Puerto Rico’s cylindrical tower represents a unique case in Maya typologies of architecture. There is no other cylindrical tower known within the great Maya region. Some buildings can be compared in morphology, such as Mayapan’s round temples or the cylindrical building at Chichén Itzá, best known as “El Caracol.” But there is an elementary difference between them: Puerto Rico’s tower has a solid core, and the others have interior spaces and vaults.
Few studies have been carried out at Puerto Rico (Andrews IV in Aveni, 2005, p. 383; Benavides Castillo, 1999), and the tower has been mentioned in some other papers (Andrews, 1989; Kelly & Kelly, 1982). But the first archaeological research was carried out by archaeologist Antonio Benavides Castillo (1999). The results on the excavations showed that previous researchers used incomplete data about the morphology of the cylindrical tower.
Several studies focused on the astronomical function of the tower because it has some ducts going...
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to the result presented here forms part of the project “Time in Intercultural Context,” directed by Prof. Dr. Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen (Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands), and has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement n° 295434.
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Castillo, M.M., May, F.A. (2018). Puerto Rico Tower. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10012-5
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