by Playfuls Staff |
2nd March 2007
Archeologists said they've solved the mystery of Peru's Thirteen Towers, a line of stone towers erected on the Peruvian [more] coast 2,400 years ago.
The Los Angeles Times reported that researchers determined the towers near Chankillo make up a huge solar observatory.
"It seems extraordinary that an ancient astronomical device as clear as this could have remained undiscovered for so long," Clive Ruggles, a professor of archeo-astronomy at the University of Leicester told the Times.
Ruggles is one of the authors of a paper on the Thirteen Towers in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The archeologists said the towers can be used to mark the solstices, the days of the week and the weeks of the year, the Times reported.
The Thirteen Towers is not the oldest such observatory. There is a 4,200-year-old observatory in Lima, Peru, the newspaper said.
"Unlike all the other sites, however, (Chankillo) contains alignments that cover the entire solar year," Ivan Ghezzi, who was a graduate student at Yale University when he helped research the towers but is now archeological director of the National Culture Institute in Lima, told the Times.
© 2007 UPI
