Klaipėdos universitetas

The Taosi late Neolithic site is located in Shanxi Province in north-central China. Three decades of excavation have unearthed storage pits, dwellings, and many artifacts, identified as the Taosi culture type (4300 to 3900 BP). Recent excavations led to the discovery of the tombs of chiefs of the Early Taosi period, and the largest walled-town in prehistoric China. A semicircular foundation built in about 4100 BP along the southern wall was also discovered. The design of the raised terrace within it would have permitted observations of sunrise at specific dates along the eastern horizon. Here we report on what has been learned about this fascinating site, and analyze its astronomical features and function.

When tree ring dates at Mesa Verde National Park were plotted as a function of time along the lunar standstill cycle, a correlation was evident, leading to the hypothesis that architectural features and construction phases were timed according to the lunar 18.6 year cycle. A detailed architectural analysis at Sun Temple and tree ring analysis support the sub-hypothesis that lunar maximums were observed over Sun Temple from the Painted Tower area of Cliff Palace. Tree ring dates at Balcony House and Square Tower House suggest a similar relationship between construction of specialized architecture such as kivas and the lunar maximum cycle.

As part of the Uppsala University archaeoastronomical project to study the Minoan calendar, we have investigated representative examples of their buildings and found on Philioremos the third example of a peak sanctuary related to sunrise at the summer solstice. This is the nineteenth example of an important Minoan building exactly related to a major yearly event of the lunisolar calendar that was remembered in archaic Greek literature. An important achievement of our project is the discovery of cooperation among Minoans at different sites to mark major celestial events and of well-developed methods for maintaining a seasonally correct lunisolar calendar that began in connection with the autumn equinox.

In the eighteenth century, the Abbé Lebeuf was a reknowned historian, a folklorist, a musicologist, and an archaeologist. He published several books and many articles in the Mercure de France. He was still famous in the 19th century but is now almost forgotten. His work contains a great many notes, reflections and other pieces of information of interest to those studying astronomy in culture. I present here a short selection of such fragments.

The paper suggests that The Book of Esther contains astronomical and chronological information associated with the reign of Artaxerxes II. It further investigates a play on dates concerning an intercalary 12th Hebrew month and the eve of Passover, and possible mathematical references to Ancient Near Eastern and Jewish calendars.

The supernova explosions of 1006 AD and 1054 AD are, probably, the astronomical events most carefully studied through the analysis of historical sources. But contradictions are still present in several sources concerning SN 1054 and the historical records are not consistent with the astronomical data. This short analysis aims to highlight all these aspects.

The identification of six significant solar eclipses during specific years of the reigns of ancient Chinese kings from the Xia, Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties has made it possible to establish an absolute chronology back to the first year of King Yu, 2070 BC.

This work aims to present a panorama of the space-time of certain Brazilian native peoples, and especially the Tupi-Guarani and the Apinayé, as reported by some of the early ethnologists who traveled to Brazil, including Paul Ehrenheich, Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Curt “Nimuendajú” Unkel, as well the Canadian naturalist C. F. Hartt. This ethnohistoric data is compared to recent fieldwork.