Archaeologists find what could be Americas oldest observatory
Site in Andes likely helped mark planting times
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 Thomas H . Maugh II LOS ANGELES TIMES
Archaeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the oldest celestial observatory in the Americas: a structure marking the summer and winter solstices that, at 4,200 years, is as old as some of the pillars of Stonehenge.
The observatory was built on top of a 33-foot-high pyramid with precise alignments and sight lines that provide an astronomical calendar for agriculture, said archaeologist Robert Benfer, of the University of Missouri.
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 archaeologists say they did not know existed in the region until at least 800 years later.
Among the most impressive finds is 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.
"Its really quite a shock to everyone ... to see sculptures of that sophistication coming out of a building of that time period," said archaeologist Richard L. Burger, of Yale Universitys Peabody Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the project.
The discovery adds strong evidence to bolster 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 B.C.
Benfers find "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 archaeologist 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 at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Puerto Rico.
The site is remarkably well-preserved, Benfer added, 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 another 2,000 years. Some archaeologists 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 archaeologist Bernardino Ojeda, of Perus 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 B.C.
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 temples offering pit place its use at about 2200 B.C.
That is about 400 years after the first pyramid was built in Egypt and about the same time that the people who would become the Greeks were settling into the Mediterranean.
Benfer calls it the Temple of the Fox because a drawing of a fox is incised 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 just slightly south of east. That points to sunrise on the Southern Hemispheres summer solstice, Dec. 21, the longest day of the year.
Dec. 21 marks planting time, as the Rio Chillon begins its annual flooding, fed by melting ice higher in the Andes.
"This was the beginning of floodplain agriculture," Benfer said. He said he thinks fishermen from the coast originally moved to the site to grow cotton for use in making fishing nets.
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.
The remaining 18 acres of the site have a variety of buildings, most from later cultures, which include a ceremonial center, stepped pyramids, and an apparent elite residence center. Most of those have been looted.
Evidence of pottery indicates that the site was inhabited for centuries, but it is unclear 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 civilization was replaced by small bands of farmers who emigrated from various areas.