Archaeologica.org

The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been found, suggesting the existence of early, sophisticated Sun cults, scientists report.....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6408231.stm

"I was gobsmacked when I saw them for the first time - the array of towers covers the entire solar arc."

Here we go with that divided by common laguage thing, again.

Would one of the Brits define "gobsmacked" please?

The towers span the annual rising and setting arcs of the Sun, providing a solar calendar to mark special dates.

We discussed this concept ages ago in relation to all those neolithic stone circles in Europe. You don't need a whole circle to track the sun. The economy version would be three rocks and a chair. The chair to sit in and one stone to mark each of the solstices and one to mark the equinox.

Two sticks. One in the ground and the other to mark the shadows. Although this is not as enduring or manly as a big stone circle when it comes to impressing your neighbors.

Gobsmacked! Lousy English for speechless. Gob is Yorkshire dialect for mouth.

Not much has changed astronomically in the last 2300 years. There is a very slight change in the angle of the ecliptic and classical precession does not effect the apparent position of the sun and moon. If these sites were aligned to natural solar or lunar cycles, 2 millenia ago, they would continue to be aligned today ( a few 10ths of a degree notwithstanding) so its easy to verify.

Since there are so many of these ancient calendars around why do the archaeologists and anthropologists always find it so astonishing when another is discovered?

Why Monk, does a farmer, priest, king, etc need a circle of stones, posts, holes etc to establish the time to plant or harvest, a priest to repeat a ceremony, a king to collect an annual tax?
The idea that Stone Henge, for example, was to enable any of the above has always struck me as total rubbish.
Once the basics are worked out what's wrong with counting days?

Good question Digit and you are right about counting days. It works fine for us today.

At the risk of making this a stonehenge thread, I didn't realize anyone could say with certainty how stonehenge was used. For example, it is a fact that the famous heel stone does not align perfectly with the summer solstice; some believe the alignment may have actually been southwest, and some think it had no astronomical use whatsoever.

Maybe they couldn't count?

That was why Monk I said 'for example'. In my time Stonehenge has been 'proved' to be everything from a solar calender, through lunar calender, to an old Druids meeting place, to the entry to the underworld.
Any farmer who uses a calender to plant by is shortly going to be looking for another job!

Digit wrote:That was why Monk I said 'for example'. In my time Stonehenge has been 'proved' to be everything from a solar calender, through lunar calender, to an old Druids meeting place, to the entry to the underworld.
Any farmer who uses a calender to plant by is shortly going to be looking for another job!

Oh. Ok.
I guess we are saying the same thing, then.

I think this structure in Peru is quite astonishing. Look at it as art or as architecture. It is stunningly beautiful. (Something I have never thought
about Stonehenge.) Something big was going on there in Peru, that we
still don't have much of a handle on.

I think this one is interesting because the builders accomodated the natural shape of a hill or ridge into their calendar. If they had been
"scientific" like us enlightened people of today, they would have scraped the hill off flat to correspond to the horizon.
Yet they built this thing across the top of an irregularly shaped ridge.
Since the sun "moves" obliquely to the horizon, not straight up, it would have encountered the variable-height gaps at different times and places
relatively to the absolute time and place of sunrise on a month or day or whatever.

I think the need to predict or to establish special days or times of year is cultural, having to do with religious ceremonies and celebrations, and , yes, as a means of controlling society, if you will..just like the clock and calendar today.

Aesthetically, compare this imaginative structure, built of small stones, to the ungainly, elephantine masses of stonehenge. Who was smarter, or more imaginative?

Hi Stan, having visted some of the circles and so on I, as an engineer, confess to being impressed.
But having walked around some of them, read about them, seen virtual and actual reconstructions of some I can still see no 'practical' purpose to them.
I am therefore forced to accept in my own mind that their purpose was mystical.
As in the thread about grave goods I suggested many practices from the past can only be understood by understanding the mind set of the people from the past.
'The proper study for man is mankind.'
A person visiting today from the 23 C and shown a a disused railway track would probably have a good crack at working out its purpose, but a person from 5000yrs in the future?
With no records to go by, I wonder.
The fact that so many different ideas have been advanced for some of the structures demonstrates that we simply do understand our ancestors well enough yet.

For anyone interested, this link will give you google earth coordinates and info of the Peruvian sites including Chankillo.
http://www.jqjacobs.net/archaeo/sites/casma.kmz

Good observation about the hill profile and tower spacing, Stan. And yet in the photos the spacing appears very regular. Makes ya wonder doesn't it?