Archaeoastronomy and the orientation of churches in the Jesuit missions

MARÍA FLORENCIA MURATORE; ALEJANDRO GANGUI; ADRIÁN DI PAOLO

Stara Zagora

Congreso; The 28th Annual Conference of the SEAC, the European Society for Astronomy in Culture; 2021

SEAC, the European Society for Astronomy in Culture

[...] In this work we focus mainly on the Jesuit missionary churches in South America, which for almost two centuries were the most representative constructions in the process of Christian evangelization on the continent until the Order's expulsion in 1767. The main objective is to discern possible patterns of orientations in the studied structures and to assess whether these orientations could be related to the location of the Sun or other celestial bodies when crossing the local horizon, which could yield important information pertaining to their construction. Although extensive and detailed historical and cultural studies of missionary peoples and of their most emblematic buildings throughout this region have been carried out, the orientation of churches (or ruins thereof) in these villages had not been the subject of in-depth study until recently. Archaeoastronomical fieldwork that considers the urban characteristics and the writings and chronicles of the missionaries have only recently been undertaken in the Guaraní peoples? territories, which today are distributed over a large region that spreads across three countries ? the northeast of Argentina, southern Brazil and Paraguay. Intending to continue and complement this work, which provided a detailed study of Jesuit churches in the Province of Paraquaria, we review our recent archaeoastronomical study of the orientations of Jesuit churches in nearby Chiquitos (today the Chiquitanía region in eastern Bolivia). [...] Apart from the data already collected and analyzed, we consider that the findings of these studies in South America should be interpreted within a larger historical and geographical context. For we know that before the studied churches at Chiquitos, Jesuits built over more than a century a large number of churches on the other side of the equator (e.g., in Baja California and Sonora). Hence, to get the complete picture of the religious architecture in the continent it would require an analysis and comparison of our data with the orientation of seventeenth and eighteenth century Jesuit churches in North America (and in Europe). Our first exploratory steps in this new project are already underway mainly by means of satellite images, which are appropriate enough, and will be shown in the presentation.