top of page
Search

The Temple of the Fox

May 5, 2006
5 min read

The Andes reveal a few more secrets. Photo by Luis Perez.

Meanwhile half a world away there’s news of what might be the earliest known astronomical alignment and sculptures in the New World. The story has been covered by the Columbia Missourian and nobody else. It connects a temple in southern Peru and a figure in the Milky Way. And there’s a twist – this story is plausible.

The Columbia Missourian story has a few oddities in it and I haven’t read Inca archaeology recently so I’m rusty between my ignorance and possible misreporting the story seemed peculiar. Fortunately you can visit the Buena Vista project homepage and also download some of the presentations for the site (in Spanish in a large powerpoint file, but with nice pictures). They’ve found something quite special.

What they’ve found is a temple that barely escaped the attention of looters procurers of authentic antiquities. It has an axial alignment which looks out to north of west. In the southern hemisphere this is the midwinter sunset alignment. By itself that would be interesting but not something I could get too excited about. If the temple has an axis then it has to point somewhere. The reason why this is more interesting is that they say that this pattern is found in similar temples in the region, which suggests it’s more likely to be deliberate. The truly unusual thing is what you see looking in the other direction. If the horizon was flat you’d see the midsummer sunrise. What you also see is the dark cloud constellation of the Fox.

The Fox

Above, somewhere above anyway, is the dark cloud constellation of the Fox. It’s a constellation known in the Andes where the air is often clear and detail can be seen in the Milky Way. In this case you’re looking for a figure between Scorpio and Sagittarius with, if memory serves, two eyes. If you click on the image it’ll take you to the Flickr page with notes. Look along the temple and, as well as the midsummer sunrise, you’ll see the Fox.

My first reaction was “so what?” Why couldn’t the other alignment be solar if the first one was. The reason why it might not be is that this temple is decorated with animal carvings. These have been interpreted as foxes, so this could be one of the few cases where ancient peoples have handily put in a big sign telling us what the temple was about. I can’t judge whether this bit of the argument is plausible. There’s a bit more to ancient art than having a quick dekko and deciding that it quite looks like something. There’s a lot of work in analysing Andean iconography and I simply don’t have the knowledge to say how likely it is that these are foxes.

Benfer argues that this would have been a significant alignment on March 21, because the Fox would have risen there at the equinox. This is the only bit of his presentation that I struggle with. It would, but being a constellation it would rise in that direction every day of the year. Further I don’t see the constellation doing anything particularly interesting in March, so I can’t see why the Fox becomes more significant at March 21. It is however doing something very interesting in early November. It’s rising in the same place, but it’s rising just before the Sun. It’s returning to the night sky after a period of obscurity and when it return the Sun does something really weird. It casts no shadow at noon.

If, like me, you live north of the tropics then the longest day of the year is when things cast their shortest shadow at noon. This is because the sun is as high as it gets in the sky. The next day the sun is slightly further south and the shadow is slightly longer at the next noon. There’s a similar effect if you live south of the tropics. The closer you are to the tropics the shorter the shadow gets. At the North Pole the shadows are quite long even at the height of summer because the sun is still low in the sky. But if you were standing on the Tropic of Cancer on the longest day in the northern hemisphere then the sun would be directly overhead at noon. A light shining down from overhead casts no shadow. Places like Buena Vista, in the tropics, have two days when the Sun casts no shadow and the rising Fox marks the event shortly before the summer solstice. The next event follows about a month after the summer solstice.

That’s an astronomical curiosity, but it was also known to be of interest to the Incas. Garcilaso de la Vega mentions it in his book as being of interest and that’s why the city of Quito was considered special, because this no shadow day fell at the equinox. The only problem left is how much we can take Inca astronomy back to this temple. Garcilaso de la Vega and the other Spanish chroniclers date from 16th century AD and this temple is old.

The temple Robert Benfer has found dates from around 2,200 BC. The date is based on carbon dating of twigs found on site. Because the site has been excavated carefully and the excavators know where these twigs were found they can say that the buildings under them have to be around or earlier than that date. If the twigs had been disturbed by looters or scooped by bulldozer, they would have been worthless.

This early date makes the temple an enigma. Were the people who built this practicing astronomy in a similar way to people three thousand years later when the Spanish arrived. Certainly we have three-thousand year old constellations in our night sky, but we have writing. Is writing necessary for high-fidelity transmission, or was the iconography of the Andes so sophisticated that writing wasn’t necessary. The Inca were unusual in having a major empire but no writing, possibly encoding complex information in strings called quipu.

If you like ancient mysteries then Robert Benfer seems to have dug up a treasure trove of them. If it had been pyramid shaped then perhaps some other news organisations would have covered it too.

Update: It’s made a couple of appearances in the media since I posted this. Orbis Quintus has the LA Times story, which I hadn’t seen.

It’s spread slowly across the news sites, you can now read about it at:

—–

 
 
 

Recent Posts

See All

Comments

bottom of page