Other Stars Than Ours

Natural History, April, 2001 by Anthony F. Aveni

While the Maya have long been credited with prowess in calendrical and astronomical matters, we are now seeing that the upstart Aztecs were also sophisticated in these realms. In fact, it appears that Mesoamerican cultures were much more interrelated than we once thought. The connections extended to their pantheons of gods, with those of the Maya and the Aztecs, like those of the Greeks and Romans, displaying many correspondences.

But perhaps the most important lesson we can derive from the study of Aztec astronomy is that these people simply were not concerned with what seems important to us now. Even the eclipses of the Sun they chose for temporal markers had to fall on special days of the tonalpohualli; whether or not these eclipses were spectacular by our criteria mattered less. But these astronomers were precise. For example, if we look at the early- to mid-sixteenth-century manuscript known as the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, we find that an eclipse that took place on the afternoon of August 8, 1496, is depicted just about as it happened, with the still partially eclipsed solar disk plunging into the mountainous horizon west of Tenochtitlan.

Caught up in the theory of progress, we tend to focus on whatever glimmers of modern science we find in ancient or, indigenous ways of understanding nature. We see that a certain group discovered an herb containing a curative chemical or recorded the position of the rising Sun at the vernal equinox. And then we lament, Just think what they might have accomplished if they had taken the "right track" and pursued this knowledge more single-mindedly. But we would do better to study how and why these cultures built elegant systems for making the things they observed comprehensible--not to us but to themselves. Other peoples' motives for sky watching may tax our patience and require dredging up subjects that suit neither our tastes nor our prejudices. But our failure to understand these motives will always be our loss.

Originally trained as an astronomer, Anthony F. Aveni ("Other Stars Than Ours" page 66) was attracted to indigenous New World calendars thirty years ago, when he took a group of undergraduates to Mexico to see the Mesoamerican pyramids. An early result of that interest was his book Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico (University of Texas Press, 1980), which helped establish the field of archaeoastronomy--the study of the astronomical practices, celestial lore, and cosmologies of ancient cultures. A revised and updated edition of this classic will be published later this year. Among the other books Aveni has authored is Between the Lines: The Mystery of the Giant Ground Drawings of Ancient Nasca, Peru (University of Texas Press, 2000). Honored in 1982 as U.S. Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, Aveni is the Russell B. Colgate Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.