and other duties.
- At the height of their rule only 60,000 Inca people controlled 12 million people.

It is amazing to think that their successes and accomplishments were executed without a language or even an alphabet and the largest animal they had for physical labour was the Llama.
-For communication they had a system called Quipu (also spelled khipu), or talking knots. Recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of the Andean South America. Knotted strings consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization. The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have as few as 10 or thousands of cords. The configuration of the quipus has been "compared to string mops. Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps a sturdier base to which the color-coded cords would be attached. A relatively small number have survived.
Objects that can be identified unambiguously as quipus first appear in the archaeological record in the first millennium AD. They subsequently played a key part in the administration of the Kingdom of Cusco and later Tawantinsuyu, the empire controlled by the Inca ethnic group who flourished across the Andes from c. 1100 to 1532 AD.
As the region was taken over under the invading Spanish Empire, the quipu faded from use, to be replaced by European writing and numeral systems. However, in several villages, quipu continued to be important items for the local community, albeit for ritual rather than practical use. It is unclear as to where and how many intact quipus still exist, as many have been stored away in mausoleums.

We had a relaxing lunch by the pool and made some progress on our blog.
At 4:30 we attended our last Planetarium presentation and the subject was exploring deep space using the most modern telescopes on earth. The most current one is called the ALMA on a site, some 50 km east of San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile, it is in one of the driest places on Earth. There is now a future one called the James Watt being built that will enable even more distant explorations almost to the end of the universe. This will be a similar format to Hubble and will be launched by NASA when it is ready.

After dinner we went to the Star Lounge for a performance by the Viking Vocalists, a musical journey through the decades of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.Weiterlesen