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collect coins, clay tablets, fragments of utensils, shards of vessels, figures, drawings, bones and everything the earth yields up to the spade. They arrange the finds neatly in a system that only has a relative validity for about 3,500 years. Anything that lies further back remains hidden behind a veil of riddles and suppositions. No one knows and no one can explain what made our ancestors capable of outstanding technical and archaeological achievements. People say a compulsive longing for the ‘gods', the desire to please the 'gods’, to carry out the duties imposed on them by the 'gods'—all these were the driving forces behind the many wonderful buildings. 'Gods' have to perform wonders; they have to be able to do more than other beings. Invented 'gods’, pure products of the imagination, would not have stayed long in the consciousness of mankind. Men would soon have forgotten them. That is why I hold the view that the 'gods' of whom we speak must have been real figures who were so clever and so mighty that they made a deep impression on our ancestors and dominated man's ideological and religious world for many centuries. We should not be afraid to give fanciful theories a fair hearing. For unfortunately what Heracleitus (ca. 500 B.C.) once said still holds good today: 'Because it is sometimes so unbelievable the truth escapes becoming known.’ There is an area of ruins on the mountainsides of Cajamarquilla, east of the Peruvian capital of Lima. Evidence of our human past to which scholars have not yet paid enough attention is being destroyed there daily by voracious bulldozers engaged in making roads. This painting with a heavenly snake, priests sacrificing (?) and strange flying objects comes from a Peruvian ceramic vessel now in The Linden Museum, Stuttgart. We trudged through this wilderness. We did not need anyone to draw our attention to curiosities, for we literally stumbled into them. In the roads there are hundreds of foxholes, like the ones dug by the Viet Cong which we know about from magazines and television. Of course, I cannot assert that these fox-holes were once dug to protect the inhabitants from air-raids. I dare not say that, because it is a Longing for the 'gods'? Which 'gods'? Carrying out duties imposed by 'gods'? Which 'gods' imposed the duties? Then who was it who manifested himself to the primitive peoples?