© Unknown
Katchinas in Argentina? Uncanny similarities between pictographs, Katsinam and... robots!The pictographs shown above are found in Argentina, in "The Cave of the Spirits", one of several grottos in Cura Malal, part of Sierra de la Ventana, a mountain range rising East of La Pampa, in the Buenos Aires province.
Argentinian scholar Fabio Picasso wrote about them in an essay on Mapuche spiritual traditions published in the Latin American Fortean Files website. There is a striking similarity of the pictograph on the left with a Hopi Masa'u Katsina from Harvard's Peabody Museum katsinam collection. In both the "techno-pictos" and the wood carving we are faced with designs that look a whole lot like our contemporary idea of a robot.