This post is dedicated to my friend Sheryl. I was frustrated yesterday at a long series of fails, and wondered on Twitter if everyone had lost their minds due to the solar eclipse.

Sheryl wasn’t buying it.

This made me wonder….aren’t some of our moods, etc. affected by lunar cycles? This made me do a quick google search, which was inconclusive, and way too quick to know if anything I saw was real.

But this took my mind down another path…what if what we know to be science is unduly influenced by Western society? I thought of two indigenous technologies that we’ve just recently been able to understand. You have to remember at first contact anything not sanctioned by the church was destroyed – they didn’t understand they were destroying technology.

Or maybe god told them to do it, either way….it’s a huge loss to us in the here and now.

Example one: the Quipu. This is a series of knots with which the Incas communicated with each other. They were

“organized and stored in state-owned libraries. They appear to have provided a complex, coded system for representing and recording both literary information and the numerical data used in taxing and other administrative functions of the Tawantinsuyu or ‘Inca Empire”
American Indian Mathematics Traditions and Contributions, Portland Public Schools Geocultural Baseline Essay Series

What’s amazing about this technology is it included the concept of zero. Now there is no way the Conquistidors would have believed that a pagan people could have understood a complex concept like zero. I mean in the Old World, it took a Fibonacci to introduce such a dangerous idea. After all, the indigenous people of the Americas were savages, right? And they did “hide” the concept in strands of yarn….so how were they to know?

It is truly amazing that this technology survived at all. But it did, and thankfully now people can study it. Can you imagine where we would be technologically  if so much of the rest of the culture hadn’t been destroyed? What other technologies were destroyed? (Geeked out reference,  non-math nerd reference).

Another native technology that is much closer to my current home is the White Shaman Panel. If you look at this, you’d never believe it’s a piece of technology:

via Emile Abbott (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/11560738@N04/3964132004/

In addition to telling the creation story of the Coahuiltecans (first people of Texas), it’s an astronomy map that accurately determines celestial events visible to the South Texas area. It’s pretty interesting, and dead on – you can read more here.

So how did I get to here from my conversation with Sheryl? Well obviously my mind makes weird connections. But maybe because things we see aren’t what they seem. Perhaps our Western education allows us to discredit traditional ways of knowing  – to our own detriment.

Maybe what we see as pretty textiles or interesting cave paintings are actually hiding ancient technologies. Who knows what unlocking some of those ways of knowing could do to advance our current tech? And how does assigning a hippie mystical status to these things prevent us from seeing what they really are (and this is actually a entire post in and of itself…)?

PS thanks Sheryl I had fun researching the links for this! <3