Product Description: Exploring Ancient Skies brings together the methods of archaeology and the insights of modern astronomy to explore the science of astronomy as it was practiced in various cultures prior to the invention of the telescope. The book reviews an enormous and growing body of literature on the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, the Far East, and the New World (particularly Mesoamerica), putting the ancient astronomical materials into their archaeological and cultural contexts...read more

Product Description: Exploring Ancient Skies brings together the methods of archaeology and the insights of modern astronomy to explore the science of astronomy as it was practiced in various cultures prior to the invention of the telescope. The book reviews an enormous and growing body of literature on the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, the Far East, and the New World (particularly Mesoamerica), putting the ancient astronomical materials into their archaeological and cultural contexts...read more

Product Description: The divide between teaching “intelligent design” and evolution in U.S. schools has brought to the public eye a struggle that archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni argues is as old as culture itself. All societies seek to understand the natural world, but their search is shaped by culturally distinct views and experiences...read more

Product Description: A través de una amena exposición, Aveni se acerca a las culturas precortesianas, especialmente la maya, a fin de esclarecer los abundantes misterios de su civilización, trazando un recorrido vasto por la sabiduría astronómica de nuestras civilizaciones.

A vivid account, including exciting writing excerpts and great photographs, of the first settlers in North America also looks at the scientists who study the many clues they left behind.

This volume offers new calendrical models and methodologies for reading, dating, and interpreting the general significance of the Madrid Codex. The longest of the surviving Maya codices, this manuscript includes texts and images painted by scribes conversant in Maya hieroglyphic writing, a written means of communication practiced by Maya elites from the second to the fifteenth centuries A.D. Some scholars have recently argued that the Madrid Codex originated in the Peten region of Guatemala and postdates European contact. The contributors to this volume challenge that view by demonstrating convincingly that it originated in northern Yucatan and was painted in the Pre-Columbian era. In addition, several contributors reveal provocative connections among the Madrid and Borgia group of codices from Central Mexico.

An engaging, entertaining reference to modern holidays explains the origins of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, witches, and St. Valentine's Day as it discusses holiday traditions, celebrations, customs, and more.

Product Description: In this fascinating exploration of occult practice, Anthony Aveni takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through time and space to unveil the many ways people have used magic over the millennia in hopes of improving their lives. As Aveni persuasively argues, the ancients sought what we now search for through science and religion - a clearer picture of humanity's place in the cosmos...read more

Tells how ancient cultures viewed the sky and used it in their mythology, showing that people from the ancient Mayans to the thinkers of the Renaissance had made accurate records of celestial phenomena (view table of contents)

Compares contemporary timekeeping methods and related cultural perspectives to those of seminomadic tribes and classical civilizations, tracing the influence of calendars, datebooks, clocks, and other means of measuring humankind's most valuable commodity

Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico helped establish the field of archaeoastronomy, and it remains the standard introduction to this subject. Combining basic astronomy with archaeological and ethnological data, it presented a readable and entertaining synthesis of all that was known of ancient astronomy in the western hemisphere as of 1980.In this revised edition, Anthony Aveni draws on his own and others' discoveries of the past twenty years to bring the Skywatchers story up to the present. He offers new data and interpretations in many areas, including: The study of Mesoamerican time and calendrical systems and their unprecedented continuity in contemporary Mesoamerican culture The connections between Precolumbian religion, astrology, and scientific, quantitative astronomy The relationship between Highland Mexico and the world of the Maya and the state of Pan-American scientific practices The use of personal computer software for computing astronomical dataWith this updated information, Skywatchers will serve a new generation of general and scholarly readers and will be useful in courses on archaeoastronomy, astronomy, history of astronomy, history of science, anthropology, archaeology, and world religions. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The giant ground drawings that cover 400 square miles of the floor of southern Peru's coastal desert have been called the eighth Wonder of the World. Anthony Aveni and his team have spent over ten years investigating this enigma, and this book tells the story of what they have discoverd...read more

Explores how the Mayans, Incans, and the people who constructed Stonehenge made sense of the heavens, and explains the mathematical system the Mayan developed to track celestial movements (view table of contents)

Product Description: This unique collection of essays investigates both ancient and modern Mayan texts and describes concepts of timekeeping and their role in Mayan culture. Including contributions from anthropologists, a mathematician, an art historian, and a linguist, the interdisciplinary approach in this innovative book offers a synthesis of past and present-day dialogue between people and the world of nature around, and especially above them...read more

Product Description: A través de una amena exposición, Aveni se acerca a las culturas precortesianas, especialmente la maya, a fin de esclarecer los abundantes misterios de su civilización, trazando un recorrido vasto por la sabiduría astronómica de nuestras civilizaciones.

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Product Description: Selected papers from the 2nd Oxford International Conference on Archaeoastronomy held January, 1986. Thirty-eight contributions are grouped into three sections addressing: the boundaries of archaeoastronomy overviews and synthesis; the textual basis; and archaeoastronomy as an interdiscipline in practice...read more