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Bolivian music is famous for its soaring, graceful sound. It is played on instruments such as the queña (pan-pipes) and the charango (a guitar made from an armadillo shell), vividly evoking the landscape of this high, mountainous country.
Arts and crafts: Ancient Quechua and Aymara crafts of feather-art, weaving, and wood-carving have survived the centuries unchanged, and still play an important part in festivals and ceremonies.
Brief History: Famous since Spanish colonial days for its mineral wealth, modern Bolivia was once a part of the ancient Incan empire. After the Spaniards defeated the Incas in the 16th century, Bolivia's predominantly Indian population was reduced to slavery. The remoteness of the Andes helped protect the Bolivian Indians from the European diseases that decimated other South American Indians. But the existence of a large indigenous group forced to live under the thumb of their colonizers created a stratified society of haves and have-nots that continues to this day.
• The announcement that Brazilian scientists unveil reconstruction of Tyrannosaurus ancestor is just the latest in a series of spectacular finds of dinosaur fossils in Bolivia have yielded fossils of tremendous importance to paleontologists and dinosaur fans worldwide. The finds range from this reconstructed Santanaraptor, who in life was a carnivore standing around two-and-a-half feet tall, measuring about six feet from head to tail and weighing about 65 pounds, to the huge 100-ton Argentinosaurus, considered by some experts to be the largest dinosaur ever recorded, to the more recent discovery of a new as yet unnamed and unclassified dinosaur thought to be 27 feet longer than that. |
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