Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 40

from the Olmec culture before then, but it's been found that the
oldest Maya sites in Belize go back to 2600 b.c. [ 47 ] , contemporary
with the pyramid builders, and back to the time when the celestial
pole lay in Draco - making the feathered serpent, and the jeweled
one in the Amazonian constellations, more interesting still.
The Maya shared Central America with another great civili-
zation, centered at Teotihuacán in Mexico, abandoned around a.d.
750.Thegridofthecityanditstwogreatflat-toppedpyramidsisnot
aligned to the cardinal points, and isn't obviously astronomical,
though the sight-lines may have incorporated Sirius and the Ple-
iades. Other features termed 'pecked crosses' have clear solar
orientations.
Despite the wholesale destruction of Mayan records, enough has
come down to us in writing or on stone to show that they had an
advanced society with a priesthood who practiced astronomy, among
their other arts. Drawings and carvings exist of Mayan observers
using crossed sticks to conduct observations. A similar exercise to
determine the distance of the Moon used to be part of the practi-
cal work in first-year astronomy at Glasgow University. The Mayan
observations enabled them to construct complex, interactive calen-
dars stretching far into the past and the future. There's been a lot of
fuss and even a blockbuster movie about one that comes to the end of
a cycle late this year, and by the time this topic comes out that issue
will be settled - one way or the other, it's wickedly tempting to add.
But other predictions extend much further.
The Caracol building at Chichén Itzá in the Yucután even
looks like a modern observatory, although that's because part of
the two-cylinder structure has fallen in [ 48 ]. An initial survey by
Gerald Hawkins found that the openings in the structure marked
the equinoctial sunsets, and the extreme northern and southern
moonsets [ 44 ]. Further work by Aveni et al. found alignments to
midsummer sunrise and sunset, the rising of Castor, Pollux and
Canopus, the setting of Fomalhaut, and the northernmost setting
of Venus [ 48 ].
(That northerly setting is for a.d. 1000 [ 49 ]. Venus's extreme
setting position is the most northerly of any planet in the Solar
System, made possible because it's the closest planet to us, and it
will be reached in 28,000 years [ 50 ]. An alignment to that is incor-
porated into the 'Sunstones II' sculpture by Richard O'Hanlon