Cultural Astronomy Lecture Tour by Clive Ruggles.

The 13 Towers of Chankillo, Peru

Professor Clive Ruggles will be giving a lecture tour in Australia and New Zealand from late-May until mid-June.  His lectures will cover various aspects of cultural astronomy, from the astronomy of megalithic structures in Europe to archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy in Peru and Hawaii.

For information about each lecture, click on the links below.

Australia

• Wednesday, 30 May: Public Lecture, Sydney Observatory (Sydney)
• Friday, 1 June: Research Seminar, Macquarie University (Sydney)
• Saturday, 2 June: Public Lecture, Adelaide Planetarium (Adelaide)
• Monday, 4 June: Public Lecture, Australian Museum (Sydney)
• Tuesday, 5 June: Research Seminar, University of Sydney (Sydney)
• Wednesday, 6 June: Transit of Venus, Macquarie University (Sydney)

New Zealand

• Thursday, 7 June: Research Seminar, University of Otago (Dunedin)
• Thursday, 7 June: Public Lecture, Classical Association of Otago (Dunedin)
• Saturday, 9 June: RASNZ Beatrice Hill Tinsley Lecture (Christchurch)
• Mon-Wed, 11-13 June: Third International Starlight Conference (Tekapo)
• Thur-Fri, 14-15 June: IAU Astronomy & World Heritage WG meeting (Mount Cook)
• Sunday, 17 June: RASNZ Conference 2012 (Carterton)
• Sunday, 17 June: RASNZ Beatrice Hill Tinsley Lecture (Carterton)
• Monday, 18 June: RASNZ Beatrice Hill Tinsley Lecture (Napier)
• Tuesday, 19 June: RASNZ Beatrice Hill Tinsley Lecture (Auckland)

About the Speaker:

Clive Ruggles is Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester, UK - the first and only Chair of Archaeoastronomy in the world. Archaeoastronomy is the study of beliefs and practices related to the sky in the past, and Clive trained as an astrophysicist (DPhil, Oxford) before switching fields and becoming an archaeologist.


Clive has worked in many parts of the world and has published books, papers and articles on subjects ranging from prehistoric Europe and pre-Columbian America to ancient Greece, Egypt, Polynesia and indigenous astronomies in Africa. He has ongoing fieldwork projects in Peru and Hawaii as well as various parts of Europe, and is a leading figure in a joint initiative by UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union to promote, preserve, and protect the world's most important astronomical heritage sites.

His work in South America hit the headlines in March 2007 with the publication in the journal Science of his work with Peruvian archaeologist Ivan Ghezzi on the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, a 2300-year old solar observation site. His books include Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland (Yale UP, 1999), Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth (ABC-CLIO, 2005), Skywatching in the Ancient World: New Perspectives in Cultural Astronomy, edited with anthropologist Gary Urton (Colorado, 2007), and most recently Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy, edited with technology historian Michel Cotte (ICOMOS-IAU 2010) and Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy: Building Bridges between Cultures (Cambridge UP, 2011), the Proceedings of the first IAU Symposium to be devoted to this topic.