The lost city of Ingrejil, heritage of American megalithic culture
My trip to Ingrejil began in Feira de Santana, a medium-sized commercial city in the interior of the State of Bahia, in Brazil.
To get an idea of the distances, it should be taken into account that the State of Bahia is larger than France. The internal streets, especially those that connect the south of the State with the federal capital, Brasilia, are in terrible condition. Sometimes, you have to travel 3 hours, in uncomfortable dusty buses without air conditioning, to travel 90 kilometers.
From Feira de Santana I arrived at Brumado, after a trip of approximately 600 kilometers in 10 hours. Then, in a dilapidated seventies-style Pullman, I arrived at Livramento de Nossa Senhora, a beautiful town located on an immense plain at the foot of the imposing Serra das Almas, a vast mountain formation about 100 kilometers long, belonging to the Diamantina Veneer.
I slept in a pleasant inn, and the next day I woke up early, at 6 o'clock. The sky was smooth, although after half an hour the sun was already scorching the skin. In this area, the temperature can easily exceed 40 degrees in the shade at midday. In the distance I could see a magnificent waterfall, fresh and pure water that comes from the Serra das Almas plateau.
The trip continued by motorcycle: traveling an unpaved road of approximately 10 kilometers you reach the rugged town of Itaguassú. In this area, mango and passion fruit are mainly produced, but also a large amount of jackfruit, a large fruit very similar to the breadfruit tree, similar to the Colombian soursop, but with a sweet and juicy yellow pulp.
In Itaguassú I met my guide, Cosme, a robust boy who knows the Serra das Almas very well.
We set off immediately in his off-road Honda, traveling a difficult and narrow trail. After about half an hour we reached a place from where it was impossible to continue in that vehicle.
Then we continued walking for about two hours through a dense jungle, and then we began to climb the Sierra das Almas. It was already 11 o'clock and the hot sun made the climb more complicated.
Towards noon we arrive at a plateau surrounded by a spectacular “stone jungle” called Ingrejil.
I suddenly had the strange sensation of finding myself in a sacred and magical place, where megalithic people lived in archaic times. Ingrejil suddenly reminded me of Marcahuasi, although it is smaller.
This archaeological site was discovered in 1984 by the Italian-Brazilian scholar Gabriele D'Annunzio Baraldi, in cooperation with the archaeologists Aurelio Abreu and Luis G. Moreira Junior.
When walking on the Ingrejil esplanade you see many stone alignments, as if they were intended to delimit areas (perhaps for spiritual or astronomical reasons), and several menhirs, as well as areas where the land was flattened.
In ancient times, several ethnic groups in South America preferred to live in high places, in the mountains, instead of the burning plains, for several reasons.
First of all, because the water sources are close to the mountains, but also for defense reasons, since access to the plateau could be easily controlled, since the path to get there was narrow and steep (also in Marcahuasi, in Peru, the geomorphology is completely similar, except for the altitude). Another reason was spiritual, since most of the ancient South American people revered the Sun as a God and therefore loved to be close to it, in order to be able to celebrate ceremonies daily.
The people who lived in Ingrejil probably lived from agriculture, but also from hunting carried out in the valley where Itaguassú stands today, which, at one time, had an abundance of animals.
According to researcher Baraldi, who in some excavation campaigns discovered the foundations of a wall (a fact that was documented by the Globo television network), ancient megalithic people lived in Ingrejil around 2000 BC.
However, until today it has not been carried out. carried out a complete excavation work with the stratigraphic method, thanks to which ceramics and polished stones could be discovered.
In my opinion, the Ingrejil site is much older than Baraldi's dating claims.
It may have been inhabited during the last years of the ice age, when the climate was colder and drier across the continent. In that distant period (approximately 10 millennia BC), megafauna animals such as the megatherium, the glyptodont and the mastodon grazed undisturbed in the meadows surrounding the Serra das Almas.
It may have been the climate change after the end of the ice age that induced the megalithic people to leave Ingrejil and perhaps head west, joining other human groups and giving rise to the Andean culture.
YURI LEVERATTO
