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Lunar Alignments - Identification and Analysis

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Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy

Abstract

Lunar alignments are difficult to establish given the apparent lack of written accounts clearly pointing toward lunar alignments for individual temples. While some individual cases are reviewed and highlighted, the weight of the proof must fall on statistical sampling. Some definitions for the lunar alignments are provided in order to clarify the targets, and thus, some new tools are provided to try to test the lunar hypothesis in several cases, especially in megalithic astronomy.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Fabio Silva and Fernando Pimenta for making their figures available and JA Belmonte for a fruitful discussion and making his images of Seikh Abada available. This work is partially financed under the framework of the project AYA2011-26759 “Orientatio ad Sidera III” of the Spanish MINECO. ACGG is a Ramón y Cajal Fellow of the Spanish MINECO.

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Correspondence to A. César González-García .

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González-García, A.C. (2015). Lunar Alignments - Identification and Analysis. In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_37

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