Every nation and every culture, before and after recorded history, created some type of sacred bond between heaven and earth. These sites could have begun as a life giving spring bubbling up from the ground or where a huge sacred oak was the most prominent object on a landscape. It was here the people gathered for sacred rituals and seasonal rites. Evenutally a structure would be erected to honor the sacred nature of a place. If the site became an important focal point to a people, a megalithic structure was quite often erected as a communal project. The Great Pyramids of Egypt in Africa, Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland are the most well known.

There are even sacred sites here in the Americas...

Central America
Yucatan - Circa 1100 CE

CHICHEN ITZA

This large Toltec/Mayan pyramid combines astronomical numerology; four sides and stairways, 52 sunken panels on each side, 91 steps to stairway plus the top level for a total of 365, and nine levels. An hour before sunset on the equinox, a light show begins as a shadow forms on the west-facing wall of the north stairway. It is a shape resembling a fire serpent. As the sun moves so does the shadow. It simulates the movement of a serpent which was a sacred animal to the people of this region.

This serpent of sunlight correlates with the legendary feathered serpents and the diamondback rattlesnakes of the traditional stories. These creatures symbolize the passage of time, seasons, and the idea of renewal.

Caracol

CHICHEN ITZA

Caracol is a cylindrical tower that contains windows specifically for the viewing of certain portions of the sky. Since the Maya had no telescopes to view the cycles of Venus, certain stars and constellations, they used naked eye observing and kept records of the movements in the heavens through the openings in the tower. The winter and summer solstices were also important celestial events that were tracked.

Pyramid of the Moon
Mexico - Circa 600 CE

From 300 BCE to 300 CE, Mesoamerica conducted its affairs from its ceremonial and political capitol of Teotihuacan. It covers more than seven square miles and includes one of the largest known structures of early America, the Pyramid of the Sun. It was built in four steps rising on a base 689 feet square to a flat top some 210 feet high. At the northern end of the avenue is a smaller pyramid dedicated to the Moon, and at the southern end is a rectangular court enclosing a temple. All around were palace buildings, thousands of domestic structures and the population has been estimated at tens of thousands.

South America
Machu Picchu - Andes - Circa 1300 CE

Within the Urubamba Valley sits world famous Machu Picchu, the “Lost City” of the Inca or “Children of the Sun.” It lies on a saddle between two mountain peaks, 3000 feet above the Urubamba River, which winds around its base like a moat around a castle. This mysterious city that was constructed sometime in the fifteenth century CE and its most striking astronomical feature is the intihuatana, or “hitching post of the sun.” It is an upright standing stone that was carved out of a single piece of gray and crystalline granite, and it is part of an altar about the size of an automobile. Many theories have been put forth in explanation of its exact purpose and function. It may have been used to cast shadows as a way to keep time and measure the daily passages of the sun throughout the year.

It may have been used in conjunction with a companion device to calculate the equinoxes and solstices. Though there were more than one of these “hitching posts,” the Spanish authorities and the clergy, during the conquest of the sixteenth century, decided that the intihuatana were of a competing religious nature and therefore had to be destroyed.
They must have never reached Machu Picchu because its “Hitching Post” never sustained the damage other sites suffered from religious persecution.

Recently, a beer company was given permission to shoot a commercial in the area and a crane fell on the hitching post and damaged it. Just shows how the Peruvian government will do anything for a little money.

There is another structure at the “Lost City” that indicates it was also used for celestial observations. It is known as the Torreon and is a rectangular building that has one wall that curves into a semicircle. It resembles the design of the “Temple of the Sun” in Cuzco. It even has an altar carved from the rock and a window that was apparently used to observe the summer solstice rising and the Pleiades open cluster. Another window could have been used to view the stars in the tail of Scorpius. This would be important because its setting point is opposite of the rising point of the Pleiades. Even today these stars and asterisms are important to Indians near Cuzco as a means of seasonal time keeping. Machu Picchu was an important ceremonial center that connected the Inca with the heavens themselves.