Pre-Columbian civilizations of the Andes region identified astronomical configurations based on dark silhouettes rather than bright stars.
Notes on verification
Multiple independent academic sources including peer-reviewed papers, arxiv.org preprints, and the Smithsonian Institution all corroborate this distinctive astronomical practice. The sources provide consistent details about the yana phuyu (dark cloud constellations), their cultural significance, and how they differ from Western star-pattern astronomy. The convergence of scholarly consensus across different types of sources (popular science, academic journals, and museum documentation) strongly supports this claim.
Sources
- Andean dark constellations (wikipedia)