The most interesting thing to me today was learning about the wakas and seqes. Wakas were sacred places, rocks, spring, etc to the people of Cuzco during Inca times and seqes were invisible lines connecting them. The following picture painted by Miguel Araoz Cartagena shows the seqes radiating from Qorikancha. The dots along the lines indicate the different wakas. The four different colors represent the four provinces of the Inca empire. Tom Zuidema's theory about the wakas. His theory is that each waka corresponds to one day out of the year for the Inca calendar. He also suggests that each waka was a place for astronomical observation. I thought this was interesting because the idea of these sacred places connected by imaginary lines to form some kind of calendar is amazing to think about because a lot of thought would of had to be put into it, or it's just a crazy random happenstance that it turned out like that.
Another thing that I found interesting was the Andean version of constellations compared to the Western idea. The Western idea is that a group of stars make a constellation, like how the big dipper is a constellation composed of 7 stars. The Andean version, at least concerning the Milky Way, looks at the dark spots of interstellar matter against the light background of the Milky Way. They took those dark spots and maked them into animal shapes. A painting by Miguel Araoz Cartagenashows the different animal shapes like the serpent, toad, llamas, fox, etc.
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