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"Any building possessing a peculiar shape or orientation relative to other buildings at an archaeological site immediately arouses our astronomical suspicions. Could architect deliberately have shifted a wall or a doorway out of place in order to fix a sighting post to register a special celestial event? One of ancient America’s most peculiar buildings can be found at the ruins of Chichén Itza;. Yucatan’s major tourist attraction.

After the collapse of the Maya cities of the southern Yucatan peninsula about the tenth century A.D. , Chichén Itza; (it means the mouth of the well of the Itza;, one of the last people to settle it before Spanish contact), along with Uxmal and later Mayapan, grew into one of the post-Classic northern centers of power. Chichén then housed a hybrid culture that synthesized the styles and ideologies of old Maya ways together with an infusion of the Nahua-speaking, highly militaristic Toltec culture, which had expanded out of the highlands of central Mexico. Iconography there is rife with jaguars and eagles devouring human hearts along with the same feathered-serpent symbolism traceable all the way back to Teotihuacan. This was the culture that built the temple of Kukulcan with its four grand stairways capped by balustrades, down which the equinox sky serpent still descends; the Temple of the Warriors surrounded by colonnaded hallways; and Mesoamerica’s largest ballcourt, nearly 100 yards long, with its two stone rings positioned 27 feet high on surrounding vertical walls; and, of course the circular 190 foot wide, 130 foot deep half water-filled sinkhole (the “Well of Sacrifice”) that gave the site the first half of its names.

The Caracol tower of Chichén Itza is surely the most famous example of a cockeyed building. So beguiling are the Caracol’s asymmetries that archaeologist Sir Eric Thompson once remarked that “something must have bee wrong with the architectural taste of the people who built it!” The Caracol’s lack of aesthetic appeal (at least to some) is largely a result of its odd shape as well as its skew. This has led some investigators to suggest a functional motivation for this aspect of its design. It has been called the gnomon (a vertical shadow-casting device) of a huge sundial as well as a military watchtower, but all of the uses proposed, astronomical observations seem most successful in accounting for the peculiarities of its situation and orientation.

When I first visited the Caracol in 1970, the narrow shaftlike windows immediately attracted my attention. Archaeologists in the 1930s who undertook the first thorough excavations there had measured several alignments taken along the jambs. Being unacquainted with tropical skies, they sent their data for analysis to the U.S. government’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, which shot back the opinion that some of the orientations may have been intended to mark lunar standstills. This made little sense, for there had been no record of any alignments of other buildings in Mesoamerican building alignments pointing in these directions. Moreover, the measurementw we made I 1973-1975 revelaed angles that failed to match the lunistices. Despite its circular form, the Caracol clearly was not built with a Stonehenge type astronomy in mind.

The lower platform, the first building unit of the Caracol, was constructed by the Maya about A.D. 800. It is a rectangular area about 3,500 yards square. The large front stairway faces 27½ ° north of west, which puts it conspicuously out of line with the other buildings at the site. The sunset position at summer solstice lies with 2° of this direction, but an even closer match is provided by the northern standstill of Venus. Recall from our extended discussion of the motion of Venus in Chapter 2 that the planet will arrive at a particular horizon extreme every eight years and that its length of disappearance, which averages eight days, also caries with the seasons. Marking the Venus standstill could have proven useful to astronomers who wanted to predict when the morning star would arrive, and this information, as the Dresden Venus Table reveals, was their prime target.

Above the lower platform, embedded in the stairway of the upper platform, lies a niche containing an altar mounted by a pair of columns. The altar is aligned asymmetrically relative to the upper platform and it, too, points to the northern Venus extreme. The columns retain flecks of black and red paint. Red is the color associated with the place of appearance of Venus in the Dresden Table and black usually stands for west. Is it possible that the painted columns served as a monument to Venus in the east as morning and in the west as evening star?

To ascend to the top of the Caracol tower you need to crawl through a snaillike passageway that give Caracol its modern name. Up in the turret astronomers would have been able to make two more Venus observations. Three horizontal shaft emanate from a small rectangular chamber and look out onto the flat southern and western landscapes. While the largest will accommodate a person attempting to squeeze through, the other two shafts are so narrow that they leave little doubt regarding their function. Surely they were made to look through. The window jambs frame short segments of the southern and southwestern horizon. When archaeologist Oliver Ricketson analyzed the building for astronomical orientations in the 1920s, he was drawn to these peculiar windows built into the tower. He hypothesized that diagonal sightlines, for example from the inside right to outside left jamb of a window, could have been employed to accurately pinpoint the position of a horizon event. Our own later measurements (made in the mid 1970s) lend strong support to this hypothesis, particularly for the alignments of the inside left to outside right jambs of windows 1 and 2. We determined that these directions precisely marked the northerly and southerly standstills of Venus along the horizon."


Pages 134-138
Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures
Anthony Aveni