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(a) Orientation diagram for all structures measured and included in Table 1. Each measurement is indicated as a linear stroke inside the circle. The solid lines outside the circle indicate the cardinal points and the extreme positions of sunrise in the solstices (JS stands for June solstice and DS for December solstice) at the latitude of the Supe Valley. (b) Frequency histogram showing the angle of the structures with respect to the riverbed closer to them. The largest concentration indicates that most of the buildings follow the river flow quite closely.
Source publication
America's first urban centres were allegedly located at the Supe Valley sites in Peru. After investigating the location and the orientation of the main built structures, we show that it is not only the presence of the River Supe that determines their orientation but also astronomical relationships within the orientation of the buildings dictate the...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... Table 1 Figure 3a shows the orientation diagram for all our measurements. The circle indicates all directions of the compass, the small strokes outside the circle indicate the cardinal directions, and DS and JS stand for the December and June solstices, respectively. ...
Context 2
... Figure 3 about here> Figure 3b shows the results when considering the orientation of the buildings with respect to the Supe River for those sites directly related to it within the valley. The orientation of the river is taken from that given by the riverbed (i.e., the orientation of the contour lines of TF0) closest to each archaeological site-the obvious choice to test the hypothesis that the river dictated the orientation of the buildings-whereas, for each structure, we considered the azimuth closest to it. ...
Context 3
... orientation diagram (Figure 3a) indicates the possible relevance of astronomical directions. Given that we have four directions, we wanted first to verify whether there is any indication of a preferred one. ...
Context 4
... first version of this method is introduced in González- García and Sprajc (2016:192-193). Figure 6a shows the orientation diagram similar to that presented in Figure 3a, but only with those measurements toward the eastern sector of the horizon (i.e., between 45º and 135º in azimuth; this is justified by the exercise described earlier to determine the most relevant direction). It emphasizes the wide concentration toward the area of the DS. ...
