HOW TO PRECISELY MEASURE ASTRONOMIC PERIODS OF TIME BY MEANS OF STONE AGE GEOMETRY

摘要

Astronomy always used to be a typical application field of geometry. Monumental structures like Stonehenge and the Egyptian or Central American pyramids were also giant observatories for the evidently strange motions in the sky. The author will show that the alignments of those structures not only had to do with sun positions, but might also have been influenced by hard-to-comprehend extreme moon positions (lunar standstills) and special positions of the Pleiades. Some special constellations allowed different archaic societies on three continents to precisely determine long periods of time with Stone Age methods, e.g., the length of a year or the time in-between lunar standstills.