Word: incas
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...likenesses: a thin trickle of Polynesian canoemen might have brought such cultural bits from the South Seas to the Americas. But Heyerdahl decided that the trickle must have moved in the opposite direction. Ancient Peru, even during the Tiahuanaco period (about 1,000 A.D., before the start of the Inca Empire), was far more civilized than Polynesia. The Peruvians built large rafts of balsa wood which were probably capable of voyaging as far as the South Seas. The prevailing winds and the ocean currents (both moving from east to west-see map) would help them make the one-way trip...
Knife & Corn. The Maya, he says, were remote cousins of the Inca, the Iroquois and the Eskimo. Squat, copper-colored, often cross-eyed (admiring crossed eyes, they hung beads of resin before the eyes of their infants to induce a squint), they were wise, brilliant, cruel...
Archaeologist Morley thinks that the Maya, rather than the Inca, were the first of the New World people to cultivate corn. Out of this skill and the sedentary rooted life it led to, they evolved their extraordinary culture. Just when the Maya flowering began he can merely guess at, but by the dawn of the Christian era there was probably already a considerable Maya civilization in what is now the Guatemala Department...
...Peru. On the puna, the more-than-two-mile-high sierra, the saffron moss took a little spring rain and greened. The llama, alpaca and wild vicuña prospered. Beyond the Divide, where the tributaries of the Urubamba, ancient river of the Incas, flow down their slotted valleys toward the Amazon, the oxen pulled the wooden plows across the tiny fields. It was not unusual to see as many as ten teams interminably plowing a valley acre terraced with the stones of the Inca...
...fall back frequently on McGovern reminiscences. These include boyhood in Brooklyn, a spell in the English theater, a junket to Tibet's Forbidden City of Lhasa, and his days as a Buddhist monk in Japan. He can also spin yarns about his explorations of Peru's Inca ruins and Formosa's head-hunting country. McGovern is a sound scholar withal, master of twelve languages, author of a Manual of Buddhist Philosophy, and From Luther to Hitler. He was one of the boys in the back room of Army & Navy Intelligence...