This week's edition of "North By Southwest" Nicolas Jackson discovers the fascinating world of Archaeoastronomy with Professor Clive Ruggles of Leicester University in the UK. Giving a talk on "Monuments tied to the Sky: ancient astronomy and its global heritage" at Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, Professor Ruggles explains how people in the past understood and used the phenomena in the sky, and what role the sky played in their cultures.
Archaeoastronomy is related to ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies, and is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems, as well as the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice (09/10/12).
