Arizona State University Professor Sherry Towers has examined the Sun Temple archaeological site at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, and found evidence that the site was laid out with a Golden rectangle, equilateral and Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangles. The researcher has also found evidence of a common unit of measurement underlying the site layout.
Some apparent geometrical constructs evident in the layout of the Sun Temple site, including squares, 45-degree right triangles, a 60:30:90-degree right triangle (or an equilateral triangle), a Golden rectangle, and Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangles. Image credit: Sherry Towers.
The Sun Temple is an ancient complex prominently located atop amesa, constructed by the ancestral Pueblo peoples approximately 800 years ago.
While the D-shaped structure is generally recognized by modern Pueblo peoples as a ceremonial complex, the exact uses of the site are unknown, although the site has been shown to have key solar and lunar alignments.
“The site is known to have been an important focus of ceremony in the region for the ancestral Pueblo peoples, including solstice observations. My original interest in the site involved looking at whether it was used for observing stars as well,” explained Prof. Towers, author of a paper published this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
However, as she delved deeper into the site’s layout and architecture, interesting patterns began to emerge.
“I noticed in my site survey that the same measurements kept popping up over and over again,” Prof. Towers said.
“When I saw that the layout of the site’s key features also involved many geometrical shapes, I decided to take a closer look.”
The geometrical shapes used within this location would be familiar to any high school student: equilateral triangles, squares, 45-degree right triangles, Pythagorean triangles, and the Golden rectangle, which was well known to architects in ancient Greece and Egypt and is often used in Western art due to its pleasing proportions.
With some geometrical know-how, a straight-edge, a compass or cord, and a unit of measurement, all of the shapes are fairly easy to construct.
But, unlike the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Maya, the ancestral Pueblo people had no written language or number system to aid them when they built the site.
Incredibly, their measurements were still near-perfect, with a relative error of less than one percent.
“This is what I find especially amazing. The genius of the site’s architects cannot be underestimated,” Prof. Towers said.
“If you asked someone today to try to reconstruct this site and achieve the same precision that they had using just a stick and a piece of cord, it’s highly unlikely they’d be able to do it, especially if they couldn’t write anything down as they were working.”
Prof. Towers found evidence that some of the same geometrical constructs from Sun Temple were used in at least one other ancestral Puebloan ceremonial site, Pueblo Bonito, located in New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historic Park.
Pueblo Bonito, a Chaco great house built by the ancestral Pueblo peoples between the 800’s to early 1100’s CE. Overlaid is a rectangle encasing the walls of the site. To within 1%, the rectangle is consistent with the dimensions of a Golden rectangle. The blue line shows the arc of a circle circumscribed within the square associated with the geometric construction of the rectangle. Image credit: Sherry Towers.
The researcher also discovered that the Sun Temple site was laid out using a common unit of measurement just over 30 cm in length – equal to about one modern-day foot.
“I also find evidence that a common unit of measurement was used to layout many features of the Sun Temple site. The base unit is either L = 30.5 cm, or one third of that,” Prof. Towers said.
“Interestingly, several past societies in the world developed a unit of measure close to L, including the modern imperial foot, which is 30.48 cm, the Greek common foot of 31.50 cm, the Roman foot of 29.59 cm, and the ‘northern foot’ of 33.53 cm (used particularly by Germanic peoples).”
“The findings represent the first potential quantitative evidence of knowledge of advanced geometrical constructs in a prehistoric North American society, which is particularly remarkable given that the ancestral Pueblo peoples had no written language or number system,” she added.
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S. Towers et al. 2017. Advanced geometrical constructs in a Pueblo ceremonial site, c 1200 CE. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 12: 1-11; doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.01.009
