This is the text explanation of the decipherment images of the Miami Circle, Brickell Point, Florida, USA, found in the immediately preceding postings. It is a bit hodge podge at the moment, but maybe that is OK, since it reflects various stages of the decipherment work. But there is massive info here, massive.
Using the software program Starry Night Pro, which permits star positions to be viewed at any location on Earth and in any historical viz. archaeological era of the past, we found that:
As one can read at Mesoamerican calendars at the Wikipedia:
Izapa Stela number 5 has been much discussed in religious circles and we want to stay out of that discussion entirely, especially since the best and earliest photograph of Stela 5 is that taken by Matthew W. Stirling's original National Geographic expedition, a photograph found online at the Book Of Mormon sources -- http://bookofmormonresources.blogspot.de/2012/07/v-garth-norman-in-mexico-city.html.
Hence, we do not present any photographs of the Stela or of the figures on it at all here, since anyone interested can find them online.
Rather, we present here only our astronomical decipherment of Izapa Stela 5 as follows. Anyone who wants to match the stars to the figures on that Stela on their own can do so, since the main figures are crystal clear:
Our illustration above, which is drawn on a Starry Night Pro astronomy software star image clip, shows that we date Izapa Stela 5 to March 24/25 1131 B.C., when Halley's Comet marked the Equinox point in the stars of Lupus, whose protuberance is at the edge of the Milky Way.
The stars of Centaurus are found in the middle and to the right, with the extension of Centaurus in the middle marking what past religious discussion has seen as the Tree of Life.
Crux at the bottom right is marked by the "standard-bearer", also at the edge of the Milky Way.
The Galactic Meridian is the next to bottom-most line on Stela 5 at the same level at which the "standard-bearer" as Crux is sitting.
Below that Galactic Meridian but directly above the edge of the Milky Way, stars are marked for Ara, Norma, Triangulum Australe, Circinus and Musca.
Hence, no fewer than three "borders" of the image, so-to-speak, are marked by edges of the Milky Way, showing why this portion of the sky was portrayed as it was. Halley's Comet is marked by the largest round depression at the left side of Stela 5, similar to the Miami Circle.
As presented in previous postings in image form, our decipherment of the Miami Circle shows it to be an ancient sky map that we date similarly to the Izapa Stela 5 to the night of March 24/25, 1131 B.C. (the Equinox) at (or near) the perihelion (closest to our Sun) passage of Halley's Comet in that era. We say "at (or near)" because exact software astronomy calculation of Halley may vary.
Our 2015 revised decipherment supercedes our decipherment of the Miami Circle made ca. 10 years ago, in which we correctly also concluded that the Miami Circle was a star map. We at that time understandably -- but erroneously, as we ourselves have discovered -- assumed that the star map reflected the Miami location at 25°46'10.05"N 80°11'20.12"W, but that turns out not to be so. Rather, the Miami Circle shows stars in the Southern Hemisphere not visible in Miami, but definitely visible in Nazca, Peru, viz. the general geographic location of Nazca (Nasca).
As we progress, consider copying those above GPS coordinates into Google Earth and/or your resident astronomy software program -- we recommend Starry Night Pro, especially since the user can set the location anywhere on Earth and also set the time back to any desired era.
Although some stars of the Northern Hemisphere are marked on the Miami Circle as expected, once we provisionally identified the largest hole on the Miami Circle as Halley's Comet, there was no escaping the conclusion that the Miami Circle marked primarily stars of the Southern Hemisphere.
Why would the ancients have done that?
We presume that this was because Brickell Point marked the southeast end point of the North America part of the ancient Native America land survey by astronomy, in which Miami marked the star Diphda in Cetus, and the Florida Peninsula marked the stars of Cetus, so that one was in the depths of the underworld with the "whale". There was nowhere deeper to go in the stars, not at Miami. So they went to Nazca where the whale at the Nazca Lines is at one edge of the entire area, and continued from there.
South America would then have been surveyed by its own Cetus-related system, and as we shall see from the megalithic and rock art locations in South America,
the Miami Circle tells us how it was done.
The Miami Circle served as a map recordation of the ancient land survey by astronomy of the Native America Southern Hemisphere and showed how that survey was oriented in the stars, being marked along the Celestial Equator of that era, with the farthest East of South America in Brazil marked at Erere by Orion, the far Northwest and the Libra Equinox point marked at Careyeros Hill, with Corvus marked at Ciudad Perdida, Canis Minor at Calcoene and the Winter Solstice marked at Mont d'Argent. All those lines are marked at the so-called Nazca Lines.
Nazca also has a sensational cupmark-like-dotted (cupule-like-dotted) anthropomorphic figure location nearly the size of a football field, a location which, to our astonishment, is apparently otherwise unknown.
We found it via the hummingbird at the Miami Circle, whose astronomical location was thus clear, and going to the corresponding hummingbird at Nazca, from there we soon found the Pleiades, and from there, it was not long until we began to understand the system.
The image below is one of the keys to understanding Nazca, whose astronomy is so extensive, that we will initially present a decipherment of only this one item in the next posting.
Golf season is upon us and whether we do much more on Nazca in the near future remains to be seen. It is a mammoth project -- maybe for younger people, as my eyes are simply suffering from too much squint-producing detail work, I can tell you that. I will provide some identifications soon, but not all.
Below again is the image of the previously posted
Let us in any case return to the Miami Circle.
We examined as many online photographs online as we could find. Our decipherment relied upon our own tracing of the dots and marks found on a photograph at the non-profit Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, Inc. ["AHC"], 4800 SW 64th Ave Suite 107, Davie, FL 33014, found at Menotrix.com at http://www.mnemotrix.com/ahci_web/projects.html. Their Miami Circle photograph is found online at http://www.mnemotrix.com/ahci_web/circle2.jpg,
We have no affiliation with AHC or Menotrix and published our decipherment of the Miami Circle via that photograph as "fair use", especially because it is essential to show that we are using actual and not imagined dots or marks.
The sky map that resulted from the decipherment can not have been seen at Miami in that era. An image created with Starry Night Pro shows clearly at a GPS setting of 25°46'10.05"N 80°11'20.12"W and a time of 23:00 on March 24, 1131 B.C. that Miami is too far North to show the lowest stars, with the grey horizon line showing the limits of stellar visibility looking South.
The solution, which was unexpected and which creates many new unforeseen problems, was to find a fitting location for sky pictured on the Miami Circle, and we initially used a GPS setting of 14°49'05.60"S 74°59'41.64"W, which is the middle of the "heart" of that Cetus-shaped figure near the Nazca "Cetus" Whale that marks the southest corner of the Nazca Lines system.
Check it all out on Google Earth, especially via Nazca Lines - ナスカの地上絵 by Makoto Kamada, available in KML (Keyhole Markup Language) in the downloadable KMZ file NazcaLines.kmz at http://stdkmd.com/nazca/ which can be loaded into Google Earth for viewing at http://stdkmd.com/nazca/NazcaLines.kmz.
Why were the stars that were placed on the Miami Circle observed at Nazca? Was Nazca the location where the ancients made their land survey calculations by astronomy, or was this the central location for the land survey of Mesoamerica and South America?
How did we come to the decipherment solution for the Miami Circle?
We initially thought that the largest circular-type hole by far on the Miami Circle marked either the celestial or ecliptic pole, but there was a serious problem with that idea, namely that the hole was too far off center on the circle and could thus hardly have marked midheaven on a circular sky map.
Could that large hole mark something else?
To fully comprehend the subsequent discussion of the Miami Circle at Brickell Point in Miami, Florida, U.S.A. and the postings to follow, which deal with connected ancient historical sites in Mesoamerica and South America, it is essential at the start to take a look at the following sources, with whom we have no affiliation:
We further observed a faint straight line on the Miami Circle running from that same largest hole in a southeasterly direction. We then asked ourselves whether that line might mark one of the principal equatorial, celestial or galactic parameters, i.e. ecliptic, ecliptic meridian, celestial equator, celestial meridian, galactic equator, or galactic meridian.
That was an astonishing result for us, but see the publication by Robert S. McIvor cited previously, where we think Halley is also pictured as a large hole near the stars on the left side, which stars are the same there as on our deciphered Miami Circle. We think that McIvor's "nova or comet" was also Halley -- some ca. 2128 years later, i.e. 1131 B.C. to ca. 997 A.D., i.e. the equivalent of 28 cycles of the 76-year orbital cycle of Halley.
That date of 1311 B.C. is is nearly 900 years earlier than the previous recognized recorded date of the perihelion passage of Halley, although the exact accuracy of the year depends on the accuracy of the calculational alogrithm used by Starry Night Pro to calculate the orbits of Halley back into time. See our previous posting at LexiLine on the Maya calendar, Piedras Negras and Halley's Comet and note that we stated that:
Using the software program Starry Night Pro, which permits star positions to be viewed at any location on Earth and in any historical viz. archaeological era of the past, we found that:
- if the largest hole on the Miami Circle (which could be seen as having a "cloudy" tail in photographs of the circle) were viewed to mark the position of the perihelion passage of Halley's Comet,
- if the holes and other markings on the Miami Circle represented stars, and,
- if a straight but faint southeasterly line marked on the Miami Circle marked the celestial meridian,
- then the largest hole on the Miami Circle would mark the position of Halley's Comet on its orbital path on the night of March 24/25, 1131 B.C. near the day of the Equinox exactly.
As one can read at Mesoamerican calendars at the Wikipedia:
"The mesoamerican calendar probably originated with the Olmecs, and a settlement existed at Izapa, in southeast Chiapas Mexico, before 1200 BCE. There, at a latitude of about 15° N, the Sun passes through zenith twice a year, and there are 260 days between zenithal passages, and gnomons (used generally for observing the path of the Sun and in particular zenithal passages), were found at this and other sites. The sacred almanac may well have been set in motion on August 13, 1359 BCE, in Izapa." [located on the current southwest border between Mexico and Guatemala, we added the link]Izapa has a stela, Stela 5, that shows a section of the same sky in which Halley is pictured on the Miami Circle, but Izapa is limited in its southern stellar visibility by its more northerly location and thus does not show stars as far South.
Izapa Stela number 5 has been much discussed in religious circles and we want to stay out of that discussion entirely, especially since the best and earliest photograph of Stela 5 is that taken by Matthew W. Stirling's original National Geographic expedition, a photograph found online at the Book Of Mormon sources -- http://bookofmormonresources.blogspot.de/2012/07/v-garth-norman-in-mexico-city.html.
Hence, we do not present any photographs of the Stela or of the figures on it at all here, since anyone interested can find them online.
Rather, we present here only our astronomical decipherment of Izapa Stela 5 as follows. Anyone who wants to match the stars to the figures on that Stela on their own can do so, since the main figures are crystal clear:
Our illustration above, which is drawn on a Starry Night Pro astronomy software star image clip, shows that we date Izapa Stela 5 to March 24/25 1131 B.C., when Halley's Comet marked the Equinox point in the stars of Lupus, whose protuberance is at the edge of the Milky Way.
The stars of Centaurus are found in the middle and to the right, with the extension of Centaurus in the middle marking what past religious discussion has seen as the Tree of Life.
Crux at the bottom right is marked by the "standard-bearer", also at the edge of the Milky Way.
The Galactic Meridian is the next to bottom-most line on Stela 5 at the same level at which the "standard-bearer" as Crux is sitting.
Below that Galactic Meridian but directly above the edge of the Milky Way, stars are marked for Ara, Norma, Triangulum Australe, Circinus and Musca.
Hence, no fewer than three "borders" of the image, so-to-speak, are marked by edges of the Milky Way, showing why this portion of the sky was portrayed as it was. Halley's Comet is marked by the largest round depression at the left side of Stela 5, similar to the Miami Circle.
As presented in previous postings in image form, our decipherment of the Miami Circle shows it to be an ancient sky map that we date similarly to the Izapa Stela 5 to the night of March 24/25, 1131 B.C. (the Equinox) at (or near) the perihelion (closest to our Sun) passage of Halley's Comet in that era. We say "at (or near)" because exact software astronomy calculation of Halley may vary.
Our 2015 revised decipherment supercedes our decipherment of the Miami Circle made ca. 10 years ago, in which we correctly also concluded that the Miami Circle was a star map. We at that time understandably -- but erroneously, as we ourselves have discovered -- assumed that the star map reflected the Miami location at 25°46'10.05"N 80°11'20.12"W, but that turns out not to be so. Rather, the Miami Circle shows stars in the Southern Hemisphere not visible in Miami, but definitely visible in Nazca, Peru, viz. the general geographic location of Nazca (Nasca).
As we progress, consider copying those above GPS coordinates into Google Earth and/or your resident astronomy software program -- we recommend Starry Night Pro, especially since the user can set the location anywhere on Earth and also set the time back to any desired era.
Although some stars of the Northern Hemisphere are marked on the Miami Circle as expected, once we provisionally identified the largest hole on the Miami Circle as Halley's Comet, there was no escaping the conclusion that the Miami Circle marked primarily stars of the Southern Hemisphere.
Why would the ancients have done that?
We presume that this was because Brickell Point marked the southeast end point of the North America part of the ancient Native America land survey by astronomy, in which Miami marked the star Diphda in Cetus, and the Florida Peninsula marked the stars of Cetus, so that one was in the depths of the underworld with the "whale". There was nowhere deeper to go in the stars, not at Miami. So they went to Nazca where the whale at the Nazca Lines is at one edge of the entire area, and continued from there.
South America would then have been surveyed by its own Cetus-related system, and as we shall see from the megalithic and rock art locations in South America,
the Miami Circle tells us how it was done.
The Miami Circle served as a map recordation of the ancient land survey by astronomy of the Native America Southern Hemisphere and showed how that survey was oriented in the stars, being marked along the Celestial Equator of that era, with the farthest East of South America in Brazil marked at Erere by Orion, the far Northwest and the Libra Equinox point marked at Careyeros Hill, with Corvus marked at Ciudad Perdida, Canis Minor at Calcoene and the Winter Solstice marked at Mont d'Argent. All those lines are marked at the so-called Nazca Lines.
Nazca also has a sensational cupmark-like-dotted (cupule-like-dotted) anthropomorphic figure location nearly the size of a football field, a location which, to our astonishment, is apparently otherwise unknown.
We found it via the hummingbird at the Miami Circle, whose astronomical location was thus clear, and going to the corresponding hummingbird at Nazca, from there we soon found the Pleiades, and from there, it was not long until we began to understand the system.
The image below is one of the keys to understanding Nazca, whose astronomy is so extensive, that we will initially present a decipherment of only this one item in the next posting.
Golf season is upon us and whether we do much more on Nazca in the near future remains to be seen. It is a mammoth project -- maybe for younger people, as my eyes are simply suffering from too much squint-producing detail work, I can tell you that. I will provide some identifications soon, but not all.
Below again is the image of the previously posted
The "Next" Great Google Earth Image Mystery for Archaeology, Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy Buffs : Where is the Location of this Image on Earth and in the Stars?
Now you know the image is at Nazca.
See if you can find out where. Do yourself a favor and examine the PERIMETER area of the Nazca lines, not the lines themselves. Everyone has ignored the perimeter, and that is where the key to the system is found! Look between the horns of Aries (and Triangulum)....
Let us in any case return to the Miami Circle.
We examined as many online photographs online as we could find. Our decipherment relied upon our own tracing of the dots and marks found on a photograph at the non-profit Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, Inc. ["AHC"], 4800 SW 64th Ave Suite 107, Davie, FL 33014, found at Menotrix.com at http://www.mnemotrix.com/ahci_web/projects.html. Their Miami Circle photograph is found online at http://www.mnemotrix.com/ahci_web/circle2.jpg,
We have no affiliation with AHC or Menotrix and published our decipherment of the Miami Circle via that photograph as "fair use", especially because it is essential to show that we are using actual and not imagined dots or marks.
The sky map that resulted from the decipherment can not have been seen at Miami in that era. An image created with Starry Night Pro shows clearly at a GPS setting of 25°46'10.05"N 80°11'20.12"W and a time of 23:00 on March 24, 1131 B.C. that Miami is too far North to show the lowest stars, with the grey horizon line showing the limits of stellar visibility looking South.
The solution, which was unexpected and which creates many new unforeseen problems, was to find a fitting location for sky pictured on the Miami Circle, and we initially used a GPS setting of 14°49'05.60"S 74°59'41.64"W, which is the middle of the "heart" of that Cetus-shaped figure near the Nazca "Cetus" Whale that marks the southest corner of the Nazca Lines system.
Check it all out on Google Earth, especially via Nazca Lines - ナスカの地上絵 by Makoto Kamada, available in KML (Keyhole Markup Language) in the downloadable KMZ file NazcaLines.kmz at http://stdkmd.com/nazca/ which can be loaded into Google Earth for viewing at http://stdkmd.com/nazca/NazcaLines.kmz.
Why were the stars that were placed on the Miami Circle observed at Nazca? Was Nazca the location where the ancients made their land survey calculations by astronomy, or was this the central location for the land survey of Mesoamerica and South America?
How did we come to the decipherment solution for the Miami Circle?
We initially thought that the largest circular-type hole by far on the Miami Circle marked either the celestial or ecliptic pole, but there was a serious problem with that idea, namely that the hole was too far off center on the circle and could thus hardly have marked midheaven on a circular sky map.
Could that large hole mark something else?
To fully comprehend the subsequent discussion of the Miami Circle at Brickell Point in Miami, Florida, U.S.A. and the postings to follow, which deal with connected ancient historical sites in Mesoamerica and South America, it is essential at the start to take a look at the following sources, with whom we have no affiliation:
- Two articles in the Florida Anthropologist, Volume 53, Number 4, Special Issue: The Miami Circle, December 2000, Ryan J. Wheeler, Editor, Florida Anthropological Society, Inc., Special & Area Studies Collections. http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00027829/00084
- Brent R. Weisman, Herschel E. Shepard, and George M. Luer, The Origin and Significance of the Brickell Point Site (8DA12)
- Robert S. Carr and John Ricisak, Preliminary Report on Salvage Archaeological Investigations of the Brickell Point Site (8DA12)
- Robert S. McIvor, Star Patterns on the Aztec Calendar Stone, ADSABS.HARVARD.EDU, Research Papers -- Articles de recherche SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 94, p. 56, where McIvor writes:
"The most obvious feature of the dotted patterns is the simple fact that the Aztecs mapped the heavens by displaying stars as dots or circles....
The present investigation of the dotted patterns on the Aztec calendar stone tells us something about the history and practice of astronomy. The custom of forming star groups by “connecting the dots” appears to have been a universal pursuit. It was no different in Mesoamerica than in Mesopotamia, or in China, or the Land of the Inca, or in modern astronomy. While there are some differences in the final results, there are also remarkable similarities. In many ways, the constellation identifications support the concept of cultural diffusion....
As argued here, the Aztec calendar stone, in addition to all its other layers of fascinating information, seems to be a permanent record of an independent observation of an unusual star [nova or comet] that was recorded by the Chinese in 1011 CE, with the same year and sky position
chiseled on basalt."
We further observed a faint straight line on the Miami Circle running from that same largest hole in a southeasterly direction. We then asked ourselves whether that line might mark one of the principal equatorial, celestial or galactic parameters, i.e. ecliptic, ecliptic meridian, celestial equator, celestial meridian, galactic equator, or galactic meridian.
That was an astonishing result for us, but see the publication by Robert S. McIvor cited previously, where we think Halley is also pictured as a large hole near the stars on the left side, which stars are the same there as on our deciphered Miami Circle. We think that McIvor's "nova or comet" was also Halley -- some ca. 2128 years later, i.e. 1131 B.C. to ca. 997 A.D., i.e. the equivalent of 28 cycles of the 76-year orbital cycle of Halley.
That date of 1311 B.C. is is nearly 900 years earlier than the previous recognized recorded date of the perihelion passage of Halley, although the exact accuracy of the year depends on the accuracy of the calculational alogrithm used by Starry Night Pro to calculate the orbits of Halley back into time. See our previous posting at LexiLine on the Maya calendar, Piedras Negras and Halley's Comet and note that we stated that:
"Halley appears again as the illustrious king Yich'aak K'ak' (Fiery Claw) whose "flint and shield" are brought down by Jasaw Chan K'awiil I on (sic) August 5, 695 A.D. - but of course this is 2+ years earlier in fact."If we take 693 A.D. and add it to 1131 B.C. we get a sum of the passage of 1824 years, divided by 76, the average orbital period of Halley, and we get a result of exactly 24 appearances of Halley in that period. The world last saw Halley's Comet in 1986 A.D. Halley will enter our solar system again only in the year 2061 A.D.
If we add 2061 A.D. to 1131 B.C. we get a sum of the passage of 3192 years, divided by 76 results in exactly 42 appearances of Hally. Douglas Adams greets.
THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 58 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America
The Native America Southern Hemisphere Land Survey Revealed at Miami Circle: Related - The Aztec Calendar Stone, Izapa Stela 5, and the Next Google Earth Mystery Image
-----
