1 This work was supported by the Mainwaring Foundation in association
with the Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
2 University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
3 A. L. Peratt `Orientation of Z-Pinch instabilities from an intense aurora as
recorded in antiquity: Western USA. Conf. Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. On
Plasma Science, Baltimore, 2004.
4 C.N. Dubelaar, The Petroglyphs in the Guianas and Adjacent Areas of
Brazil and Venezuela: An Inventory. Monumenta Archaeologica 12,
Los Angeles, 1986.
Conference Record

31st IEEE
International Conference
On Plasma Science
Orientation of Z-Pinch Instabilities from an Intense Aurora as
Recorded in Antiquity: South America1

D. Scott2 and A. L. Peratt

Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 USA

In the first presentation3 we reported an analysis of a GPS
database of petroglyphs recorded in the western US and British
Columbia. These results indicated that a plasma flowing into the
Earth's south magnetic pole produced an intense aurora seen
worldwide. In this paper we report the findings of logged
petroglyphs in Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, French Guiana and
northern Brazil as well as some preliminary results  from 93
countries. With decreasing longitude towards the Greenwich
Meridian, petroglyphs appear to take on an increasingly easterly
orientation. This swing from south to east can be tracked through
the eastern US and the Caribbean Islands to the petroglyph sites
shown below (dots), between 0 and 8 degrees north and 51 to 62
degrees west.4

The morphological types of petroglyphs oriented eastwards
appear to belong to instabilities much further out in the inflowing
plasma. This suggests that the plasma, at least intense enough to
to be seen at dawn and/or dusk, curved in from the east to flow
inwards along the Earth's southern magnetic pole. This geometry
is further supported by `eclipsed' pictographs in Australia.