Pre-Incan Dancefloor That Sounded Like Thunder Was Used For Worshiping Lightning God

[Judi Lynn]

1. Pre-Incan Dancefloor That Sounded Like Thunder Was Used For Worshiping Lightning God

Like Riverdance but with worse weather.

BEN TAUB
Freelance Writer



An excavated section of a platform (pictured) at a pre-Inca site in Peru provided clues to how this surface may have amplified the sounds of stomping dancers, probably as they ritually honored their thunder god.

PIACI/ORP PROJECT

By Bruce Bower

AUGUST 22, 2023 AT 7:00 AM
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).

While working at Viejo Sangayaico in 2014, Lane’s team first noticed that one of two open-air platforms located in a ritual area sounded hollow when people walked on it.

A later excavation of part of the platform uncovered six sediment deposits consisting of various mixes of silty clay, sand, ash and other materials. Ashy layers within a section of guano from animals such as llamas and alpacas included small cavities that helped to generate drumlike sounds from the platform’s surface, Lane says.

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.

More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/inca-stomped-salutes-thunder-god-dance-floor