DEMG - Mayan Astronomy - Mark Gibbons

 The Mayans were a South American culture that flourished for a long time until the Spanish Conquistadors arrived. As a society they were pretty obsessed with astronomy. They invented one of the most elegant writing systems ever devised to help record their findings, including arguably the world's first use of zero. They built some stunning observatories that we can still visit, and their measurement of heavenly objects was more accurate than that in Europe of the time. This talk looks at what we have been able to piece together so far from what has survived.