Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy

by Magli, Giulio

• ISBN13: 9780387765648
• ISBN10: 0387765646
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-30
• Publisher: Copernicus Books

Summary

This complete, authoritative study of the growing discipline of archaeoastronomy examines the role of astronomy in antiquity. Professor Giulio Magli provides a clear, up-to-date survey of current thinking on the motives of the ancients for building fabulous and mysterious monuments all over our planet. Was it an attempt to reproduce the sky on Earth? To put at the foundation of power the ability to predict and control the cycles of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars? Magli uses archaeoastronomy as a key to understanding our ancestors' way of thinking. It is a challenge which could be called "predicting the past."

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. ix
Part 1	p. 1
Thirty thousand years of silence
Twice perplexed	p. 3
Astronomical thought in the Palaeolithic	p. 6
An enigmatic scene	p. 9
Forests of stones, rings of giants
The radiocarbon revolution	p. 13
Stone forests	p. 15
Spirals and mounds	p. 18
Rings of rock	p. 19
Picnic of the giants	p. 24
Skara Brae	p. 27
From Norman Lockyer to Gerald Hawkins	p. 32
A satisfied visage	p. 34
Alexander Thom	p. 36
The legacy of Thom's work	p. 43
The island of the goddess
An untroubled sleep	p. 47
The place of the giants	p. 49
A Temple in the Negative	p. 56
An alignment obviously not correlated with heavenly bodies	p. 57
Cart ruts	p. 64
A civilization entitled to no place
Egypt of the Pharaohs	p. 69
A primitive mathematics	p. 75
A boring, delaying calendar	p. 78
Solar orientations of Egyptian temples	p. 80
The stretching of the cord	p. 83
Stellar Clocks	p. 87
The Egyptian constellations	p. 91
Temporary conclusions on Egypt	p. 95
When the method is lacking
Babylonian astronomy	p. 97
People who never existed, rivers that do not exist anymore	p. 103
The celestial empire	p. 107
Following the God's paths	p. 111
Wheels, octagons and golf courses
A land full of surprises	p. 117
Poverty Point	p. 117
Effigy mounds	p. 120
Newark	p. 124
Cahokia	p. 129
Medicine Wheels	p. 130
Straight roads, circular buildings and a supernova
The Anasazi	p. 135
The Chacoan's main hobby	p. 137
The Great North Road	p. 142
Casas Grandes	p. 145
The land where the Gods were born.
A place which should not exist	p. 147
The place where time was born	p. 152
The place where the Sun turns back	p. 157
An ungainly, asymmetrical building	p. 159
Urbanistic imitation of T-north	p. 161
Tenochitlan	p. 164
The Tree of the World
The time of the flower children	p. 169
Maya Astronomy: the calendar	p. 172
Maya astronomy: the codexes	p. 174
The Tree of the World	p. 177
A building that turns the stomach	p. 179
Astronomy and landscape in Maya cities	p. 186
Palenque	p. 189
A forgotten rendezvous	p. 193
The four parts of the Earth
The civilizations of the Andes	p. 195
The state of the Four Parts	p. 199
The Puma city	p. 203
The Serpent of the Lion's head	p. 207
The city of the lines	p. 212
The Pachacuti Yamqui diagram	p. 215
The Llama in the sky	p. 220
An old town on an old mountain	p. 222
The people of the lines
The people of the lines	p. 229
The Lady of the lines	p. 234
The enigmas of the lines	p. 236
A lesson left on the chalkboard	p. 238
The last of the lands
The last of the lands	p. 241
The stone anchestors	p. 243
A perplexed captain	p. 249
	p. 253
A picnic on the side of the road
Instructions not included	p. 253
The Similaun Man	p. 256
Creeping evolution	p. 258
Through respect, understanding	p. 260
Predicting the past
The etic approach	p. 267
The humanistic approach	p. 269
The analogical approach	p. 271
The problem of the code	p. 274
The discovery of precession before the discovery of precession	p. 277
A Corrida in the sky	p. 279
Predicting the past	p. 285
Power and replica
Three levels of cosmos, four parts of the world	p. 289
The man who climbs the tree of the world	p. 292
The man who opens the doors	p. 294
The Earth and the Goddess	p. 296
Power and replica	p. 300
	p. 305
The Age of the Pyramids
From Pre-Dynastic Egypt to the Age of the Pyramids	p. 307
The Step Pyramids	p. 309
Medium	p. 312
The Geometrical Pyramids	p. 316
Dashour	p. 320
Giza, Abu Roash and Zawiet el Arian	p. 326
The End of the Age of the Pyramids	p. 339
Gateways to the Stars
Eliminating the impossible	p. 343
The Pyramid Texts	p. 345
Two and two makes four	p. 349
Upuaut	p. 351
The Gates of Heaven	p. 355
On the paths of the Ancient Stars
The Rebirth Machine	p. 359
On the paths of the ancient stars	p. 363
Simultaneous Transit	p. 365
The attribution of the Giza pyramids	p. 368
A point to shift up, or a pyramid to shift back?	p. 375
The Sacred landscape in the Age of the Pyramids
An ordered landscape	p. 379
The horizon of Khufu	p. 382
Orion, Sirius and the sacred landscape in the Age of the Pyramids	p. 386
Mirages from Heliopolis	p. 392
The Sky with the naked eye	p. 399
Moving large stone blocks in ancient times	p. 413
References	p. 421
Index	p. 439
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