Skywatcher Societies explores the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of ancient indigenous cultures worldwide, revealing how they observed, tracked, and integrated celestial events into their daily lives.
Moving beyond a Eurocentric view of science, the book highlights the ingenuity of these societies in developing complex systems for agriculture, ritual, and social structure, without modern technology.
Discover how monuments were strategically aligned with astronomical events and how ancient observatories, like Mesoamerican pyramids and European stone circles, were used to track the sun, moon, and stars.
The book begins by introducing fundamental astronomical concepts and indigenous observation methods.
Progressing across chapters, it examines the construction and function of ancient observatories and analyzes monument alignments for agricultural, calendrical, and ritual purposes.
Through archaeological surveys, ethnographical studies, and archaeoastronomical analyses, Skywatcher Societies demonstrates that indigenous civilizations possessed advanced astronomical knowledge integral to their cultures.
This knowledge reframes our understanding of scientific development as a multi-faceted phenomenon, not solely a Western progression.
