Robert A. Benfer

Abstract

The Earliest Art in the Americas is Associated with Andean Coastal Astrology The most ancient sculpture in the Americas is from a coastal valley in Perú (2,000 and 2,100 BC). It is a mud-plaster personified disk flanked by two foxes. Foxes are inevitably associated with the moon in prehispanic Peruvian art. The mud-plaster sculpture is associated with the sun and the Andean Zodiac. It looks with a round eye through an entryway, later blocked off, towards the setting December solstice sun. It looks with a crescent eye on the opposite face towards the Andean Fox constellation, the top of which rises before the December solstice sunset and whose entire body is seen in the twilight after the March equinox. This first three-dimensional sculpture in the Americas shows that early astronomer-priests were also artists. However, the design of this disk, a fierce mask, was lost after the temple was ritually reinturred, never to be seen again in Andean Iconography.

Biography

Robert A.Benfer is Emeritus Professor at the University of Missouri
Cultural Astronomy publications: (most available at https://missouri.academia.edu/BobBenfer)
2013 Luces y arquitectura en las iglesias coloniales de la Nueva España y del Perú. El Futuro del Pasado 4: 421-458. (www.elfuturodelpasado.com/)
2013 Early Mounds in Peru that Resemble Mythical Animals Have Astronomical Orientations and Alignments IN Ancient Cosmologies and Modern Prophets: Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture, Edited by Ivan Šprajc and Peter Pehani. Anthropological Notebooks XIX, Supplement, pp. 359-377
2012 Monumental Architecture Arising from an Early Astronomical/Religious Complex in Perú, In The Origins of New World Monumentality, R.M. Rosenswig and R. L. Burger, editors, Gainesville, University of Florida Press, p. 313-363
2012 Revalaciones Simbólicas del Preceráico (junior author with Rudolfo Sánchez G), El Antoniano 22: 41-54
2011 Giant Preceramic animal effigy mounds in South America? Antiquity Gallery 85 (http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/benfer329/)
2011 Four-Thousand Years of the Myth of the Fox in South American Cosmology (senior author with Louanna Furbee and Hugo Ludeña R., Journal of Cosmology, Vol. 16 (http://journalofcosmology.com/AncientAstronomy120.html)
2010 La Tradición Religioso-Astronómica en Buena Vista (senior author with Bernardino Ojeda, Neil A. Duncan, Larry R. Adkins, Hugo Ludeña, Miriam Vallejos, Víctor Rojas, Andrés Ocas, Omar Ventocilla y Gloria Villarreal). Boletín de Arqueología PUCP l1:53-102