Tuesday, March 18th, 7:30 p.m., at the University of Victoria, next ASBC talk:
A short history of Mayan astronomy: The Mayan calendar and the collapse of the Classic Mayan culture by Dr. Andreas Fuls, Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany
The Classic Mayan developed a sophisticated calendar and observed the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. Precise astronomical data allow correlation of the Mayan calendar to the Christian calendar. A new chronology is proposed and verified by different dating methods and data, which also results in a discussion of the so-called “Mayan collapse”.
Andreas Fuls is currently working at the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science of the Berlin Institute of Technology, where he has worked for the last 25 years. His special fields are geodatabases and GIS, measurement systems and methods. He finished his dissertation at Hamburg University in 2006 in the history of science, more specifically in Maya archaeoastronomy and the solution of the Maya calendar correlation question. Andreas Fuls became interested in Maya glyphs in 1998 and in the Indus script in 2007, developing an epigraphic database of Indus inscriptions and mathematical methods to analyze undeciphered writing systems.