Why would the ancients have used stars of the starry night to "map" their Earth?
Just imagine trying to make your way in a tropical climate in ancient days. How did you get around and know where you were?
We think stars and landmarks based on stars are the answer.
West & SW Amazonian Pre-Columbian village mounds viz. earthworks, geoglyphs and "enclosures" identified by archaeologists are shown here in our independent decipherment -- not related in any way to the publications of the archaeologists -- as having been located by the ancients to represent the Milky Way and corresponding stars in the stellar constellations Aquila, Sagittarius, [Scorpio perhaps via a natural mountain formation], Lupus, Centaurus, Crux, Musca, Carina, Vela, Pyxis, & Puppis. Note that the ancients may have grouped and designated the respective stars somewhat differently, but the principal star locations in the sky remain the same nevertheless, concentrating on the sky's brightest stars by magnitude, which form the "shape" of artificial star groupings.
The star correspondences shown below were discovered in December 2020 by Andis Kaulins after reading an article in Smithsonian magazine about Amazonian Pre-Columbian mound villages and other earthwork and similar constructions. See the article by Livia Gershon in Smithsonian
magazine at These Amazonian Villages Were Laid Out Like Clock Faces https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-find-clock-face-layout-amazon-villages-180976553/.
As retained down to this day, we find that the ancients placed their religious "gods" in the heavens, i.e. stellar locations which provided a natural, fixed easily accessible map, which was mirrored geographically on Earth "as above, so below".
Please note that our decipherment star maps -- shown below -- were created using our clips of star maps produced via Starry Night Pro astronomy software, to which we have added explanatory texts, labels, and figures, as necessary.
See http://www.starrynight.com/
In the image below, the upper section shows a geographic map clip by us from
-- a geographic map at Iriarte, J., Robinson, M., de Souza, J., Damasceno, A., da Silva, F., Nakahara, F., Ranzi, A. and Aragao, L., 2020. Geometry by Design: Contribution of Lidar to the Understanding of Settlement Patterns of the Mound Villages in SW Amazonia. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 3(1), pp.151–169. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jcaa.45 --
which shows the locations of the Amazonian archaeological sites in question, together with our added star labels and the appropriate Milky Way section of stars. These identifications were made independently by Andis Kaulins, Traben-Trarbach, Germany, who is not affiliated in any way with any of the authors of the article cited above. We use the geographic map as fair use for research purposes.
In the article cited above, Iriarte et al. mention a possible "cosmic" meaning to the locations, as follows:
"Arranged in symbolically significant ways with no clear hierarchy, the villages' circular layouts may reflect their Indigenous inhabitants' conceptions of the cosmos (Iriarte et al., Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, under CC BY 4.0)".
To that we can independently add: YES ... the
COSMOS ... We find that the cosmos referred to is comprised of specific "landmark" stars and sections of the Milky Way of stars visible from the identified Amazonian locations.
One possibility to perhaps partially confirm the likelihood of the correctness of our stellar correspondences occurred to us after examining some additional neighboring earthworks viz. similar locations identified in de Souza, J.G., Schaan, D.P., Robinson, M. et al. Pre-Columbian earth-builders settled along the entire southern rim of the Amazon. Nat Commun 9, 1125 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03510-7.
If our stellar analysis is sound, then neighboring Amazonian earthwork locations should also represent other stars in the sky located beyond those shown in the image above, and, indeed, we find it is possible to view those earthworks located to the West of those above as representing the stars of Aquila and Sagittarius, which identification fits into the system of star correspondences shown above.
Recall our original question:
Why would the ancients have used stars of the starry night to "map" their Earth?
Just imagine trying to make your way in a tropical climate in ancient days. How did you get around and know where you were?
We think stars and landmarks based on stars are the answer.
