Evidencia de la relación entre Arqueoastronomía y Geodesia satelital en el Cerro Catequilla, Ecuador

Abstract

Ecuador, a country crossed by the equinoctial line, made mathematician scholars and geographers set their sights on this part of the planet, as happened in the eighteenth century with the First French Geodetic Mission. However, long before this scientific milestone, the pre-Inca peoples already had an understanding of their place in space by observing celestial bodies, which formed an important part of their cultural worldview. Cerro Catequilla is an archaeological site attributed to the Quitu-Caranqui culture that is built on zero Latitude. Despite this particularity, the archaeoastronomic link of the place with current geodesic techniques has not been studied in depth. The objective of the work was to determine if there is any link between the archaeoastronomy with satellite geodesy, through satellite positioning techniques of the Cerro Catequilla with respect to the conventionally established equatorial line, and thus demonstrate the ancestral geographical knowledge of the Andean cultures from the country. Differential static and RTK methods were used to determine points with precise coordinates, whose survey was linked to the National Geodetic Network of the IGM (REGME). A photogrammetric flight was carried out, from which the orthophotography, DEM, DSM was obtained. With the obtained orthophotography, the direction of the equatorial line was drawn, and in addition the angle of the ecliptic to which the ruins were oriented was determined, whose value was 23.49°, which proved the archeoastronomic correspondence of Catequilla for the observation of the arch of heaven.