Submitted by coldrum---
Robert Benfer (University of Missouri) and his team began excavating at Buena Vista in 2002. Two years later they uncovered the site's most notable feature, a ceremonial temple complex about 55 feet long. At the heart of the temple was an offering chamber about six feet deep and six feet wide. It was brimming with layers of partially burned grass; pieces of squash, guava and another native fruit called lucuma; guinea pig; a few mussel shells; and scraps of cotton fabric—all capped by river rocks. Carbon-dated burned twigs from the pit suggest the temple was completed more than 4,200 years ago. It was used until about 3,500 years ago, when these occupants apparently abandoned the settlement.
A few weeks before the end of the excavation season, the archaeologists cleared away rocks from an entrance to the temple and found themselves staring at a mural. It was staring back. A catlike eye was the first thing they saw, and when they exposed the rest of the mural they found that the eye belonged to a fox nestled inside the womb of a llama.
Within days, Duncan spied a prominent rock on a ridge to the east. It lined up with the center of the offering chamber, midway between its front and back openings. The rock appeared to have been shaped into the profile of a face and placed on the ridge. It occurred to Benfer that the temple may have been built to track the movements of the sun and stars.
He and his colleagues consulted astronomer Larry Adkins of Cerritos College in Norwalk, California. Adkins calculated that 4,200 years ago, on the summer solstice, the sun would have risen over the rock when viewed from the temple. And in the hours before dawn on the summer solstice, a starry fox constellation would have risen between two other large rocks that were placed on the same ridge.
Because the fox has been a potent symbol among many indigenous South Americans, representing water and cultivation, Benfer speculates that the temple's fox mural and apparent orientation to the fox constellation are clues to the structure's significance. He proposes that the "Temple of the Fox" functioned as a calendar, and that the people of Buena Vista used the temple to honor the deities and ask for good harvests—or good fishing—on the summer solstice, the beginning of the flooding season of the nearby Chillón River.
The idea of a stone calendar is further supported, the researchers say, by their 2005 discovery near the main temple of a mud plaster sculpture, three feet in diameter, of a frowning face. It resembles the sun, or maybe the moon, and is flanked by two animals, perhaps foxes. The face looks westward, oriented to the location of sunset on the winter solstice.
Other archaeologists are still evaluating the research, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal. But if Benfer is right, the Temple of the Fox is the oldest known structure in the New World used as a calendar.
For his part, Neil Duncan, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, says he maintains "a bit of scientific skepticism" about the temple's function as a calendar, even though, he says, that view supports his side in the debate about early Peruvian civilization. Calendars, after all, "coincide with agricultural societies." And referring to the vegetable-stuffed offering pit, he asks, "Why else would you build such a ceremonial temple and make offerings that were mostly plants?"
For more, including the disagreement between Benfer and Duncan on the origins of Peru's pre-ceramic cultures, see the Smithsonian.
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