An Ancient Mayan Copernicus, UCSB article featuring Prof. Aldana

Professor Aldana was recently featured on the UCSB Current, Society and Culture in an article titled "An Ancient Mayan Copernicus." For more than 120 years the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex - an ancient Mayan book containing astronomical data - has been of great interest to scholars around the world. The accuracy of its observations, especially the calculation of a kind of 'leap year' in the Mayan Calendar, was deemed an impressive curiosity used primarily for astrology. 

But UC Santa Barbara's Gerardo Aldana, a professor of Anthropology and of Chicana and Chicano Studies, believes the Venus Table has been misunderstood and vastly underappreciated. Find out more about Prof. Aldana's journal article and why he calls it "discovering discovery" by visiting http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/017062/mayan-moment?utm_source=newsletter&...