Thanks for trying, Kim, but no matter what spin you put on it, I still find little merit in archeoastronomy. It is folk art at best, superstition and paganism at worst. It may be science in a very soft sense, never astronomy. I have no interest at all in how poor, naked, paleolithic people saw their world and their place in it. I pity them for their dumb luck at having been born in a pre-industrial age of ignorance. No doubt someone living a thousand years from now will have the same attitude toward our times, but as Einstein showed us, it's all relative. C. PS: My best friend in the world is a professional anthropologist and archeologist. He has spent many months in the South American rainforest living with native peoples. He would show me slides of these people, commenting on how they live, what they eat, what their legends are, excitedly pointing out all the little details of life in a neolithic culture, how fortunate he was to get the chance to work in this "living laboratory", a peek backwards in time, from his point of view. I got mad, telling him that they are not merely specimens for him to study, and all I saw were desperately poor, hungry, diseased, uneducated people who got completely passed-up by any technical advancement and need help if they are to survive in the face of expanding civilization. Apparently he never had this thought. To him, they were there for him to study. --- Kim Hyatt <khyatt@smithlayton.com> wrote:
Unfortunately, while we may have evidence that ancient peoples made specific observations of the sky, much of it gets passed on to us in the form of fortune-telling, messages from deity, ritual, rock art, myth, legend, etc. I personally find it very interesting - a sort of detective story - to sort out the science and fact from such things.
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