Many artifacts found in Mexico were made using the most sophisticated technologies, which could only be owned by highly developed civilizations.
I was able to be convinced of this when I visited a Latin American country as part of an expedition organized under the auspices of the III Millennium Science Development Fund. In the National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, among hand-made and rather unpretentious handicrafts, we were struck by a small - ten centimeters in diameter - disc made of obsidian, very similar to a modern CD (which is more often called a CD or simply CD), only a little thicker.
At first glance, nothing out of the ordinary. And the edge of the disc is not very even in places, and the circles scratched on the plane "walk" from side to side. But what is the very plane of the disc!
Unfortunately, all exhibits of this size are behind glass, and it is impossible to check the accuracy with which the plane is made with instruments. But the human eye itself is a very good measuring instrument. He will immediately notice any flaw on a flat surface. On the disc there are no irregularities at all!
Fragile material
Obsidian is volcanic glass. Very handy material for easy processing due to its fragility. Even with a slight impact, it splits so that sharp edges are formed. They can easily cut soft materials - for example, leather, meat, some types of vegetation. If carefully, you can cut materials and harder, such as wood. A good master of obsidian will make not only knives, but also finer tools that can be used as a blade, an awl or even a needle.
However, glass is glass. It pricks easily. But it is pricked so that flat planes - such as on a disc - are not formed. So it will not be possible to obtain such a plane by simply splitting a piece. This requires completely different processing technologies: first, obsidian must be sawed or cut. And then also polish - after all, the surface of the disc is polished.
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This is where very serious problems begin. The fact is that obsidian is easy to work with when a simple shearing of the material is used. But cutting or sawing it is not an easy task. The hardness of obsidian is at the level of the usual steel knives and files. But for processing, harder materials are required - a tool from a softer material will grind off itself.
We stopped by an obsidian processing workshop near the famous Teotihuacan archaeological complex. It is located at the gift shop, and tourists are brought there specially. Not at all to increase knowledge in the field of material processing, but so that no one is surprised at the high prices for the souvenirs offered there. After all, everyone can see with their own eyes how difficult it is to make a craft from a stubborn material.
For its processing, hard abrasive discs are used, rotating at high speed with special equipment or a tool resembling an electric drill. If desired, they can be made the same flat plane as on a CD from the museum.
But the Indians could not have had such instruments in ancient times. As, however, there was no other tool at all with which one could make that very CD. But the disk is there! So someone did it after all. And it is clear that he is not the Indian known to archaeologists and historians, but a representative of a civilization that had the appropriate tools and technologies.
Obsidian monkey
Non-primitive Indians made an amazing vessel with a monkey from a single piece of obsidian, which stands in the same museum of the Mexican capital. Its quality is perfect!
And the point is not at all in the remarkably polished minute details of the monkey's figure, but in the impeccable performance of the bowl itself. He had to manage not to split the very fragile obsidian. And the main thing is to somehow make a vessel without the slightest deviation from the correct round shape.
Similar bowls are offered in the aforementioned souvenir shop, which houses an obsidian workshop. Judging by the prices (which scared off even the wealthiest members of our expedition), the craftsmen had to put a lot of effort into making this vessel. And this is in the presence of modern equipment. There is no need to talk about manual production with the help of primitive tools.
Divine spools
The creator of the obsidian monkey did not seem to have any trouble working on the masterpiece (you can't name it otherwise). Other products made of this material also suggest this assumption. For example, strange objects that strongly resemble bobbins (spools of thread) in modern sewing machines. They are almost the same in size.
But bobbins today are stamped out of plastic (in the 20th century they were metal), and here they have the same shape, but from obsidian. Small discs only a millimeter thick on a common cylinder, which is hollow and has the same millimeter wall thickness - and it's all monolithic. What kind of manual work with primitive tools can be discussed here at all! It is difficult to imagine anything other than a lathe with diamond (or similar in hardness and strength) cutters.
The whole shape of the bobbins indicates just such a manufacturing method. Indeed, to obtain such an accurate round shape, the workpiece must be rotated. Hard obsidian requires harder cutters. And in order for obsidian to be cut off, and not chipped off, a high rotation speed of the workpiece is needed. So we get a lathe!
Did the Indians of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica have something like that? No. But the bobbins are real! And they were found during archaeological work on ancient sites, and were not brought from a modern workshop.
Historians believe that bobbins were used as ritual decorations. They say that the Indians - representatives of the nobility or priesthood - cut a hole under their lower lip and inserted a bobbin there. A banal assignment for an item, the manufacture of which requires technologies that the Indians did not have at all.
However, the Indians could indeed use bobbins as decorations. After all, give some papuan from a wild tribe that lives deep in the jungle a ballpoint pen, he can easily insert it into a pierced earlobe or nostrils as an adornment instead of a simple stick, which he is already used to wearing.
So the hypothesis of historians about the ritual purpose of the object may in fact be true. If the Indians understood that they got the spools from a civilization much more developed than themselves, then they could well consider its representatives to be gods, and the objects they got divine. And use only in the most significant rituals of worshiping these same gods.
Only, such use says absolutely nothing about the original purpose of the bobbins.
Jade tubes
By the way, right there in the museum there are similar items from another material - from rock crystal. And its hardness is much higher, and it can only be cut with even harder materials. A diamond cutter is fine here. Something else is unlikely.
Compared to obsidian and rock crystal bobbins, jade items can seem like children's toys. But they are far from all the same, and not all of them can be made using the simplest technologies. For example, a strangely shaped tube, as if wrapped in a spiral around its axis, would look much more natural if it were made of plasticine or clay.
Theoretically, one can imagine an Indian master who decided to spend more than one year of his life making such a toy out of jade. But how could he achieve such a high accuracy of the spiral pitch? How could you create the complete illusion of easy twisting in a solid stone?
Another jade tube is so perfect that it looks like it was turned on a machine. And this is even if it is limited only to its outer surface. But this is a tube in the full sense of the word: a hole is drilled inside it. Drilled so that the wall thickness is only a millimeter and a half.
How could a simple Indian do such a thing? And not in soft wood, but in hard jade.
Details of a complex device
In another Mexican museum - on the territory of an archaeological zone called Tula - among the most primitive ceramic pots was a very strange obsidian object. If it looks like anything, it looks like a modern bushing for some complex mechanical device. But how could it be made? And most importantly, why did the ancient Indians need such an item at all?
Small (6-7 centimeters in diameter) items made of the same obsidian in the museum of the city of Oaxaca also suggest the details of a complex mechanical device. If they were rubber, then they could well be used as gaskets or cuffs. But why were objects of a similar shape made of obsidian needed?
The technologies that are required for the manufacture of the described objects are so radically different from everything that was at the disposal of any society known to historians on the territory of Mesoamerica that one should certainly speak of their creation by a highly developed civilization. A civilization that is separated from the Indians of this region by a real abyss.
Andrey Sklyarov
