Man-made ‘volcano’ in Peru still confusing scientists

Posted On: Nov 27th, 2017 at 11:56

Peru
El Volcán lies in the Nepeña Valley in north-western Peru, and like most other constructions in the desert it’s made of mud (brick). It wasn’t identified as man-made until the 20th Century because it looks like the tip of a volcano. Of course, lying at ground level it couldn’t be a volcano, but certainly it looks no different to other natural mounds in its current state. However, originally it was clearly like most other pyramids and El Niño rains have eroded it to make it look like this. Looking at the interior the mud bricks are clear to see. The article neglects to mention this.
Excavations have produced a stairwell that had collapsed, and at the bottom a hearth which had carbon from fires. Dating of those fires puts the last use at between 1492 and 1602. Ironically this date is also slap bang in the middle of the Spanish invasion and conquest of the Incas.
The article states the fires lit coincide with four total solar eclipses that occurred (1521, 1538, 1539 and 1543), but since the Spanish conquest occurred between 1532 and 1572 I do not understand why the conclusion of these fires is based on solar eclipses.
The middle year of the fires using the carbon dates (using a classic bell graph, assuming the bell graph to be perfectly dated) would have been in 1547, long after the solar eclipses but during the Spanish conquest. Therefore the assumption that this mound was used in solar eclipse rituals would be false. It’s equally, or more, likely that the fires were used and then ceased when the Spanish put a stop to local “ritual”, or perhaps the people who were using it died in some way and therefore they were no longer making fires in the mound.
I’m proposing these alternatives because quite frankly I’m tired of the regurgitated story of ritual based around loose data. Everything, it seems, is ritual in the ancient world, perpetrating the myth of our ‘primitive’ ancestors who supposedly attributed any and every event to gods.
The notion that these fires were lit based around solar eclipses is just another guess. They may have had another purpose entirely. IF they were ritualistic, maybe they were going on for hundreds of years; maybe they were lit in the hope the Spanish would leave the country; maybe the people here were killed by then Spanish so the fires were no longer lit and they had nothing to do with eclipses. Or maybe they were cooking in there in the hope the smell and the fire itself would not be detected in the local area. So many possibilities, and too many to make guesses as to what was occurring here. At least the headline states El Volcan has experts “stumped”.

 https://www.livescience.com/59544-mysterious-volcano-shaped-pyramid-in-peru.html