Jacana: Astronomy of a Prehistoric Site on SouthWestern Puerto Rico: Cuadernos del CEH Núm. 2, 2013

Copy and paste the link below for our titles: http://ediitorialnuevomundo.blogspot.com/ Some 800 years ago, the prehistoric inhabitants of the Northern Caribbean, the Taino people built large, and precisely planned ceremonial centers, one of which contained the largest such structures in the Antilles up to the present. Such accomplishments reflect a tangible knowledge manifested in the architectural design and by related symbols or petroglyphs - carved images on boulders that outline these center’s structures.The distinctive architectural designs of these structures, ball courts or ceremonial plazas, called batey, by their builders suggests that they were intentionally aligned toward specific astronomical events. During the time 1990 to 2006, two elaborate petroglyph boulders were observed in different locations on the surface of the prehistoric Jacana Site (local identification PO-29), along the Portugues River, a major south coastal river in the Municipality of Ponce, Puerto Rico. As a result of these findings, extensive archaeological data recovery excavations took place between 2006 and 2007 by Espenshade (2010) as part of the Portugues and Bucana Flood Protection Project that was sponsored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District. Results revealed a rectangular plaza or ball-court (40m X 50m) bordered on its four sides with aligned boulders. Some of these boulders had petroglyphs on them or rock art. Most of the engraved boulders were in the north wall, followed by the west and south walls. In this paper, the focus is on the analysis of the data that was recovered during the excavations and how that data is relevant to archaeoastronomy. The discussion primarily involves the relations of the astronomical alignments of the ball court and its petroglyphs with the seasonal cycles and the symbolic meaning of the rock art in an astronomical context