Pre-Inca People Stomped Salutes To Their Thunder God On A Special Dance Floor
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
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Roughly a century before the Inca empire came to power in A.D. 1400, blasts of human-produced thunder may have rumbled off a ridge high in the Andes Mountains.
New evidence indicates that people who lived there around 700 years ago stomped rhythmically on a special dance floor that amplified their pounding into a thunderous boom as they worshipped a thunder god.
Excavations at a high-altitude site in Peru called Viejo Sangayaico have revealed how members of a regional farming and herding group, the Chocorvos, constructed this reverberating platform, says archaeologist Kevin Lane of the University of Buenos Aires. Different layers of soil, ash and guano created a floor that absorbed shocks while emitting resonant sounds when people stomped on it. This ceremonial surface worked like a large drum that groups of 20 to 25 people could have played with their feet, Lane reports in the September Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
These findings, from a ridgetop ritual area that faces a nearby mountain peak, provide a rare glimpse of the role played by sound and dance in ancient societies (SN: 11/18/10).
[...] His team acoustically tested the platform by stomping on it one at a time and in groups of two to four while measuring the noise produced. The same was done while a circle of four people stomp-danced across the platform.
The resulting sounds ranged in intensity from 60 to 80 decibels, roughly equivalent to between a loud conversation and a noisy restaurant, Lane says. Larger groups of Chocorvos dancers, possibly accompanied by singing and musical instruments, would have raised a much bigger racket.
K. Lane. Pounding the ground for the thunder god: Sounding platforms in the Prehispanic Andes (CE 1000 1532). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Vol. 71, September 2023, 101515. doi: 10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101515.
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