Celestial Find at Ancient Andes Site
The discovery in Peru of a 4,200-year-old temple and observatory
pushes back estimates of the rise of an advanced culture in the
Americas.
By Thomas H. Maugh II
Times Staff Writer
May 14, 2006
Archeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the
oldest known celestial observatory in the Americas — a 4,200-year-old
structure marking the summer and winter solstices that is as old as
the stone pillars of Stonehenge.
The observatory was built on the top of a 33-foot-tall pyramid with
precise alignments and sightlines that provide an astronomical
calendar for agriculture, archeologist Robert Benfer of the
University of Missouri said.
The people who built the observatory — three millenniums before the
emergence of the Incas — are a mystery, but they achieved a level of
art and science that archeologists say they did not know existed in
the region until at least 800 years later.
Among the most impressive finds was a massive clay sculpture — an
ancient version of the modern frowning “sad face” icon flanked by two
animals. The disk, protected from looters beneath thousands of years
of dirt and debris, marked the position of the winter solstice.
“It’s really quite a shock to everyone … to see sculptures of that
sophistication coming out of a building of that time period,” said
archeologist Richard L. Burger of Yale University’s Peabody Museum of
Natural History, who was not involved in the discovery.
The find adds strong evidence to support the recent idea that a
sophisticated civilization developed in South America in the pre-
ceramic era, before the development of fired pottery sometime after
1500 BC.
Benfer’s discovery “pushes the envelope of civilization farther south
and inland from the coast, and adds the important dimension of
astronomy to these ancient folks’ way of life,” said archeologist
Michael Moseley of the University of Florida, a noted Peru expert.
The 20-acre site, called Buena Vista, is about 25 miles inland in the
Rio Chillon Valley, just north of Lima. “It is on a totally barren,
rock-covered hill looking down on a beautiful fertile valley,” said
Benfer, who presented the find last month in Puerto Rico at a meeting
of the Society for American Archeology.
The site is remarkably well preserved, Benfer said, because it rains
in the area only about once a year.
The name of the people who inhabited the region is unknown because
writing did not emerge in the Americas for 2,000 more years. Some
archeologists call them followers of the Kotosh religious tradition.
Others call them late pre-ceramic cultures of the central coast. For
brevity, most simply call them Andeans.
Benfer and archeologist Bernardino Ojeda of Peru’s National Agrarian
University have been working at Buena Vista for four years. The site
contains ruins dating from 10,000 years ago to well into the ceramic
era in the first millennium BC.
The large pyramid and a temple occupy about 2 acres near the center
of the site. Radiocarbon dating of cotton and burned twigs found in
the temple’s offering pit place its use at about 2200 BC.
That is about 400 years after the first pyramid was built in Egypt
and about the same time that the peoples who would become the Greeks
were settling into the Mediterranean region.
The temple is built of rock that was covered with plaster and
painted, although most of the white and red paint has long since
flaked off.
Benfer calls it the Temple of the Fox because a drawing of a fox is
carved inside a painted picture of another animal, probably a llama,
beside each doorway. According to Andean myth, the fox taught people
how to cultivate and irrigate plants.
As the team mapped out the site, Benfer observed that a person
standing in the doorway of the temple and gazing through a small,
flap-covered window behind the altar is aligned with a small head
carved onto a notch of a distant hill. The line had an orientation of
114 degrees from true north, pointing southeast.
Benfer does not normally deal with archeoastronomy — the science of
ancient astronomy — so he contacted a childhood friend, Larry Adkins
of Tustin, and asked him what that angle signified.
Adkins, a physicist who is retired from Rockwell International and
who now teaches astronomy at Cerritos College, told him 114 degrees
pointed the way to sunrise on the Southern Hemisphere’s summer
solstice, Dec. 21, the longest day of the year.
“That really got the ball rolling,” Adkins said.
The summer solstice marks planting time, as the Rio Chillon begins
its annual flooding, fed by melting ice higher up in the Andes. The
flooding deposits fresh soil on the land, fertilizing the crops and
eliminating the need for manure from domestic animals.
“This was the beginning of flood-plain agriculture,” Benfer said. He
thinks fishermen from the coast originally moved to the site to grow
cotton for use in making fishing nets.
The large frowning disk sits near the door to the temple. It is made
of mud plaster and grass and covered with a fine surface of clay.
Benfer speculates that the sculpture represents Pacha Mamma, the most
important god of the Andes. He acknowledges the difficulty of proving
that, however, because the next known sculpture of the mother goddess
does not appear until 800 BC.
“The disk would frown over the sunset on the winter solstice, the
last day of harvest,” Benfer said.
Alignments in the temple also pointed to the position at the summer
solstice of a constellation known in Andean culture as the fox,
Benfer said.
Unlike Western constellations, which are outlined by groupings of
stars, some Andean constellations were made from dark areas in the
sky that are gaps in the bright Milky Way.
Scientists once thought that the gaps represented a lack of stars,
but astronomers now know that they are caused by large clouds of dust
that block light from distant stars.
The so-called dark cloud constellation of the fox is well-known today
in the region, but archeoastronomer Anthony Aveni of Colgate
University doubted that it has maintained its shape for four
millenniums.
“He has an alignment. That’s neat,” Aveni said. But the idea that the
ancients were looking at the same constellation “is a bit of a leap
for me.”
Last summer, Benfer’s team also partially excavated a second
sculpture, that of a life-sized human figure playing a pipe. The
figure is sitting with its legs sculpted in high relief and hanging
over the edge of one of a series of short platforms that lead down to
what appears to be another temple.
The remaining 18 acres of the site have a variety of buildings, most
of them from later cultures, that include a ceremonial center,
stepped pyramids and what apparently was a residence center for
elites. Most of those have been looted.
Oval houses that probably served as homes for families of commoners
sit across a ravine from the main pyramid.
There were probably other buildings farther down the slopes, Benfer
said, “but the Chillon River removes everything from time to time.”
Evidence of pottery indicates that the site was inhabited for
centuries, but it is not yet clear whether or how it was eventually
abandoned.
“There were people in the valley at the time of the Spanish Conquest,
but they were of several ethnic groups,” Benfer said.
That suggests that the sophisticated civilization was eventually
replaced by small bands of farmers who immigrated from various areas.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
