Andean temple discovery ranks as top science story

MU students are part of a team credited with uncovering important ancient treasures.

A discovery by Professor Emeritus Bob Benfer, Anthropology, is cited as one of the top 100 science stories for 2006. Discover magazine’s "The Year in Science" issue ranks Benfer’s unearthing of a 4,000-year-old Andean temple as 54th.

Benfer led an excavation team, including 11 Mizzou students, that unearthed the Temple of the Fox and some unusual sculptures at a site near Buena Vista, Peru, in 2004.

The 33-foot stepped-pyramid temple is 1,000 years older than anything of its kind previously found. The mud-plaster artifacts — known as sculptures in the round — can be viewed from many angles.

Benfer believes the sculptures represent some of the earliest astronomical alignments, with ties to an agricultural calendar and Andean myth. Researchers are particularly interested in the possibility that the astronomical alignments mark important farming dates. Such a discovery would suggest that people organized their lives around Andean constellations.

News of the Buena Vista discovery appeared in most major national newspapers as well as magazines such as National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine and was featured by media in the United Kingdom, Australia and India. The National Geographic Society was a backer of the dig, supporting the conservation of the sculpture.

Benfer has presented his findings in a series of lectures sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America. Now 67, he retired in 2003 after 34 years of teaching. Despite the challenging red tape involved in working on international projects, he wanted to devote more time to fieldwork.

"Field schools are a lot of fun, but they’re exhausting," Benfer says. "We moved rock and dirt from an area that was 14 feet by 20 feet long by 12 feet. That’s a lot to move, and the site is on the side of a very steep hill that’s 1,200 feet from bottom to top. We were going up and down four times a day."

In addition to the temple and sculptures, the team found mummified remains of two people, hearths, cooking pits, intact vessels, pottery sherds and many plants, which provided material for carbon dating to determine the age of the artifacts.

For anthropology students, especially undergraduates, the experience of uncovering important artifacts during a field school is in itself a lifelong treasure.

"The archaeological significance of what we found is more than I could have imagined," says field director Neil Duncan, an anthropology graduate student who has been involved for five years, from the beginning. Duncan says that students who work on such an excavation will remember it for the rest of their lives.

Links:

Bob Benfer
Buena Vista Archaeological Project
Department of Anthropology

Discover magazine
National Geographic Society
Archaeological Institute of America