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Bob Benfer oversees his excavation site in Peru. The Temple
of the Fox is 1,000 years older than anything of its kind
previously found. Photo courtesy of the College of Arts
and Science
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Discovery
Ranks as
Top Science Story
By Nancy Moen
A discovery by anthropology
Professor Emeritus Bob Benfer 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. National Geographic was a backer of the dig.
Numerous MU students helped uncover important artifacts
during the fieldwork. Photo courtesy of the College
of Arts and Science
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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.
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Last Update:
November 15, 2007
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