Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 39

There's a further possibility, however. Carl Sagan suggested
that an exploding star in the cluster Praesepe, 'the Beehive,' might
have been part of the Samson legend [ 43 ]. In classical maps the
tuft of the Lion's tail is sometimes represented as the constella-
tion Coma Berenices, between Leo and Boötes, the Herdsman, the
summer counterpart of Orion - and the brightest star in Boötes
is Arcturus.
As we leave the Old Testament, in the first millennium b.c.
a new age of astronomical observation was opening up in the Far
East. In China, Japan and Korea detailed records were being kept
of changes in the sky: bright meteors, meteor showers, comets and
exploding stars.
There were other cultures, though, who still felt the urge
to match the shapes seen in the sky with great structures on the
ground. For instance, at least some of the figures “drawn” on the
plain of Nazca in Peru, and also found on the local pottery of
the time, can be matched up with the stars. The lines and figures
have been formed by clearing away the dark pebbles that cover the
Nazca plain to reveal lighter sand beneath; they radiate in star-like
fashion from a number of centers.
In the 1970s much was made of the fact that a few of the
lines point to the former azimuths of rising stars, but those appear
in random order and many others don't, with any accuracy bet-
ter than chance [ 44 ] . (This is a good counter to the archaeologists
who insist that the real astronomical alignments at other sites
'must' be random.) It now seems that the lines and the so-called
'runways' may link hills and wells, hoping to attract rain during a
40-year drought in the sixth century [ 45 ]. But grouped around the
ends of the 'runways' there are also huge figures such as a condor,
a dolphin (far from the coast) and even more strangely of a type
of spider found only in the Amazon jungle, also far from Nazca.
These figures are also found on local pottery and the figure of the
condor, for example, makes a good match to the constellation we
call Pavo, the Peacock [ 46 ].
The sky legends of Peru are closely linked with those of
Mexico, where the Maya and later the Aztecs worshipped Quetzal-
coatl, whose planet was Venus but whose symbol was the winged,
feathered serpent. The high point of the Mayan civilization was
200 b.c. (contemporary with the building of the Great Wall) to a.d.