[Aztlan] MORE ON THE TEMPLE OF THE FOX FROM THE SMITHSONIAN

[michael ruggeri]

The New World's Oldest Calendar
Research at a 4,200-year-old temple in Peru yields clues to an  
ancient people who may have clocked the heavens
By Anne Bolen


They were excavating at Buena Vista, an ancient settlement in the  
foothills of the Andes an hour's drive north of Lima, Peru. A dozen  
archaeology students hauled rocks out of a sunken temple and lobbed  
them to each other in a human chain. Suddenly, Bernardino Ojeda, a  
Peruvian archaeologist, called for the students to stop. He had  
spotted bits of tan rope poking out of the rubble in the temple's  
central room. Ojeda handed his protégés small paintbrushes and showed  
them how to whisk away centuries of dirt. From the sickeningly sweet  
odor, he suspected that the rope wasn't the only thing buried beneath  
the rocks: most likely, it was wrapped around a corpse.

"Burials here have a distinctive smell," says Neil Duncan, an  
anthropologist at the University of Missouri, "even after 4,000 years."

The crew spent the rest of the day uncovering the remains, those of a  
woman in her late 40s, her body mummified by the dry desert climate.  
Two intertwined ropes, one of braided llama wool and the other of  
twisted cotton, bound her straw shroud, bundling the skeleton in the  
fetal position typical of ancient Peruvian burials. Nearby, the  
researchers found a metal pendant that they believe she wore.

The mummy—the only complete set of human remains yet recovered from  
Buena Vista—may play a role in a crucial debate about the origin of  
civilization in Peru. The excavation's leader, Robert Benfer, also of  
the University of Missouri, is analyzing bones from the site for  
signs of what people ate or the sort of work they did. He hopes the  
analyses will shed light on a controversial theory: that these  
ancient Peruvians established a complex, sedentary society relying  
not just on agriculture—long viewed as the catalyst for the first  
permanent settlements worldwide—but also on fishing. If so, Benfer  
says, "Peru is the only exception to how civilizations developed  
4,000 to 5,000 years ago."

As it happens, one of his liveliest foils in this debate is Neil  
Duncan, his collaborator and Missouri colleague. Both agree that some  
farming and some fishing took place here. But the two disagree about  
how important each was to the ancient Peruvians' diet and way of  
life. Duncan says these people must have grown many plants for food,  
given evidence that they also grew cotton (for fishing nets) and  
gourds (for floats). Benfer counters that a few useful plants do not  
an agriculturalist make: "Only when plants become a prominent part of  
your diet do you become a farmer."

Benfer 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, Duncan 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?"

But Benfer hasn't given up on the theory that ancient Peruvians  
sustained themselves in large part from the sea. How else to explain  
all the fish bones and shells found at the site? And, he says, crops  
would fail if the fickle Chillón River did not overflow its banks and  
saturate the desert nearby, or if it flooded too much. "It's  
difficult to make it just on plants," he says.

So even after several seasons' worth of discoveries, Benfer and  
Duncan are still debating—collegially. As Benfer puts it, "I like it  
that his biases are different than mine."

Anne Bolen, a former staff member, is now managing editor of Geotimes.