Sunday, January 29, 2017

Mesa Verde "Sun Temple" - more Southwestern Archaeoastronomy

From:
http://westerndigs.org/mesa-verdes-sun-temple-reveals-geometrical-genius-physicist-says/
This report is a little more detailed than the last one which, as Tommy H. points out, had interesting comments.

3 comments :

Tommy Hudson said...

I am very much interested in archaeoastronomy. I have tried to find that connection at several sites in Georgia, including checking them in the early morning and late evening of the summer and winter solstices. I believe that prehistoric people (sorry Tim) were capable of expressing complex astronomical alignments. I believe that archaeoastronomy has been proven to be a component of several sites, such as the Woodhenge at Cahokia. Mesa Verde may also be one of those sites, but this article doesn't prove it to me. Except for possibly the center of the two circles, the locations of all the line junctions appear to be arbitrary. I've read both versions of this article and I still don't see the basis for the conclusion.
I believe I could just as well throw a handful of marbles on the ground and measure the distance between the marbles, and draw lines between them, and so forth and so on. With that said, I do believe I could find a couple of relevant astronomical alignments amongst that bunch of marbles, merely by chance. This is the problem, the "merely by chance" part has to be dealt with in some way. I'm not just being critical of the article, I'm also being critical of my own findings. My limited testing in North Georgia hasn't provided any proof, in spite of the fact that I wish it would.
Guess that "prehistoric (sorry Tim) genius" is an elusive fellow.

pwax said...

The observation of a unit of measure can be backed up with hard mathematics - you plot all the several hundred distance measurements and check if they are random or grouped as multiples of a common unit.

Given the article's claim that they have established such a unit, it sounded to me as if they did the math.

pwax said...

(adding sheepishly:) but then I always am a bit of a sucker for fringe archeology.