Ancient Brazilian tribes 'charted the heavens'
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
The Independent, 29 June 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1129732.ece
Did the early indigenous peoples of the rainforest look to the
stars to
measure time and mark the passage of the seasons? Archaeologists
believe they did.
This photograph shows what is being called the tropical Stonehenge, a
grouping of 127 granite blocks, each 10ft high and spaced at
regular intervals around
a grassy hilltop in northern Brazil. On the winter solstice, 21
December, the
shadow of one of the blocks disappears, leading experts to believe the
formation was used as a calendar.
"Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a
monument,"
said Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of Scientific and
Technological
Research.
The blocks are located near the village of Calcoene, in Amapa
state, close to
the border with French Guiana. Ms Cabral believes that the site was
once
inhabited by the Palikur Indians and says pottery discovered there
may be more
than 2,000 years old.
Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of
Florida, said it
was a novel find. "The traditional image is that some time
thousands of years
ago small groups of tropical forest horticulturists arrived in the
area and
they never changed - [that] what we see today is just like it was
3,000 years
ago."
Did the early indigenous peoples of the rainforest look to the
stars to
measure time and mark the passage of the seasons? Archaeologists
believe they did.
This photograph shows what is being called the tropical Stonehenge, a
grouping of 127 granite blocks, each 10ft high and spaced at
regular intervals around
a grassy hilltop in northern Brazil. On the winter solstice, 21
December, the
shadow of one of the blocks disappears, leading experts to believe the
formation was used as a calendar.
"Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a
monument,"
said Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of Scientific and
Technological
Research.
The blocks are located near the village of Calcoene, in Amapa
state, close to
the border with French Guiana. Ms Cabral believes that the site was
once
inhabited by the Palikur Indians and says pottery discovered there
may be more
than 2,000 years old.
Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of
Florida, said it
was a novel find. "The traditional image is that some time
thousands of years
ago small groups of tropical forest horticulturists arrived in the
area and
they never changed - [that] what we see today is just like it was
3,000 years
ago."
-----------------
Apparent Observatory Found in Brazil
By STAN LEHMAN
http://channels.netscape.com/celebrity/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/
0001/20060627/1
701371426.htm
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - A grouping of granite blocks along a
grassy Amazon
hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old astronomical
observatory - a
find archaeologists say indicates early rainforest inhabitants were
more
sophisticated than previously believed.
The 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet tall, are spaced at regular
intervals
around the hill, like a crown 100 feet in diameter.
On the shortest day of the year - Dec. 21 - the shadow of one of
the blocks
disappears when the sun is directly above it.
``It is this block's alignment with the winter solstice that leads
us to
believe the site was once an astronomical observatory,'' said
Mariana Petry
Cabral, an archaeologist at the Amapa State Scientific and
Technical Research
Institute. ``We may be also looking at the remnants of a
sophisticated culture.''
Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous populations
were acute
observers of the stars and sun. But the discovery of a physical
structure that
appears to incorporate this knowledge suggests pre-Colombian
Indians in the
Amazon rainforest may have been more sophisticated than previously
suspected.
``Transforming this kind of knowledge into a monument; the
transformation of
something ephemeral into something concrete, could indicate the
existence of a
larger population and of a more complex social organization,''
Cabral said.
Cabral has been studying the site, near the village of Calcoene,
just north
of the equator in Amapa state in far northern Brazil, since last
year. She
believes it was once inhabited by the ancestors of the Palikur
Indians, and while
the blocks have not yet been submitted to carbon dating, she says
pottery
shards near the site indicate they are pre-Columbian and maybe
older - as much as
2,000 years old.
Last month, archaeologists working on a hillside north of Lima, Peru,
announced the discovery of the oldest astronomical observatory in
the Western
Hemisphere - giant stone carvings, apparently 4,200 years old, that
align with
sunrise and sunset on Dec. 21.
While the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs built large cities and huge rock
structures, pre-Columbian Amazon societies built smaller
settlements of wood and clay
that quickly deteriorated in the hot, humid Amazon climate,
disappearing
centuries ago, archaeologists say.
Farmers and fishermen in the region around the Amazon site have
long known
about it, and the local press has dubbed it the ``tropical
Stonehenge.''
Archeologists got involved last year after geographers and
geologists did a
socio-economic survey of the area, by foot and helicopter, and
noticed ``the unique
circular structure on top of the hill,'' Cabral said.
Scientists not involved in the discovery said it could prove
valuable to
understanding pre-Colombian societies in the Amazon.
``No one has ever described something like this before. This is an
extremely
novel find - a one of a kind type of thing,'' said Michael
Heckenberger of the
University of Florida's Department of Anthropology.
He said that while carbon dating and further excavation must be
carried out,
the find adds to a growing body of thought among archaeologists that
prehistory in the Amazon region was more varied than had been
believed.
``Given that astronomical objects, stars, constellations etc., have
a major
importance in much of Amazonian mythology and cosmology, it does
not in any way
surprise me that such an observatory exists,'' said Richard
Callaghan, a
professor of geography, anthropology and archaeology at the
University of Calgary.
Brazilian archaeologists will return in August, when the rainy
season ends,
to carry out carbon dating and further excavations.
``The traditional image is that some time thousands of years ago
small groups
of tropical forest horticulturists arrived in the area and they
never changed
- (that) what we see today is just like it was 3,000 years ago,''
Heckenberger said. ``This is one more thing that suggests that
through the past thousands
of years, societies have changed quite a lot.''
© Copyright The Associated Press
-------------------------
Celestial Find
at Ancient Andes Site
The discovery in PERU of a 4,200-year-old temple/observatory pushes
back
estimates of the rise of an advanced culture in the Americas.
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer
May 14, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-
observatory14may14,0,3343
915.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Archeologists 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, archeologist Robert Benfer of the University of
Missouri said.
The people who built the observatory — three millenniums before the
emergence
of the Incas — are a mystery, but they achieved a level of art and
science
that archeologists 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," said
archeologist Richard
L. Burger of Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History,
who was not
involved in the discovery.
The find adds strong evidence to support 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 BC.
Benfer's discovery "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," said archeologist Michael Moseley of
the University
of Florida, a noted Peru expert.
The 20-acre site, called Buena Vista, is 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," said Benfer, who
presented the
find last month in Puerto Rico at a meeting of the Society for
American
Archeology.
The site is remarkably well preserved, Benfer said, because it
rains in the
area only about once a year.
The name of the people who inhabited the region is unknown because
writing
did not emerge in the Americas for 2,000 more years. Some
archeologists 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 archeologist Bernardino Ojeda of Peru's National Agrarian
University have been working at Buena Vista for four years. The
site contains ruins
dating from 10,000 years ago to well into the ceramic era in the first
millennium BC.
The large pyramid and a temple occupy about 2 acres near the center
of the
site. Radiocarbon dating of cotton and burned twigs found in the
temple's
offering pit place its use at about 2200 BC.
That is about 400 years after the first pyramid was built in Egypt
and about
the same time that the peoples who would become the Greeks were
settling into
the Mediterranean region.
The temple is built of rock that was covered with plaster and painted,
although most of the white and red paint has long since flaked off.
Benfer calls it the Temple of the Fox because a drawing of a fox is
carved
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 observed 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
southeast.
Benfer does not normally deal with archeoastronomy — the science of
ancient
astronomy — so he contacted a childhood friend, Larry Adkins of
Tustin, and
asked him what that angle signified.
Adkins, a physicist who is retired from Rockwell International and
who now
teaches astronomy at Cerritos College, told him 114 degrees pointed
the way to
sunrise on the Southern Hemisphere's summer solstice, Dec. 21, the
longest day
of the year.
"That really got the ball rolling," Adkins said.
The summer solstice marks planting time, as the Rio Chillon begins
its annual
flooding, fed by melting ice higher up in the Andes. The flooding
deposits
fresh soil on the land, fertilizing the crops and eliminating the
need for
manure from domestic animals.
-------------------------------1151564901
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<H1>Ancient Brazilian tribes 'charted the heavens' <SPAN
class=starrating></SPAN></H1>
<H3>By Andrew Buncombe in Washington </H3>
<H4>The Independent, 29 June 2006 </H4>
<DIV><A href="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/
article1129732.ece">http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/
article1129732.ece</A></DIV>
<DIV class=bodyCopy>
<DIV class=articleButton>
<DIV class=ad id=articlebutton></DIV></DIV>
<DIV id=bodyCopyContent style="DISPLAY: none">
<P>Did the early indigenous peoples of the rainforest look to the
stars to measure time and mark the passage of the seasons?
Archaeologists believe they did. </P>
<P>This photograph shows what is being called the tropical
Stonehenge, a grouping of 127 granite blocks, each 10ft high and
spaced at regular intervals around a grassy hilltop in northern
Brazil. On the winter solstice, 21 December, the shadow of one of
the blocks disappears, leading experts to believe the formation was
used as a calendar.</P>
<P>"Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a
monument," said Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of
Scientific and Technological Research.</P>
<P>The blocks are located near the village of Calcoene, in Amapa
state, close to the border with French Guiana. Ms Cabral believes
that the site was once inhabited by the Palikur Indians and says
pottery discovered there may be more than 2,000 years old.</P>
<P>Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of
Florida, said it was a novel find. "The traditional image is that
some time thousands of years ago small groups of tropical forest
horticulturists arrived in the area and they never changed - [that]
what we see today is just like it was 3,000 years ago." </P></DIV>
<DIV class=articleColumn1 id=articleColumn1 style="DISPLAY: block">
<P>Did the early indigenous peoples of the rainforest look to the
stars to measure time and mark the passage of the seasons?
Archaeologists believe they did. </P>
<P>This photograph shows what is being called the tropical
Stonehenge, a grouping of 127 granite blocks, each 10ft high and
spaced at regular intervals around a grassy hilltop in northern
Brazil. On the winter solstice, 21 December, the shadow of one of
the blocks disappears, leading experts to believe the formation was
used as a calendar.</P>
<P>"Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a
monument," said Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of
Scientific and Technological Research.</P></DIV>
<DIV class=articleColumn2 id=articleColumn2 style="DISPLAY: block">
<P>The blocks are located near the village of Calcoene, in Amapa
state, close to the border with French Guiana. Ms Cabral believes
that the site was once inhabited by the Palikur Indians and says
pottery discovered there may be more than 2,000 years old.</P>
<P>Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of
Florida, said it was a novel find. "The traditional image is that
some time thousands of years ago small groups of tropical forest
horticulturists arrived in the area and they never changed - [that]
what we see today is just like it was 3,000 years ago." </P>
<P>-----------------</P>
<P> </P>
<DIV class=ffcopy>
<DIV class=Atitleb><B><FONT size=5>Apparent Observatory Found in
Brazil</FONT></B></DIV>
<DIV class=Atitleb><STRONG><FONT size=5></FONT></STRONG></
FONT><BR>By STAN LEHMAN </DIV></DIV>
<P><A href="http://channels.netscape.com/celebrity/story.jsp?idq=/
ff/story/0001/20060627/1701371426.htm">http://channels.netscape.com/
celebrity/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/0001/20060627/1701371426.htm</
A><BR></P>
<P>SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - A grouping of granite blocks along a
grassy Amazon hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old
astronomical observatory - a find archaeologists say indicates
early rainforest inhabitants were more sophisticated than
previously believed.
<P>The 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet tall, are spaced at
regular intervals around the hill, like a crown 100 feet in diameter.
<P>On the shortest day of the year - Dec. 21 - the shadow of one of
the blocks disappears when the sun is directly above it.
<P>``It is this block's alignment with the winter solstice that
leads us to believe the site was once an astronomical
observatory,'' said Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist at the
Amapa State Scientific and Technical Research Institute. ``We may
be also looking at the remnants of a sophisticated culture.''
<P>Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous
populations were acute observers of the stars and sun. But the
discovery of a physical structure that appears to incorporate this
knowledge suggests pre-Colombian Indians in the Amazon rainforest
may have been more sophisticated than previously suspected.
<P>``Transforming this kind of knowledge into a monument; the
transformation of something ephemeral into something concrete,
could indicate the existence of a larger population and of a more
complex social organization,'' Cabral said.
<P>Cabral has been studying the site, near the village of Calcoene,
just north of the equator in Amapa state in far northern Brazil,
since last year. She believes it was once inhabited by the
ancestors of the Palikur Indians, and while the blocks have not yet
been submitted to carbon dating, she says pottery shards near the
site indicate they are pre-Columbian and maybe older - as much as
2,000 years old.
<P>Last month, archaeologists working on a hillside north of Lima,
Peru, announced the discovery of the oldest astronomical
observatory in the Western Hemisphere - giant stone carvings,
<STRONG><U>apparently 4,200 years old</U></STRONG>, that align with
sunrise and sunset on Dec. 21.
<P>While the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs built large cities and huge
rock structures, pre-Columbian Amazon societies built smaller
settlements of wood and clay that quickly deteriorated in the hot,
humid Amazon climate, disappearing centuries ago, archaeologists say.
<P>Farmers and fishermen in the region around the Amazon site have
long known about it, and the local press has dubbed it the
``tropical Stonehenge.'' Archeologists got involved last year after
geographers and geologists did a socio-economic survey of the area,
by foot and helicopter, and noticed ``the unique circular structure
on top of the hill,'' Cabral said.
<P>Scientists not involved in the discovery said it could prove
valuable to understanding pre-Colombian societies in the Amazon.
<P>``No one has ever described something like this before. This is
an extremely novel find - a one of a kind type of thing,'' said
Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida's Department of
Anthropology.
<P>He said that while carbon dating and further excavation must be
carried out, the find adds to a growing body of thought among
archaeologists that prehistory in the Amazon region was more varied
than had been believed.
<P>``Given that astronomical objects, stars, constellations etc.,
have a major importance in much of Amazonian mythology and
cosmology, it does not in any way surprise me that such an
observatory exists,'' said Richard Callaghan, a professor of
geography, anthropology and archaeology at the University of Calgary.
<P>Brazilian archaeologists will return in August, when the rainy
season ends, to carry out carbon dating and further excavations.
<P>``The traditional image is that some time thousands of years ago
small groups of tropical forest horticulturists arrived in the area
and they never changed - (that) what we see today is just like it
was 3,000 years ago,'' Heckenberger said. ``This is one more thing
that suggests that through the past thousands of years, societies
have changed quite a lot.''
<P><SPAN class=readmore>© Copyright The Associated Press</SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN class=readmore>-------------------------</SPAN></P><SPAN
class=readmore>
<H1 align=center>Celestial Find </H1>
<H1 align=center>at Ancient Andes Site</H1>
<DIV class=storysubhead><FONT size=3><STRONG><EM>The discovery in
PERU of a <U>4,200-year-old</U> temple/observatory pushes back
estimates of the rise of an advanced culture in the Americas</EM></
STRONG>.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV class=storysubhead> </DIV>
<DIV class=storybyline>By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff
Writer<BR>May 14, 2006 </DIV>
<P><A href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-
observatory14may14,0,3343915.story?coll=la-home-headlines">http://
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-
observatory14may14,0,3343915.story?coll=la-home-headlines</A></P>
<P>Archeologists 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. <BR><BR>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, archeologist Robert Benfer of the University of
Missouri said.<BR></P>
<P>The people who built the observatory — three millenniums before
the emergence of the Incas — are a mystery, but they achieved a
level of art and science that archeologists say they did not know
existed in the region until at least 800 years later.<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>"It's really quite a shock to everyone … to see
sculptures of that sophistication coming out of a building of that
time period," said archeologist Richard L. Burger of Yale
University's Peabody Museum of Natural History, who was not
involved in the discovery.<BR><BR>The find adds strong evidence to
support 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 BC.<BR><BR>Benfer's discovery
"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," said archeologist Michael Moseley of
the University of Florida, a noted Peru expert.<BR><BR>The 20-acre
site, called Buena Vista, is 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," said
Benfer, who presented the find last month in Puerto Rico at a
meeting of the Society for American Archeology. <BR><BR>The site is
remarkably well preserved, Benfer said, because it rains in the
area only about once a year. <BR><BR>The name of the people who
inhabited the region is unknown because writing did not emerge in
the Americas for 2,000 more years. Some archeologists 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.<BR><BR>Benfer and archeologist Bernardino Ojeda
of Peru's National Agrarian University have been working at Buena
Vista for four years. The site contains ruins dating from 10,000
years ago to well into the ceramic era in the first millennium
BC.<BR><BR>The large pyramid and a temple occupy about 2 acres near
the center of the site. Radiocarbon dating of cotton and burned
twigs found in the temple's offering pit place its use at about
2200 BC. <BR><BR>That is about 400 years after the first pyramid
was built in Egypt and about the same time that the peoples who
would become the Greeks were settling into the Mediterranean
region. <BR><BR>The temple is built of rock that was covered with
plaster and painted, although most of the white and red paint has
long since flaked off.<BR><BR>Benfer calls it the Temple of the Fox
because a drawing of a fox is carved 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.<BR><BR>As the team mapped out the site, Benfer observed
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
southeast.<BR><BR>Benfer does not normally deal with
archeoastronomy — the science of ancient astronomy — so he
contacted a childhood friend, Larry Adkins of Tustin, and asked him
what that angle signified. <BR><BR>Adkins, a physicist who is
retired from Rockwell International and who now teaches astronomy
at Cerritos College, told him 114 degrees pointed the way to
sunrise on the Southern Hemisphere's summer solstice, Dec. 21, the
longest day of the year.<BR><BR>"That really got the ball rolling,"
Adkins said.<BR><BR>The summer solstice marks planting time, as the
Rio Chillon begins its annual flooding, fed by melting ice higher
up in the Andes. The flooding deposits fresh soil on the land,
fertilizing the crops and eliminating the need for manure from
domestic animals.<BR></P></SPAN>
<P><SPAN class=readmore></SPAN> </P></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>
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