Skywatchers: A Revised and Updated Version of Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico

Portada
University of Texas Press, 2001 M08 15 - 411 páginas

Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico helped establish the field of archaeoastronomy, and it remains the standard introduction to this subject. Combining basic astronomy with archaeological and ethnological data, it presented a readable and entertaining synthesis of all that was known of ancient astronomy in the western hemisphere as of 1980.

In this revised edition, Anthony Aveni draws on his own and others' discoveries of the past twenty years to bring the Skywatchers story up to the present. He offers new data and interpretations in many areas, including:

The study of Mesoamerican time and calendrical systems and their unprecedented continuity in contemporary Mesoamerican culture The connections between Precolumbian religion, astrology, and scientific, quantitative astronomy The relationship between Highland Mexico and the world of the Maya and the state of Pan-American scientific practices The use of personal computer software for computing astronomical data

With this updated information, Skywatchers will serve a new generation of general and scholarly readers and will be useful in courses on archaeoastronomy, astronomy, history of astronomy, history of science, anthropology, archaeology, and world religions.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

The Historical Ethnographic and Ethnological Background
12
Contents
38
Astronomy with the Naked Eye
49
Zenith Passage Dates of the Sun for Observers
67
Eclipses of the Sun and Moon during the 1980s
76
Appendices
96
Obliquity of the Ecliptic at Different Times in the Past
103
Heliacal Rise and Set Phenomena
110
Days per Given Number of Maya Calendric Units in
137
Information Contained in the Calendar on Page 1 of
151
Intervals and Cumulatives in the Eclipse Table of
177
Scheme of the Ritual Calendar Portion of the Venus Table
188
Arrangement of Material on Pages 43b44b of
199
A The Problem of the Correlation of Maya
207
Additional Selected Readings
214
Appendix A An Analysis of the Pecked Cross Petroglyphs
329

Heliacal RiseSet Events for Bright Stars Observed
114
E Change of Direction of the Magnetic Compass with Time
118
Typical Data Form for Transit Observations
122
Additional Selected Readings Electronic Resources
124
Postscript
339
Bibliography
365
Index
395
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Acerca del autor (2001)

Anthony F. Aveni is the Russell B. Colgate Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University in New York.

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