Abstract
Astronomy always used to be a typical application field of geometry. Monumental structures like Stonehenge and the Egyptian or Central American pyramids were also giant observatories for the evidently strange motions in the sky. The author will show that the alignments of those structures not only had to do with sun positions, but might also have been influenced by hard-to-comprehend extreme moon positions (lunar standstills) and special positions of the Pleiades. Some special constellations allowed different archaic societies on three continents to precisely determine long periods of time with Stone Age methods, e.g., the length of a year or the time in-between lunar standstills.
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Notes
- 1.
A fourth star would be something very unusual, although it is theoretically possible that a visible comet crossed the area (this happened occasionally in the past, e.g., in 2009, when Comet 217P Linear crossed the belt of Orion, M42 / M43, magnitude 9.8). However, the latter stays pure speculation since it is impossible to recalculate all comet paths so far back in the past.
- 2.
The durance of a complete rotation of the Earth is 23h56'. Therefore the stars appear/disappear in the average four minutes earlier on the horizon every day.
- 3.
The people of Teotihuacán were not Mayas. Nevertheless, the Maya calendar has its roots in the historical development of the Maya's predecessors in Mesoamerica. Furthermore, celebrations in context with the Pleiades have been reported and still happen in Mesoamerica.
- 4.
The Maya calendar had 360 days (18 months with 20 days each) plus a short month—usually five “unlucky days” with corrections every fourth year and probably also additional corrections within larger periods of time.
- 5.
1 Earth year equals ≈ 1,599 Venus years.
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Glaeser, G. (2015). How to Precisely Measure Astronomic Periods of Time by Means of Stone Age Geometry. In: Cocchiarella, L. (eds) The Visual Language of Technique. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05350-9_10
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