Above GATEWAY: Archeologist Robert Benfer’s team found this clay sculpture of a frowning face at the Buena Vista site near Lima, Peru. The disk, marks the position of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter solstice. (Robert Benfer / University of Missouri)

Celestial Find at Ancient Andes
May 14, 2006. Source: By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

Archaeology | Stonehenge-era celestial observatory oldest found in region.

Archeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the oldest 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-high pyramid with precise alignments and sight lines 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.

The discovery adds strong evidence to the recent idea that a sophisticated civilization developed in South America in the pre-ceramic era, before the development of fired pottery some time after 1500 B.C.

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 Archeology in Puerto Rico.

The site is remarkably well preserved, Benfer added, because it only rains in the area about once a year.

Benfer and archaeologist Bernardino Ojeda of Peru's National Agrarian University have been working at Buena Vista for four years. The entire 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 temple's 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 peoples 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 saw 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 Hemisphere's 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 up in the Andes.

"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.

• "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.

• 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.