Ancient (BCE-40 CE)

Museionline results from a partnership between Microsoft and Adnkronos Cultura and provides updated information concerning over 3,500 museums. The site aims at enhancing and promoting the Italian cultural heritage worldwide. Besides detailed service information on each museum, Adnkronos Cultura provides information on cultural programmes, exhibitions, and the activities carried out by Italian museums.

It pleases me that they think this page is a good list of links. I created it long before the advent of google, which is where you should go if you don't find what you're looking for here.

The Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies was founded in 1997 in Fürstenfeldbruck, a small village near Munich, Bavaria, Germany. It now has its location in Gilching-Geisenbrunn, Bavaria, Germany. The task of the institute is doing research work in special fields, combining various statements of the problem and several methods to solve it. Up to now, the institute inquires about scientific and technical abilities of early cultures. Another investigation deals with the correlations between natural sciences, human disciplines, art and techniques, economy, philosophy, and scientific study of religions in past, present time and future.

A century ago, at the height of what might be referred to as the "canal furor," Camille Flammarion published the first volume of his great work, La Planète Mars, which summarized what was then known about the planet. In his preface he described how he hesitated between two methods of presenting the state of Martian knowledge---in special chapters dealing with topics such as continents, seas, polar caps, and so on; or chronologically, in the order in which the facts had been obtained. He at length decided on the latter approach, "mainly," he wrote, "because it seemed to me to be the more interesting . . . and also because it provides a better account of the gradual development of our knowledge." So it has seemed to me, and I have done likewise.

Culture, Astronomy and Cosmology
General Reference
Aztec/Inca/Maya Astronomy
Early Greek Cosmology
Magazines and Journals : Culture and Science
Further Search Facilities

This page provides access to my collection of some 1100 images of archaeological and archaeoastronomical interest.

Dogons knew existence and description of Sirius B invisible to naked eye.

Humans have been fascinated by the Moon for thousands of years, explaining it both as a deity and a physical world, recognizing its monthly re-occurrences, speculating on the origins of its surface features, and ultimately visiting it. Exploring the Moon provides knowledge about the Moon and its history of exploration.

Although the numerical methods and parameters found in the Babylonian Astronomical Procedure texts and Ephemerides of the Seleucid Era [310 B.C. - 75 A.D.] have been described in some detail, notably by Neugebauer (1955),1 (1975), 2 Van der Waerden (1974) 3 and others, it is far from certain whether the extant material represents the state of Babylonian astronomy per se, or merely scattered remnants of a larger corpus of knowledge.

Archaeoastronomy has emerged in the last three decades as a thriving `interdiscipline', but it is one that continues to be viewed with suspicion by many mainstream archaeologists. Together with what has become known as ethnoastronomy, it strives to comprehend the nature and meaning of astronomical practice in past (as well as modern non-Western) societies. This has tended to be of particular interest to astronomers and historians of science, but for the archaeologist or anthropologist forms merely one aspect of the study of human societies in general. It is an important one, though: the movements of the heavenly bodies are of almost universal concern, even amongst small bands of hunter-gatherers. Stellar lore and astronomical practice invariably form part of a broader frameworks of understanding--cosmologies--which define and dictate the nature, place and timing of various human actions.