[meteorite-list] re: Campo de Cielo impact - 17 February, 2325 BCE?

From: Marco Langbroek <marco.langbroek_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:50:29 2004
Message-ID: <004d01c1ed58$ae921a00$16d286c2_at_latitude>

E.P. Grondine wrote:

> It must be remembered that the massive
> Rio Cuarto impact (350 megatons, 25 October, 2360 BCE)
> occured "near" to Campo de Cielo. Before the Rio
> Cuarto impact event, South America was populated by
> culturally advanced peoples, who were killed by the
> impact. These people would have been in trade contact
> with both the Olmec and Maya.
>
> There is little doubt that the Maya were severely
> affected by the Rio Cuarto impact.
> and hence their interest less than 35 years later
> (2325 BCE) in the area they called "Matawil".

Hi Ed,

My apologies, I actually took your initial mail serious and not as the joke
as it was intended to be. Maybe I did because regularly this kind of posts
pop up which >are< meant to be serious by the person posting it!

At any rate I must have been sleeping when I hit the reply button for my
earlier response. While noting the geographic discrepancy, the 2500 year
chronological discrepancy (for the Maya: for the Olmecs its a mere 1000
years) went completely unnoticed by me. Shame, now I won't dare to face my
colleagues at the Meso-American department one floor up in the building for
at least 5 days to come... Well, as an excuse, I am of course a Palaeolithic
archaeologist, so Mayans and other meso-American civilizations are not my
'core business'...

But would this not make great stuff for a scenario for a sci-fied-up Indiana
Jones Movie? In which our hero enters a Maya pyramid in search for a golden
statuette, which is the entrance to a time tunnel transferring him from 1939
AD to 300 AD, the start of Maya civilization. That time-tunnel is kept
operational by the Maya high priests (not so peculiar, for those guys were
obsessed with time keeping and intricate calendar systems), with the help of
some alien technology perhaps. They a.o. use it to make a trading contact
over a gap of 2500 years with those Pampa indians in Argentinia, at 2300 BC,
when the Campo de Cielo impact is imminent...
Our only problem for the scenario would be, how the impact at 2325 BC all
affected this, or most notably the Maya. For they simply could re-establish
contact by having their time-tunnel connect to a moment just prior to the
event, isn't it? Hmmmm, let's see; maybe they couldn't adjust the length of
their time tunnels? No, that won't work, because with a fixed length they
could not transfer our Indy from 1939 AD to 300 AD too....rats, and we
really can't leave Indy out.....! But wait: eerrrrr; maybe they could get
connection only to moments in history for which a very peculiar situation
existed, eerrrr, let's say: Venus had to be in conjunction with the sun
while Jupiter was in the Pleiades or something like that?! Would fit nice
with the Maya calendrical and celestial mechanics obsession... Yes, that's a
solution alright....now let's see, where did I have Steven Spielberg's
phonenumber......?

Cheers,

- Marco

---
Marco Langbroek                    private: marco.langbroek_at_wanadoo.nl
Leiden University                     work: m.langbroek_at_arch.leidenuniv.nl
Faculty of Archaeology
P.O. Box 9515
http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek/
NL-2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
"What seest thou else
  In the dark backward and abysm of time?"
William Shakespeare: The Tempest act I scene 2
---

Received on Fri 26 Apr 2002 03:28:20 PM PDT