Exploring Ancient Skies A Survey of Ancient and Cultural Astronomy
Exploring Ancient Skies brings together the methods of archaeology and the insights of modern astronomy to explore the science of astronomy as it was practiced in various cultures prior to the invention of the telescope. The book reviews an enormous and g
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David H. Kelley Eugene F. Milone
Exploring Ancient Skies A Survey of Ancient and Cultural Astronomy Second Edition
Foreword by Anthony F. Aveni
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David H. Kelley Professor Emeritus, Department of Archaeology The University of Calgary 2500 University Drive, NW Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4 Canada [email protected]
Eugene F. Milone
Faculty Professor and Professor Emeritus, Department of Physics and Astronomy The University of Calgary 2500 University Drive, NW Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4 Canada [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-7623-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-7624-6 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7624-6 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Foreword
A third-millennium academic cliché worth repeating is that the questions we pose and the problems we now attempt to solve seem to have the effect of blurring the lines that demarcate the traditional disciplines. This is true not only among the sciences, in which universities now routinely offer interdepartmental courses in biophysics, neuropsychology, and astrogeology, but also across the traditional academic divisions of science, social science, and the humanities. The study of ancient astronomies is a perfect example of the latter case. Once partitioned into the traditional history of astronomy, which dealt exclusively with the underpinnings of Western scientific astronomy, and its upstart adopted child archaeoastronomy, which treated all other world cultures, it has now been subsumed by cultural astronomy, which, in addition, envelops the astronomical practices of living cultures. The problems treated in Exploring Ancient Skies are as follows: What did ancient people see in the sky that mattered to them? How did they interpret what they saw? Precisely what knowledge did they acquire from looking at the sky, and to what ends did they employ this knowledge? In short, what were they up to and why? You hold in your hand a weighty tome, the product of an enduring collaboration between a pair of seasoned veterans: one an observational astronomer of great expertise, and the other an archaeologist/epigrapher, well known among his Mesoamerican colleagues for his significant contributions to the problem of decipherment of anc
