Ancient Skies: Progress and issues with digital tools applied to archaeoastronomy

30th EAA annual meeting

Roma. Italia
Congreso. 2024

Nowadays, it is customary to use several digital tools for the archaeological research. All of them are also applied and

with increasing interest in the field of Cultural Astronomy and particularly in Archaeoastronomy. Besides, this field

is producing some tools of its own that can also be of use to mimic phenomenological approaches within the field of

landscape archaeology, for example.

In spite of these, many of them are some times used to substitute field work, particularly troublesome is the indiscriminate

use of Google Earth satellite images to derive measurements of orientations. Although this is a useful tool

in several cases, it must be used with care and caution (see, e.g., Rodríguez-Antón et al. 2017).

In the present talk I’d like to review the digital methods presently used to derive data for archaeoastronomy, see how

they are used, indicate a number of possible problems, and also a few ways forward to move in the future years in the

aim of delving these tools as a complement for our data gathering and analysis, to enhance the and complement the

interpretation of their skies by ancient peoples.