Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 42

crisis. But none of that detracts from the scientific achievements
of the Apollo program, many of which were accomplished out of
the limelight.
MacKie now feels that even his comparison of Neolithic
society with the Mayan may have been overstated [ 51 ]; but now
that we know Neolithic society was extensive and did have a pro-
fessional priesthood, that retraction may be premature. Chapters
4 and 8 will show that precise observations could have been con-
ducted at Neolithic sites, sometimes tracking events that would
be of interest only to serious students of the movements of the
Moon, and human curiosity being what it is, we may suspect that
if they could have done it, they probably did it.
This quick overview of astronomy in the ancient world is
very far from complete. North American readers will justly regret
the omission of Medicine Wheels and serpent Mounds [!] through-
out pre-Columbian America; in Africa, there's no mention of
Zimbabwe and its neighbors, to say nothing of peripatetic cities
nearer the equator; and in India, pre-telescope positional astron-
omy reached great heights of achievement. In his contribution to
Cosmic Perspectives , below, a breathtaking leap by Jean-Claude
Pecker dismisses the entire 2000-year Western dead ends of geo-
centric theory and the fixed, unchanging heavens, not even in a
sentence but in a semi-colon [ 53 ]. But omissions are inevitable.
For fuller introductions to the subject see G.S. Hawkins, Beyond
Stonehenge, and E.C. Krupp's Echoes of the Ancient Skies , below,
because the authors have toured the world and visited the ancient
sites in person.
References
1. Montagu, A.: Man, His First Million Years. Mentor, New American
Library, New York (1958)
2. Thomas, D. (ed.): Moon, Man's Greatest Adventure. Abrams, New
York (1973)
3. Mellars, P.: Major issues in the development of modern humans.
Curr Anthropol 30(3), 349-385 (1979)
4. Leakey, R., Lewin, R.: Origins Reconsidered, In Search of What Makes
Us Human. Little, Brown and Co., New York (1992)