Muisca astronomy

Various astronomical sites have been constructed on the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, the territories of the Muisca in the central Colombian Andes, but few remain today.

Important scholars who have contributed to the knowledge of the Muisca astronomy were José Domingo Duquesne and Alexander von Humboldt in the late 18th and early 19th century and modern researchers as Eliécer Silva Celis, Manuel Arturo Izquierdo Peña, Carl Henrik Langebaek and Juan David Morales.

On the fertile plains of the Andean high plateau the Muisca developed a rich economy consisting of agricultural technologies of drainage and irrigation, fine crafts of gold, tumbaga and ceramics and textiles and a religious and mythological society.

The most important and still remaining archaeological site of the Muisca, dates to the pre-Muisca Herrera Period; called by the Spanish conquerors El Infiernito.

It is an astronomical site where at solstices the Sun lines up the shadows of the stone pillars exactly with the sacred Lake Iguaque, where according to the Muisca religion the mother goddess Bachué was born.

[5] Astronomy was an important factor in the organisation of the Muisca, both in terms of cycles of harvest and sowing and in the construction of their architecture.

[8] The religion of the Muisca contained various deities who were based on cosmological and environmental factors (Cuchavira; rainbow, Chibchacum; rain, Nencatacoa; fertility).

The supreme being of the Muisca, Chiminigagua represented the birth of the Universe who had sent two birds to create light and shape the Earth.

[9] Both deities served as the basis for the complex lunisolar Muisca calendar, having different divisions for synodic and sidereal months.

The Cojines are aligned with an azimuth of 106 degrees to the cross quarter of the Sun, passing over the present-day San Francisco church to the sacred hill of Romiquira.