Telling Time - by the Stars
This made its way to the top of the pile on the Digg Space Page - but I wondered about the comment at the beginning of the article about Telling Time by the Stars
Telling time by the stars is not really very useful.
Surely - the ability to tell time by the stars would have been very useful indeed for anyone who was involved in any kind of seamanship.
The problem of longitude was a thorny problem for mariners all over the world.
Longitude can't be obtained that easily. The method that is considered the most reliable and practicable is by using a chronometer which keeps the local time at a point of known longitude, say, the home port of the ship. By judging the local time of the ship2, the navigator computes the time difference between home port and ship. Because good old Earth does one full rotation (360°) in 24 hours, one hour corresponds to 360 /24 = 15°. One hour time difference from the home port means 15° longitude difference (east or west).Having determined latitude and longitude in the described ways, the ship's captain knew where he was and in which direction he had to sail.
Now suppose ancient mariners also knew how to "tell the time" from the stars - wouldn't that enable them to predict how far they had sailed across the globe? - while knowledge of latitude from the rising and setting of the sun would enable them to know roughly how far up or down the globe that they had travelled.
The "ancient mariner" theory means that people would have been able to sail a long way with a degree of accuracy.
If they travelled from America from Europe, for example, that would explain a lot of "misplaced" archaeological artefacts found in the "New World" - like the Lake Superior Copper Mines, the Newport Tower, Mystery Hill, the New England Stone Chambers, the San Francisco East Bay walls.
But accepting that ancient man had a degree of sophistication about matters astronomical would undermine the whole accepted history of the world.
Conventional history tells us "it was impossible" to sail across the world because it was necessary to have a reliable chronometer first, and that the first accurate chronomter was not constucted until 1770 (or thereabouts) - and then leaps to the conclusion that because it was "impossible" before this it must have been impossible beforehand.
Subsequently - any evidence or data that suggests anything else becomes - in Charles Fort's words - "Damned Information" - and is subsequently ignored because it doesn't fit in with any theories.
I prefer sensible explanations for archaeological anomalies - and the idea that ancient mariners were able to sail around the globe is much more sensible than any ideas about "Alien Intervention" or "Lost Supercivilisations" - especially when we already know from the evidence that ancient man had a very good grasp of astronomy.
Tags: archaeology, astronomy, navigation, longitude, ancient mariners, forteana
Comments
Was this not demonstrated by Thor Heyerdahl with his Kon-Tiki, Ra and Tigris raft and boat reconstructions and expeditions without the aid of modern technology ?
The ancient mariners and more recent navigators like the Polynesians also used a huge knowledge base of ocean currents and weather patterns to help them navigate.
Posted by: wtwu | October 28, 2006 6:20 AM
Thor Heyerdahl is a typical "maverick archaeologist" and although his findings shed a lot of light on migration and diffusion patterns of sea-going civilisations - they are sometimes not accepted as evidence for a more general "diffusionist" view of the spread of human culture.
What has begun to change everything in the last few years is the emergence of a new academic discipline "astro-archaeology" which takes seriously the claims that ancient peoples had a very good grasp of astronomy.
The major problem is that allowing the ancients a high degree of knowledge of astronomy - and by default spherical geometry and the mathematics necessary to use such knowledge - runs against the conventional "Myth of Progress" which claims that all of humanity has crawled out of a pit of ignorance to create our modern culture, which, therefore, is superior to ancient culture because it is "less primitive".
Knowing (or accepting) that the Egyptians had knowledge of Pi and Phi - and used them in their architecture - would undermine much of the conventional historical stories that the ancient Greeks discovered/used/invented those ideas and that they were subsequently "rediscovered" in the Renaissance.
The true story, of course, was the supression of a widely known and used body of knowledge learnt from the Egytptians, Chalcedonians and other astronomically obssesed ancient cultures.
These ideas later allowed these ideas to be diffused from the Greek world into "Classical Culture" - but later to be ignored by the suppression of ancient "hermetic" knowledge by the Christian hegemony in Europe in that time.
On this reading of history, the "Renaissance" is no longer a "rebirth or renewal of culture" - but was an unintended side-effect of the reduction of suppressive activites by the church that allowed nobody to accept either that (a) the world was round or (b) the earth moved around the sun.
From all the evidence I can see - ancient cultures acquired a high degree of astronomical knowledge very early on in human history, and continued to refine and use that knowledge. The idea that they there was no "cross-pollination" from astronomy into navigation is just daft - yet I see it all the time in the "conventional" archaeological literature.
Posted by: drk | October 28, 2006 1:19 PM
Things like Pi , or , say, fractals, are so fundamental in nature, that they turn up in natural and man made items regardless of the designers' intent or knowledge.
Some things that appear to be deliberate man made alignments, influenced by astronomy etc. turn out not to be so, even allowing for slight errors, when subjected to modern statistical analysis e.g. ley lines
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0035-9238%281980%29143%3A2%3C109%3ASTLH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K&size=LARGE
Archaeologists seem to be a very conservative group, who still seem to be trying to come to terms with the impact of mitochondrial DNA (i.e. passed down through maternal ancestors) and other human genetic analysis techniques , on their previously cherished theories of migrations.
Posted by: wtwu | October 29, 2006 1:05 AM