Incan capital looked to heavenly puma
Written by Heather Catchpole
ABC Science Online
Tuesday, 14 September 2004

The Incan capital at Cusco was built to look like a dark puma-shaped constellation, according to an Italian scientist.

The research by Professor Giulio Magli from the maths department at Milan's technical university was published recently on the physics website arXiv, which is owned and operated by the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The Incan capital of Cusco was founded around the 12th century in what is now Peru and is about 110 kilometres south of the fortress city at Machu Picchu.

Like other ancient cities Cusco was built based on the alignment of buildings with astronomical events such as the winter and summer solstice.

According to tradition the city was conceived as a puma incorporating a nearby hill as its head and the main temple of the capital as its genitals. The tail of the puma is formed where the Tullumayo and Huatanay rivers join.

Magli said Cusco's layout was meant to replicate a puma constellation, which the Inca said was formed not of stars but the dark spaces between the stars.

Many other ancient civilisations, including Indigenous Australians recognise these dark constellations.

Other scientists had suggested the Incas had a puma constellation but placed it in the tail of Scorpio.

But Magli said the constellation was more likely to lie within a dark region of space between the Northern Hemisphere constellations of Cygnus, the Swan, and Vulpecula, the Fox.

This dark region sits between two bright bands of sky, which may represent the two rivers that meet at Cusco, he said.

Archaeologist Ian Farrington of the Australian National University in Canberra, is excavating a site 30 kilometres from Cusco.

The landscape around Cusco is "littered with this symbolism", he told ABC Science Online from Peru.

All sunrises throughout the year can be seen from the plaza at Cusco and he said two nearby mountains mark the December and June solstices. "It all fits together symbolically."

He said cats played an important part in Inca culture.

"The 'cat's eye' in Scorpio, presumably Antares, which rises just before the December solstice on the eastern horizon, has a lot of significance in Inca culture," he said.

But he said he had never heard of Cusco being based on the constellation of a puma.

Whether the whole city follows this astronomical significance as Magli suggested was "another matter", he said.