* Astronomy

Archaeologists 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.

According to archaeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri, 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.
The people who built the observatory -- three millennia 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 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" - Richard Burger, archaeologist at Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the discovery.

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 sometime after 1500 B.C.

Benfer's 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" - Michael Moseley, archaeologist, University of Florida, and noted Peru expert.

The 20-acre site, called Buena Vista, is located 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" - Richard Burger.

Richard Burger presented the find last month at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Puerto Rico.
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 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 centre 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.

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" - Richard Burger.

He thinks fishermen from the coast originally moved to the site to grow cotton for use in making fishing nets.

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