Archaeologists Busy in South America
There's been announcements of two important archaelogical discoveries in the last few weeks with a pre-colonial astrological observatory possibly 2,000 years old in the Amazon basin near French Guiana, and the discovery in Peru of a 4,200-year-old temple and observatory. The observatory has been dubbed the "Amazon Stonehenge" and was built of 127 blocks of granite each three meters (10 feet) high and regularly placed in circles in an open field.
Archaeologist Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (IEPA), told O Globo newspaper...
Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a monument. The site resembles a temple which could have been used as an observatory, because the blocks are positioned to mark the winter solstice. In December, the path of the sun allows rays to pass through a hole in one of the blocks, possibly to calculate agricultural activity and religious rituals.
The discovery is in Calcoene, 390 kilometers (240 miles) from Macapa, the capital of Amapa state, near Brazil's border with French Guyana.
Archaeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the oldest known 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-tall pyramid with precise alignments and sightlines that provide an astronomical calendar for agriculture, archaeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri said.
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