ON THE winter solstice in 2017, a team of researchers waited in the pre-dawn chill of the Atacama desert. Before them stood two square piles of stones, each about 1.2 metres (four feet) high. A row of three other cairns stretched out 500 metres to the east. This line of saywas—roughly, “markers” in Quechua, an indigenous Andean language—intersected diagonally with an ancient path, part of a road network built five centuries ago by the Incas. The sun rose directly behind the closest columns, appearing to rest briefly atop them.
“It was an extremely moving experience,” says Cecilia Sanhueza, a historian at Chile’s Pre-Columbian Art Museum in Santiago. Her findings were made public last month. The alignment of the stones with the sun’s rise supported her thesis that they were not just milestones. At least some of northern Chile’s saywas had the “astronomical function”...Continue reading
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