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Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archaeoastronomy

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One of these days, if gas prices aren't too high, I hope to make a trip to Calgary to meet Kelley and Milone. William Sullivan (author of The Secret of the Incas) urged me to ante up for this terribly expensive book. It is phenomenal.

The authors are teachers/researchers (Kelley an archaeologist of the Maya, and Milone a professor of astronomy and physics) who have worked together with students over more than 25 years as they prepared this text. It includes everything you would ever want to know about naked-eye sky observation. The "naked eye" part is the key. No telescopes. Simply a history of the methods, tools and ritual objects/architectures related to recording what was observed in the sky and how those observations might have been interpreted.

I was impressed to find among the color plates a photo of a calendrically-aligned sun pyramid brought to the attention of researchers by Sullivan and his colleagues in Peru. Also included are references to "mavericks" such as von Dechend and diSantillana. Even more amazing, the book is introduced by Anthony Aveni, who praises the authors for the great service they have done for the field by compiling such an exhaustive reference frame--while at the same time distances himself somewhat from some of the work.

The authors present tidbits of research that would likely otherwise be lost, and it is this material that is so fascinating in understanding ancient culture and its roots in the present. Any researcher, no matter their area of expertise, is likely to find gold in this book. One example is a hand-held geometric artifact related to a stone circle celebration in ancient Ireland. I have not seen this object previously in the plethora of books on sacred geometry I have read over the past 30 years. It may provide a link between the goddess Hecate and her rhombos/magic wheel.

In summary, the authors' intent it to provide detailed observation training, with examples, and then to go at the inventory of worldwide literature. Rather than creating an interpretive frame, they include rather than exclude pieces of work outside the "mainstream." Proponents of 2012 calendrics would do well to read this book. Much work in the direction of precessional calendrics was done without much fanfare prior to the harmonic convergence of 1987. The book's extensive bibliography has the feel of tracking down lost family members whose existence was rendered meaningless in the face of scientific archaeoastronomy.