Astronomy hasn’t always been practiced the way that it is today! For many centuries, different civilizations have conceptualized the universe in a wide range of ways covering the entire spectrums of science and mythology– from this, at the intersection of astronomy and anthropology, the field of archaeoastronomy was born!
The field began with the discovery of Stonehenge in the 1960s, but it has roots dating back to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt (which can claim accurate cardinal orientation!). A majority of the work done in the field concerns alignment, or pointing out the connections between the structures and beliefs of ancient peoples to what we now know to be true about the universe.
Archaeoastronomy became particularly important in 2012 with the infamous ‘End of the World’ panic due to the Mayan Calendar. The Mayan Calendar was at the end of Baktun 13, one of many cycles that they used to categorize time. As scientists have deciphered Mayan texts to learn how they understood time and the universe, they realized that the string of zeroes that would have been displayed on December 21, 2012 did not mean the solar system would be transcendentally aligned with the center of the Milky Way– it simply meant the changeover of an era, similar to the way an odometer flips to zero as it runs.
emma's astro corner 
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