The Coricancha functioned as more than a single shrine; Spanish chroniclers and modern archaeological and ethnohistorical research, most influentially the work of the anthropologist Tom Zuidema, describe it as the organizing centre of an elaborate system of forty one or so imaginary lines, called ceques, radiating outward from the temple across the Cusco valley like spokes from a hub, each line passing through a sequence of huacas, sacred shrines, springs, rocks, and other significant sites maintained by specific kin groups responsible for their upkeep and ritual observance on an assigned schedule through the year. The ceque system tied the state religion of the sun quite literally to the social and administrative organization of the Inca capital, since responsibility for maintaining particular shrines along particular lines mapped onto specific lineage groups and their place in Cusco's social hierarchy, while the sequence of ritual observances at the huacas along the ceques was coordinated with the agricultural and ceremonial calendar that Inti Raymi itself belonged to.
Some ceque lines are argued by researchers to have had genuine astronomical significance, marking the risings or settings of the sun at the solstices or other significant celestial events as seen from the Coricancha, linking the physical geography radiating from the sun god's temple directly to the sky he was understood to govern, though the precise astronomical function of every individual ceque and huaca remains a matter of ongoing scholarly reconstruction rather than fully settled fact, since much of the system had to be reconstructed from fragmentary and sometimes inconsistent colonial-era testimony rather than direct archaeological survival of the huacas themselves.