520 Astronomy
Aveni, Anthony. Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures. (Illus.) NY: Wiley, 1997. ix+230pp. $24.95. 96-36517. ISBN 0-471-15942-5. Index; C.I.P.
YA–T, GA ++
In this work, Tony Aveni, a leading archaeoastronomer from Colgate University, has written a marvelous book about how the celestial rhythms influenced the cultures of the past. The book could be used as a text for a special course for advanced high school students or college students, but it also makes fascinating reading for any interested layperson. Throughout, Aveni succeeds in putting us into the minds and shoes of the ancient peoples, as he constantly warns against interpretations based too much on our 20th-century prejudices. The book opens with a fast, lucid course in the basic motions of the sun, moon, and planets as seen by observers at different latitudes. Aveni shows how viewers in the tropics see a fundamentally different type of daily motion compared to those at high latitudes and shows how this can affect a society's picture of its cosmos and its gods. He then examines three well-studied cultures of the past and what we know about their lives, their beliefs, and their knowledge of the sky. The first of these is the culture or cultures that built Stonehenge in southern England in the third and second millennia B.C. The other two cultures are those of the classic Maya, who held sway in Central America from A.D. 200 to 900 (and who, fortunately, left us some written language, examples of which are presented), and the Inca Empire of South America. Taking Stonehenge as an example, with no written record and such a long passage of time, any conclusions reached about the culture must be tentative, but Aveni presents the evidence of a people surprisingly similar to you and me (stripped of our technology, of course). Along with most serious scholars, he is not enthusiastic about the excessive claims of the 1960s and 1970s that Stonehenge was, in essence, a computer for calculating the times of eclipses. But he shows how the record of the giant stones, together with other archaeological evidence, nevertheless indicates a deep concern with the motions of the sun and moon and their impact on daily life.—Woodruff T. Sullivan, III, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
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