Chibcha, also called Muisca, of Colombia, contemporaries of the Inca.
From Clements Markham, 1912: “They were beginning to erect important edifices of stone for temples and palaces . . . Barrientos found the site of a stone temple, at Ramiriqui in the province of Tunja. . . . There were twenty-seven cyclindrical pillars, very well worked, lying near each other.”
This obelisk is not identified as calendrical by Restrepo. It is an example of workmanship by a people that had also developed a calendar of hieroglyphic figures representing numerals and referencing the phases of the moon and the seasons of agriculture.
The Chibcha divided the day into four parts: sunrise to noon, noon to sunset, sunset to midnight, and midnight to sunrise.
Their week was made of three days, their month was made of ten weeks, and their year consisted of twenty months. Priests also used an astronomical year of thirty-seven months that reconciled the difference between the lunar and solar years.
More Exhibit Items
Sacred Rock = Titi-Kala. Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca (Inca)
Palace of the Inca. Lake Titicaca. Island of the Sun (Inca)
Palace of the first Inca on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca (Inca)
Temple of the Sun. Cuzco, Peru (Inca)
Main gateway to Pisac’s observatory (Inca)