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Cerro Guasú, Amambay, and related hills, Paraguay

Amambay rock art

Mid-Holocene hearth date (5,212 ± 323 before present, on one fire)

A shelter wall in the Amambay hills, packed with grooves and pits. The file places the photograph only as rock art on a hill in that department. It does not name Cerro Guasú, Akua, or Lorito Picada. Drawings of the three Cerro Guasú shelters are in the papers linked below. FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 3.0. Shown unedited.

Three sandstone shelters on Cerro Guasú, the hill the Paĩ Tavyterã call Jasuka Venda, are cut with more than a thousand tracks and signs apiece on the two large walls. A hearth under one of them has a published thermoluminescence age of 5,212 ± 323 before present. Books from 1972, 1975, and 1979 read marks in these hills as Norse runes.

Why this is extraordinary

Cerro Guasú is a sandstone hill in the department of Amambay, 60 kilometres from Pedro Juan Caballero. A 2015 conference paper measures it at 11 kilometres across, 350 metres at the base and 710 at the summit. Along one outcrop, three rock shelters stand about 500 metres apart. The Paĩ Tavyterã, a Guaraní people whose traditional land includes this hill and the Brazilian border beside it, call the hill Jasuka Venda. In their account it is the centre of the world. One of the shelters has been taken into that account as the house of Ñande Ru, the creator and father.

The walls are cut almost solid. A petroglyph, here, means a mark pecked, scraped, or incised into rock. At the shelter called Itaguy Guasu the 2013 excavation report inventories 1,385 graphic units: animal tracks, human footprints, a smaller group of vulva-shaped signs, and abstract pits, cupules, and lines. Itaguy Mirî, the next large shelter, has 1,674 units in a partial count, and the paper says several hundred more are there. The grooves are wide. The report's average is about a centimetre across and half a centimetre deep, which is easy in this sandstone and still deep enough to read after the visor of one shelter collapsed.

In 2008 a pit of 2 square metres, dug to bedrock at 70 centimetres beside the engraved wall of Itaguy Guasu, found one sandy occupation and one hearth. Thermoluminescence, a clock that reads when mineral grains were last heated, dates reddened sandstone from the base of that hearth to 5,212 ± 323 before present. The same digits are printed as years BC on Paraguay's 2022 tentative list. Those are not the same calendar claim. The report assigns the engravings to that occupation because the pit has one level and the wall has one repertoire. It also says the date cannot yet be called the start, the middle, or the end of the cutting.

A different reading has been in print since the 1970s. Jacques de Mahieu, through the Institute of the Science of Man in Buenos Aires, published the marks as pre-Columbian runic inscriptions, in 1972 and again in a 1975 supplement on Cerro Guazú. A 2023 account in La Nación, drawing on his writing, reports a 1973 note of 61 characters at Cerro Guazú already translated, expeditions from 1975 to 1979, a white king named Ipir, a fortress wall inside Cerro Corá National Park, and a dressed-stone foundation at Tacuatí carrying a sign he read as the rune gebo. The same account says he wrote at least half a dozen books on Viking voyages from the far north of the Americas to this border. The northern camp with a calendar year is L'Anse aux Meadows. Stones farther south that have been read as runes are in Runestones in America. Neither of those catalogues is a wall in Amambay.

What this changed

The shift, in short. The weighing further down is the longer argument.

Older textbook view
The walls entered public notice in 1973 as aboriginal shelters of about 2500 to 3500 BC, and in the same decade as Norse runes. The footprints repertoire, named in Patagonia in 1957, was being placed later than this hearth in Argentina and Brazil.
New evidence
One thermoluminescence age on reddened hearth sandstone, one lithic level in a 2-square-metre pit, and inventories of 1,385 and 1,674 graphic units on the two large Cerro Guasú walls.
How it is dated
Thermoluminescence of heated sandstone, printed as 5,212 ± 323 before present in the 2013 report and as 5,212 ± 323 BC on the 2022 tentative list. The grooves themselves were not dated.
What moved
A middle-Holocene occupation is now published for Itaguy Guasu, and the marks are catalogued with the footprints repertoire. The year of each groove is still an assignment, not a measurement on the cut.
What is still disputed
The unit BC against before present, a Guaraní sherd date that the 2013 article does not print, and the rune books, which remain a separate reading of the same hills.

Why it matters

If the hearth age belongs to the cutting, track-and-sign engraving was already a crowded practice in eastern Paraguay in the middle Holocene, earlier than the dates usually given to the same repertoire in Argentina and Brazil. If the tentative list's printing of those digits as BC is the right unit, the fire is older still. If de Mahieu's translations are the carver's text, Norse writing reached the Paraná–Paraguay divide, and a mid-Holocene hearth is a fire in a shelter that was marked again, or marked for another reason. The Paĩ reading, that the hill is where the world was begun and that the marks are ancestral messages, is a third claim, about meaning, and it does not have to lose for either clock to be kept.

A shelter here is a shallow cave under a lip of rock, open to the weather along a drip line. A cupule is a round hollow. The report calls anything under 2 centimetres a point, and anything wider a cupule. A tridigit is three strokes meeting at a point, read as the track of a rhea, the ñandú. Paired short strokes are read as deer, and a central pit with smaller pits around it as a jaguar. Guasu, in Guaraní, means large, and it is also the name the Paĩ use for the deer. Mirî means small. The conference paper says the leaders used those names to mark the shelter they held in higher regard, and it also calls Itaguy Mirî the larger shelter. The floors printed in the same paper are 265 square metres and 196.

Photo tour

8 photographs, unedited. On a phone, swipe the row. Choose one to look closely.

A shelter wall in the Amambay hills, packed with grooves and pits. The file places the photograph only as rock art on a hill in that department. It does not name Cerro Guasú, Akua, or Lorito Picada. Drawings of the three Cerro Guasú shelters are in the papers linked below.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 3.0
Pit clusters and a few three-stroke marks on red stone at Akua 1, a related Amambay shelter, not one of the three on Cerro Guasú. The file title calls the clusters jaguar prints. The inventory uses that name for a central pit ringed by smaller ones.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 4.0
A three-stroke mark, paired short grooves, and a line of pits, on a ledge at Akua 1. Paired strokes are the inventory's deer track. A three-stroke mark is its rhea track. The file title names deer and jaguar together.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 4.0
Parallel grooves set inside an arch, at Akua 1. The file title calls the mark abstract. Series of parallel lines are a large part of the Itaguy Guasu count, 132 series on that wall alone.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 4.0
Ovals, a scatter of pits, and branching lines on a block at Akua 1. The file title calls the subject a serpent. A single wavy line is not the clearest groove in the frame. Wavy lines are one of the signs the 1957 footprints list included.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 4.0
Two foot-shaped hollows with toe pits, at Lorito Picada. The tentative list's name for this hill is Cerro Lorito. Human footprints at Itaguy Guasu were made by scraping a shallow sole and adding pits for the toes. This frame is a related shelter, not that wall.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 4.0
Three-stroke grooves crowded on red rock at Lorito Picada. The inventory reads that shape as a rhea track and calls it a tridigit. Itaguy Guasu has 328 of them. This photograph is the related hill, not the counted wall.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 4.0
Radial grooves and bands of parallel lines on an open slab at Lorito Picada. The file title calls the radial marks stars. The Cerro Guasú inventory includes branching signs and parallel lines, and it does not publish a sky alignment for them.FrankOWeaver, CC BY-SA 4.0

See the evidence at the source

These pictures are not openly licensed, so they are not copied onto this page. Each link opens in a new tab.

What is still unexplained

These sit beside the consensus account, with the same visual weight. None of them is marked solved.

Counted Three shelters, and a wall with almost no empty stone The 2015 paper places Itaguy Guasu east of the summit at 465 metres, facing northeast, with a front of 55 metres, a height of 12, and a depth of 9. Of that front, 46 metres still carry engravings, and 24 metres are dense up to 4 metres above the present floor. The usable floor inside the drip line is 265 square metres. Itaguy'i, 500 metres to the northwest at 457 metres, is the small one: 15 metres of front, 3.5 of height, and a visor only 2 metres deep, with a triangular inner cavity. Its visor fell after the wall was cut, so many marks now sit in the rain. The inventory there is 197 units. Itaguy Mirî, another 500 metres on, faces northeast at 458 metres, with 42 metres of front and a floor of 196 square metres. Thirty-one metres are densely cut. The count of clearly separable units is 1,674, and the paper says the true total is higher by several hundred. The shared repertoire is tracks and abstract signs, cut by incision, by scraping, and, more rarely, by pecking. At Itaguy Guasu the 2013 count is 639 animal tracks, 46 percent of the wall, and 116 human footprints, so that tracks together are 54.5 percent. The tridigits number 328, from 5 to 25 centimetres high. Jaguar marks, including 19 rosette forms, number 151. Deer marks are 160 units and 371 pairs of strokes, mostly 3 to 10 centimetres, with a full range of 1 to 20. Vulvas are 27. Points are 55, cupules 123, and series of parallel lines 132. Twenty-five overlaps were recorded. They are tangential, and the report draws no sequence from them except that human footprints lie under some later marks, so feet were there early. Pecked signs sit at the edges and are read as later. Itaguy Mirî adds six schematic human figures, five of them with a triangular or diamond shape the paper reads as a skirt, and one with the line of the body continued as a penis. The other two shelters do not share that group.
The laboratory line and the list do not match One hearth, and two ways of printing its age The pit sat in the most protected part of Itaguy Guasu, against the engraved wall. The fill was one continuous sand, read as a long stay or a repeated stay inside one span of time. The hearth is a concentration of ash and charcoal. Its base, reddened sandstone, is the sample MAD-5468BIN, 5,212 ± 323 before present at one sigma. Bone and charcoal were collected. The age that was published is not a radiocarbon result on that charcoal. From the 6,811 pieces of worked stone, 55 are tools. Ten are the thick planoconvex flakes called limaces, or lesmas, a scraper at the end and a side edge on one face. One bifacial point has a central stem. The bone is deer, armadillo, and bird. The 2022 tentative list prints the same hearth as 5,212 ± 323 BC, at 50 centimetres down, and adds a Guaraní ceramic fragment at 734 ± 67 BC by the same method. It also counts 6,378 flakes, 55 tools, nine planoconvex pieces, and three projectile points, one of them translucent quartz, plus ochre and a bone awl. The 2013 article's single level does not include that sherd, and its tool count is ten planoconvex pieces and one point. Both documents are in print. A before-present age, if before present means 1950, sits near 3300 BC, inside an error of a little more than three centuries. The list's BC printing sits about two thousand years earlier. A reader can see the digits and cannot yet see a second laboratory sheet that chooses the unit. The report's own puzzle is the company the date keeps. Planoconvex tools of this kind are often placed in the early Archaic. The footprints repertoire, in Argentina and Brazil, is often placed in the late Holocene. Here one level has to hold both, around 5,212 before present. That is why the authors call Amambay a possible source area for the repertoire, and why the tentative list says the idea still has to be tested. The 1973 newspaper ABC, quoted in the article, had already offered 2500 to 3500 BC for aboriginal inhabitants, and a count of 157 caves or shelters. The later inventories are twelve sites in the article's conclusion, ten in Amambay and two in Guairá, and thirteen on the tentative list.
A published Norse reading Sixty-one characters, a white king, and a temple foundation The 2013 article is plain about the first illustrated claim. After the 1973 press notice, a team from the Institute of the Science of Man visited some of the Amambay sites and one in the Yvytyrusú range, and published photographs and drawings as runic inscriptions left by Vikings. The books it cites are de Mahieu's of 1972, Las inscripciones rúnicas precolombinas del Paraguay, and of 1975, a supplement on Cerro Guazú. The article says those books had no credit outside Paraguay, that the speculation was rejected in a 1984 publication, and that the same photographs were afterwards described as footprints-style engraving. A 1975 thesis by a visitor to Cerro Guasú had already described two shelters and a repertoire repeated across a wide band of the interior. La Nación's 2023 account, written from his books and from the expeditions, adds the narrative he offered. A German engineer, Fritz Berger, working with Paraguayan army surveyors in the early 1940s, treated the hills as the largest runic complex in the world. An oral story, which the newspaper gives as de Mahieu's note of what an elder told Berger, puts a powerful white king named Ipir, blond and bearded, in a village on a hilltop, with gold and silver, until other tribes attacked and he disappeared. In 1973, the newspaper says, de Mahieu's collaborators reported 61 characters at Cerro Guazú, already translated. Expeditions followed from 1975 through 1979. At Cerro Corá they described a wall and a worked face on the Aquidabán-Nigui inside the national park. A geologist with the 1976 party, in the newspaper's retelling, said a form that regular would be natural only in hard rock under glaciers. De Mahieu's conclusion, as quoted there, is that no geological movement breaks rock with a geometer's rigor or keeps the edges of the blocks alive. The party then read the wall as one side of a fort, the other three sides having been stakes. On the engraved walls he read figures of the Norse god Odin and of other mythological persons, and he called the authorship Aryan. At Tacuatí, under and around a church the locals called Tupao Cue, the old temple, the party described dressed stone set without mortar, thick timber posts, and one boulder carrying the sign he identified as the rune gebo, the g-rune. He wrote that the Jesuits had never settled in Tacuatí and that the native builders did not work stone, so the foundation, on his argument, could not be either. The newspaper says photographs from those seasons are in El rey vikingo del Paraguay, Hachette, 1979. It also places a tumulus, read as Ipir's tomb, at Yvyty Perõ, a hill it names apart from Cerro Guazú. The 2015 inventory, at Itaguy Mirî, records two profile horses and a human figure in a very fine line, without patina, over the older cuts, plus the modern words Cerro Guasu and the name Delio. The paper calls the animals and the figure modern imitations, and says that taking them for a horse and a dog served the Viking thesis. Elsewhere in the footprints literature, a mark sometimes read as a horse's track has also been read as a vulva.
Same repertoire, other departments and other shelters Cerro Polilla, Ita Letra, and the hills that are not this pin Cerro Polilla is not an Amambay summit in the inventory. The tentative list groups it with Ita Letra, on Cerro Tororo, in the department of Guairá, inside the Yvytyrusú managed-resources reserve created by decree 14,945 on 9 October 2001. Both were named national cultural heritage by resolution 609 of 2018. Ita Letra is Guaraní for stone with letters. The list says it is the best-known site because visitors can reach it, and that the same access brought names cut over the old marks and campaigns of "enhancement" without a scientific watch. The 2013 article says the shelter was known by the 1960s, that de Mahieu's 1972 book treats it on pages 29 to 39, and that a 1984 field catalogue published it without the rune reading. Inside Amambay the same list names Akua 1, Akua 2, Cerro Lorito, Alambique or Amba, Cerro Kysé, Tujao 1, Tujao 2, Ysau 1, and Ysau 2, besides the three shelters on Cerro Guasú. Akua 1 is given as 22° 40' 16.8" S, 56° 09' 29.5" W, and Akua 2 a short distance from it. Tujao and Alambique lie inside Cerro Corá National Park. Surveys there in the 1980s and 1990s, the list says, were never published. The photographs in this room that name a hill are Akua 1 and Lorito Picada. Lorito Picada is the file title's name for the place the list calls Cerro Lorito. The list prints no coordinate for it. The 2013 conclusion adds five further large shelters in the region, four smaller ones, and two engraved places that could not have been lived in, plus two sources of stone for the tools. It says that pattern is not yet enough to map how people moved.
A living account, recorded beside the inventory What the Paĩ say the hill is Decree 7,685 of 1990 recognizes Yasuka Venda, in the district of Capitán Bado, as cultural heritage of the Paĩ Tavyterã. Resolution 21 of 2005 repeats that recognition for Jasuka Venda. The hill is the property of their association, Paĩ Retã Joaju. The tentative list says they understand the petroglyphs as the work of their ancestors, and the hills, above all Jasuka Venda, as the place where Ñande Ru, also called Ñande Ramói, began the world. The conference paper's sentence is narrower and more local. One shelter was brought into the oral story as the house of Ñande Ru, Ñame Ramoy Jusú Papá. The people who walked the excavators through the work are named in the report by office, not as a crowd of signatures. Tekoaruvicha are the persons recognized for wisdom and moral authority. Standing in Itaguy Guasu, they called the tracks jaguar, not puma, though puma live nearby, ñandú rather than some other bird, and guasu, the deer they still hunt. That is the same sorting the footprints literature uses. It is an identification of shapes. It is not, by itself, a date, and it is not a translation of the abstract signs. The finds from the pit, the list says, were given to the association and in 2018 placed with the Dr. Andrés Barbero Ethnographic Museum.

Location and dating

Location
The pin is 23° 05' S, 55° 59' W, the degrees and minutes of the single position the tentative list prints for Itaguy Guasu, Itaguy Mirî, and Itaguy'i. The seconds on that line are not a readable figure, so they are not in the pin. The conference paper's 60 kilometres from Pedro Juan Caballero is the other location it gives for the hill. Itaguy Guasu is the excavated shelter, at 465 metres. Akua 1, the hill in several of the photographs, is the list's 22° 40' 16.8" S, 56° 09' 29.5" W. Cerro Polilla and Ita Letra are in Guairá, in the Yvytyrusú reserve, not on this pin. Cerro Corá National Park holds Tujao and Alambique. Stones read as runes in North America are in Runestones in America. The dated Norse camp is L'Anse aux Meadows.
Period label
Current consensus — open to revision The excavation report's age for the Itaguy Guasu hearth is 5,212 ± 323 before present, middle Holocene, and the engravings are assigned to that occupation. The tentative list prints 5,212 ± 323 BC for the hearth and 734 ± 67 BC for a Guaraní sherd, and it associates the footprints repertoire with 3500 to 1800 BC, with later Guaraní and Jê pottery at the sites. The 1973 newspaper figure, quoted in the report, was 2500 to 3500 BC. The rune books place makers from the Norse world in these hills in the 1970s argument, without a laboratory year in the sources used here. Current consensus, open to revision. The marks are Indigenous petroglyphs of the footprints repertoire. The year of any one groove is not measured.
How this dating was done
Thermoluminescence on reddened sandstone from the base of a hearth. That dates a heating, not a groove. The link from the fire to the wall is the single level in the pit and the single repertoire on the stone, which is a use of stratigraphy. Comparing these signs with the Patagonian and Brazilian series is a kind of typology. Bone and charcoal were taken. No radiocarbon age for them is in the 2013 article. No archaeoastronomy of these shelters is in the sources used here.
What could change it
A second laboratory report on MAD-5468BIN that states whether 5,212 ± 323 is before present or BC, and a date on a sample from a named groove, or from a crust that formed inside one. A published reading of the 61 characters, sign by sign, that another epigrapher can repeat. For the Paĩ account, the oral identifications set beside the panels, which the 2008 season began and did not finish as a translation.
Published ranges, drawn as bars. A bar is a claim about a span, not a point.
Hearth, if before present means 1950Contested
Same digits, printed as BCContested
Guaraní sherd on the tentative listContested
Newspaper age of 1973Contested
5535 BCE2500 BCE667 BCE
  • Hearth, if before present means 1950. The 2013 report prints 5,212 ± 323 before present, one sigma, on sample MAD-5468BIN. This bar uses 1950 as the zero, which the report does not state. A zero at the year of measurement would move the bar by a few decades, inside the error.
  • Same digits, printed as BC. The 2022 tentative list prints 5,212 ± 323 BC for the Itaguy Guasu hearth, and places it 50 centimetres down. The report's pit reached bedrock at 70 centimetres and does not use BC.
  • Guaraní sherd on the tentative list. 734 ± 67 BC, a ceramic fragment, in the tentative list only. The 2013 article describes one lithic level and does not print this sherd.
  • Newspaper age of 1973. ABC, 9 January 1973, as quoted in the 2013 article. Aboriginal inhabitants of 2500 to 3500 BC, and 157 caves or shelters. It is a press figure, not the later inventory.

What is actually there

Open questions

Question Status
Does 5,212 ± 323 date the cutting, or only the fire? Open. The report assigns the wall to the occupation and says the date may be early, middle, or late in the life of the marks.
Is the published unit before present, or BC? Open. The excavation report and the tentative list print the same digits with different units.
Are any of the marks the 61 characters translated in 1973? Open. The newspaper reports the translation. The inventory reads the walls as tracks and abstract signs, and it separates a few unpatinated animals as modern.
What do the Paĩ oral readings say about the signs that are not tracks? Open. Jaguar, rhea, and deer were named in the shelter. A full account of the other signs is not in the papers used here.

The current narrative

Where publication stands today. It is the best-supported reading, and it is open to revision. It is not a verdict.

The current narrative — open to revision

Indigenous tracks and signs

The walls are petroglyphs in the footprints repertoire, cut by people who also left planoconvex tools and bifacial points in the shelters. The Itaguy Guasu hearth dates a middle-Holocene occupation, and the engravings are assigned to it because the pit has one level and the walls have one style. Later Guaraní use of the hills is a separate chapter, not a Norse one. Cerro Polilla and Ita Letra belong to the same repertoire in Guairá.

What supports this

  • The inventories sort the marks as jaguar, deer, rhea, human feet, vulvas, and abstract signs, the set named in Patagonia in 1957 and since found across Argentina and Brazil.
  • Paĩ observers in the shelter used the same animal names for the same shapes.
  • One occupation, 6,811 pieces of flaked stone, and a hearth at 5,212 ± 323 before present sit against the engraved wall.
  • Grooves average about a centimetre wide in soft sandstone, which is the technique the tentative list describes for the whole series.
  • The 2015 paper separates two horses and a fine-line figure at Itaguy Mirî as modern, by the lack of patina, and reads the older wall as the same repertoire as the other shelters.
  • The journal records that the 1970s rune books had no credit outside Paraguay and were rejected in print in 1984, after which the photographs were described as footprints engraving.

What pushes back

  • The hearth dates a fire. The report itself will not say whether that fire is early, middle, or late in the cutting.
  • The tentative list prints the hearth as BC and adds a Guaraní sherd at 734 ± 67 BC, so the single-level story in the 2013 article is not the only published occupation.
  • Tool types often placed in the early Archaic and a repertoire often placed later are being asked to share one century.
  • De Mahieu published translations, a gebo sign at Tacuatí, and a fortress reading of the Cerro Corá wall. An inventory that does not reprint those 61 characters has not yet answered them sign by sign.
  • Abstract signs and radial grooves can be read as writing by a viewer who brings a rune row. The tracks do not exhaust the wall.

What would settle it

A groove-by-groove publication of the 61 translated characters, set on a photograph, would show whether they are a selection of the tracks and lines already counted or a text the inventory did not see. A second sheet for MAD-5468BIN would settle the unit. Until then the repertoire and the lithics are the best-supported reading of the walls, and the year of each mark stays assigned.

Emerging narratives

Other published readings. Each may be right. None is adopted here unless the evidence carries it.

An emerging narrative

Norse runes from a southern voyage

Jacques de Mahieu's reading is that some of these cuts are Norse runes, left by Vikings in South America. The 1972 and 1975 books present the Amambay and Yvytyrusú marks as pre-Columbian runic inscriptions. The 1979 book, as a 2023 account of it reports, carries the expeditions, a translated set of 61 characters at Cerro Guazú, the white king Ipir, a fortress in Cerro Corá, and a stone temple at Tacuatí with a gebo rune. The wider theory is a Norse journey from the far north of the Americas to this border, told across several of his books.

What supports this

  • The marks exist, in deep grooves, and a portion of them are abstract signs, radial forms, and lines that a reader can compare with a rune row.
  • La Nación reports a 1973 record of 61 characters at Cerro Guazú, already translated, and quotes his identification of a gebo sign on a dressed block at Tacuatí.
  • The same account gives his case that the Cerro Corá wall keeps geometric edges a geologist did not treat as ordinary breakage, and that the Tacuatí foundation is dressed stone without mortar under a later church.
  • An oral story of a white, bearded king named Ipir was collected in the hills before his expeditions, in the newspaper's telling, from elders through Fritz Berger.
  • A Norse camp at L'Anse aux Meadows shows that a voyage west from Greenland happened. His books ask how much farther such a voyage could be taken.
  • Two profile horses at Itaguy Mirî are real cuts. A horse is part of the case he made for Old World animals on the walls.

What pushes back

  • The 2013 inventory of the same hills reads the mass of the walls as tracks and signs of a repertoire already defined in 1957, not as a rune row.
  • The only published laboratory age is a middle-Holocene hearth, millennia before the Norse centuries, unless the tentative list's BC printing is used and even then the fire is far older than a medieval voyage. The age is the fire, not a proof that no one cut a mark later.
  • The conference paper treats the horses and the fine-line human figure as modern, because they have no patina, and it records modern names cut over the old grooves.
  • The journal states that the rune books had no credit outside Paraguay and that the speculation was rejected in 1984.
  • L'Anse aux Meadows has buildings and iron and, in the published find lists, no rune. A camp there does not identify a letter in Amambay.
  • No second epigrapher's repetition of the 61 translations is in the sources used here. A translated set that cannot be checked sign by sign is a claim about a text, not yet a text on the page.

What would settle it

The rune reading stands or falls on a published comparison, character by character, with the walls as they are inventoried, and on a date for a mark he translated rather than for the hearth alone. The fortress and the Tacuatí foundation need the same treatment, a plan and a context another crew can dig. The northern camp stays evidence that Norse ships crossed an ocean. It does not, by itself, label these grooves.

An emerging narrative

Ancestral messages on a creation hill

For the Paĩ Tavyterã, Jasuka Venda is the centre of the world, the place where Ñande Ru began it, and one shelter is his house. The petroglyphs are messages left by their ancestors. The tracks of jaguar, rhea, and deer are the animals they named in the shelter, and the hills remain theirs to keep.

What supports this

  • Decree 7,685 of 1990 and resolution 21 of 2005 recognize the hill as Paĩ heritage, and the land is held by Paĩ Retã Joaju.
  • The tentative list states their account in those terms, ancestors and creation, and calls the sites a living heritage.
  • The conference paper records that one shelter entered the oral story as the creator's house.
  • In the shelter, tekoaruvicha identified jaguar, ñandú, and deer, matching the shapes the inventory counts.
  • The finds were returned to the association and later placed in the Andrés Barbero museum, which is the list's account of who holds the material.

What pushes back

  • An account of meaning does not, by itself, choose between a middle-Holocene fire and a later hand.
  • The papers used here do not print a Paĩ reading of the abstract signs, the vulvas, or the six human figures, so most of the wall is still untranslated on their terms.
  • De Mahieu's Ipir story is also an oral account from the hills, about a white king rather than about Ñande Ru. Two oral accounts can be collected in one region and still not be the same story.
  • The Guairá sites, Cerro Polilla and Ita Letra, are in the same repertoire and are not described as Jasuka Venda.

What would settle it

A recording of the oral readings, panel by panel, published with the inventory numbers, would show which signs the creation account actually uses. The heritage decrees already settle whose hill it is. They do not settle the century of a groove.

Should the current view be reevaluated?

Open to revision

The footprints inventory is the best-supported reading of what is cut, because the walls have been counted, the shapes match a repertoire published across the southern continent, and the Paĩ names for the animals agree with that sorting. The hearth age is a real laboratory result and it is not a date on a groove. The same digits printed as BC, the sherd the list adds, and the tool counts that do not match are enough to keep the year open. De Mahieu's translations, the gebo block, and the fortress are a published reading with named places, and they have not been answered by a sign-by-sign reply in the sources used here. The room stays open on the year and on the meaning. It does not have a second Norse archaeology, of the Newfoundland kind, in these shelters.

What drives this

  • 1,385 units at Itaguy Guasu and 1,674 at Itaguy Mirî, mostly tracks, pits, and lines.
  • A 2-square-metre pit with one occupation, planoconvex tools, and hearth sample MAD-5468BIN at 5,212 ± 323 before present.
  • The same digits printed as BC on the tentative list, with a Guaraní sherd at 734 ± 67 BC.
  • De Mahieu's 1972 and 1975 books, the 61 characters reported from 1973, and the 1979 Hachette volume.
  • Unpatinated horses and modern names at Itaguy Mirî, separated by the 2015 paper from the older wall.
  • Jasuka Venda as a Paĩ creation hill, recognized in 1990 and 2005, with one shelter told as the creator's house.

This is the museum’s own weighing of the evidence. It is not a visitor vote, and it is separate from the slider.

Weigh it yourself

Anonymous. Nothing here is stored except on this browser. Your lean does not change the assessment beside it.

Indigenous tracks and signs Unsure Norse runes from a southern voyage

If the contested reading is right

What would follow if a reading that is not the consensus turned out to be true, and what could settle it. This explains the stakes. It does not adopt the reading.

The translated marks are Norse runes, and the hills held a Viking refuge

Norse travel would not stop at a Newfoundland terrace around 1021. Writing, a fortress, and a stone temple would stand on the divide between the Paraguay and the Paraná, and the oral king Ipir would be a candidate for a historical person. The middle-Holocene hearth would be an earlier fire in a shelter that was inscribed again. The footprints counts would have to be re-read as a code, or as a mixture of an old repertoire and a later text.

Why it is still worth a test

The 61 characters published against photographs of the panels, and a date on one mark included in that translation. A plan of the Cerro Corá wall and of the Tacuatí foundation, with the gebo block identified.

The walls are ancestral messages, and the hill is where the world began

The shelters would be a sacred text still in use, not only an Archaic picture gallery. A motif catalogue would remain a description of shapes and would not be a translation. Protection of the kind the Amambay sites already have, from the people who live with them, would be part of the record, which is how the tentative list already distinguishes them from Ita Letra.

Why it is still worth a test

The oral account written down beside the panel numbers, including the signs that are not animals. The decrees already say whose hill it is.

Sources

  1. Itaguy Guasu: un abrigo con grabados de pisadas y abstractos en el Cerro Guasú Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie I, UNED, 2013
  2. Grabados de pisadas y abstractos en Cerro Guasú Arkeos 37, XIX International Rock Art Conference, IFRAO 2015
  3. Rock Art of Jsukaevnda and Cerro Corá UNESCO World Heritage tentative list, submitted by Paraguay, 6 April 2022
  4. ¿Una civilización desaparecida en lo profundo del Amambay? La Nación, 5 November 2023

Image credits

← Paraguay World map