On the Alignment and Possible Origin of Certain Ancient Sites in Mesoamerica

Abstract

A study of ancient sites in Mexico and Central America finds that most are not aligned in any obvious astronomical direction, e.g., to north, or solstices or lunar standstills. While others have demonstrated some success in relating the alignments of structures at Mesoamerican sites to the surrounding landscape, important calendar dates, and certain constellations, this paper considers a different hypothesis – that the original builders aligned the sites to other locations that were points of reference at the time of construction. Among the 160 ancient locations examined in our study, we have found 64 sites/structures that point to four locations within 20° of the North Pole. These locations are correlated with Charles Hapgood’s estimated locations of the geographic pole over the past 100,000 years. The angular distribution of our site alignments to past pole locations is consistent with orientation data collected by González-García and Šprajc. By their alignment to past poles, we hypothesize that these sites were first established by a previous (unknown) civilization that existed in this part of the world tens of thousands of years ago. Predating known history we evaluate our hypothesis in a mythological context and show that it supports an early version of the Mesoamerican legend of the Five Suns.