Passion for the Climb

On serendipity and science

By Tony Aveni

The late ’60s at Colgate were about as educationally free-wheeling as any of the other progressive movements going on in the world off the hill. I’d been experimenting with the abbreviated semester known as January Term since its inception in ’64, and I vividly recall conducting a J-Term class on Theories of Cosmology in ’69. We met in one of the old Case Library seminar rooms and, as we pondered Aristotle’s Spheres and the Mystery of Stonehenge, I was distracted by horizontal streams of snow driven by a wind that screamed across the valley. I wondered: could there be a better place to hang ten on new waves of knowledge than Hamilton, N.Y., in the coldest month of the year?

With all the dire prophecies, theories, and predictions about the arrival of December 21, 2012, Professor Tony Aveni, author of The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012, has spent a lot of time lately talking to the media about the roots of this phenomenon and a recent major discovery that relates to it. Considered one of the founders of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, he reflects on how it all started. (Photo by Andrew Daddio)

    That’s when geology professor Bob Linsley and I, over a post-lunch game of billiards in the Merrill House Faculty Club basement, conceived a plan to take students to Mexico to explore the astronomical alignments of pyramids during the next J-Term. The linchpin had been a vague footnote in Gerald Hawkins’s book Stonehenge Decoded alluding to the possibility that other megalithic monuments of the world might have been designed to line up with key positions of the sun, moon, and other cosmic deities when they appeared over the local horizon. So, we wrote a proposal and created an itinerary. Early on the second morning after Christmas of 1970, a dozen of us (including our own Bruce Selleck, then a junior, and two Skidmore transfers) embarked in two station wagons loaded with a plane table, an alidade, and a surveyor’s transit — the requisite alignment data–collecting tools of the day.
    With overnight stops in Richmond, Ind.; Muskogee, Okla.; Laredo, Texas, (where we crossed the border); and Monterrey, Mexico, we arrived in Mexico City on New Year’s Eve. Our first stop was Teotihuacan, where even Montezuma’s revenge failed to deter us from our appointed task. But in our zeal, we had failed to secure permits for bringing our surveying equipment up to the 250-foot summit of the great Pyramid of the Sun. So, we were promptly arrested, scolded, and remanded to the Office of the National Institute of Anthropology and History downtown to fill out the requisite forms before being allowed to return to the pyramid.
    I didn’t realize the gold mine we’d tapped into until we arrived at our second site, Monte Alban, in Oaxaca. There, we encountered “Structure J,” a building shaped like home plate on a baseball diamond. The site guidebook we had carried along stated that the point of home plate marked where the sun set on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. We showed our papers to the guide at the gate, who allowed us in to view the phenomenon (the sun on January 2 is quite close to the solstice position), measure the alignment, then spend the night under the stars in our sleeping bags. Imagine our shock when we witnessed the sun set 40 degrees off its scheduled position! The next morning, we complained to the guide, who shrugged his shoulders and replied with a Spanish version of “How do I know? That’s what it says in the book!” Apparently, nobody had ever witnessed the phenomenon, and certainly no one had ever measured and mapped the site with any sort of precision. The same was true of Teotihuacan, and Tenayuca, and Caballito Blanco, and on and on.
    On that inaugural trip, we logged 11,000 miles and 29 sites in 31 days. Along the way, we were confronted by various professional archaeologists who, after questioning us about what we were up to, invited us to measure and analyze the astronomical alignments at their site excavations.
    Forty years later, I’m still exploring the role of cosmology and astronomy in ancient city planning. With the demise of J-Term in ’89, I labeled the one-month field trips “Extended Study” and attached them to the front end of a stretch-model spring term course. Like the fall term prerequisite, I named it Archaeoastronomy, which I would later define as “the study of the practice of ancient astronomy using both the written and the unwritten record” (i.e., archaeological remains of architecture). The textbook I wrote for the course (Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, 1980: revised 2001) came to be known as “The Gospel According to St. Anthony” by affectionate colleagues in anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, and the history of astronomy who would teach similar courses in the new interdiscipline we helped found.
    Having trained in astronomy, to what do I attribute my unanticipated interdisciplinary academic career, 100 percent of which I’ve spent at Colgate? Three factors. First, blind luck — being in the right place at the right time. Add to that the generous length of rope my Colgate mentors always seemed willing to let out to accommodate my desire to stretch intellectually and come up with novel ways of imparting knowledge. Finally — and above all — being with my students, whose dilating pupils I delight in witnessing whenever they encounter the unknown.


Read more essays from our Passion for the Climb series at colgateconnect.org/scenepfc.