NASA History Community:

                Some of you may want to register for this free, interesting NASM Webinar.  Please contact Dr. Matt Shindell with any questions and feel free to forward to others who may be interested.  Thanks a lot and happy new year.

                -Steve

 

Stephen Garber

(he/him)

NASA History Division

Office of Communications

NASA Headquarters

Mary W. Jackson Building, Room 5P25

Washington, DC 20546

202-358-0385

http://history.nasa.gov

 

 

 

               

 

Seminar on Contemporary Science, Technology, and Culture

 

Thursday, January 19, 4:00 pm ET

 

The 2023 Contemporary History Seminar begins on Thursday, January 19th on Zoom. Register in advance. The speaker will be:

 

Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos

Professor of Chicana/o Studies

University of California, Santa Barbara

 

Calculating Brilliance: An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich’en Itza

 

 

Near the Great Ball Court of Chich’en Itza, within the interior of the Lower Temple of the Jaguar, a mural depicts a female Mayan astronomer known as K'uk'ul Ek' Tuyilaj. Her brilliant discovery, recorded in the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, reverberated through Mayan science. But it has remained obscured to modern eyes. Weaving together archaeology, mathematics, history, and astronomy, Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos’s new book, Calculating Brilliance, critically reframes science in the pre-Columbian world. He reexamines the historiography of the Dresden Codex and contextualizes the Venus Table relative to other Indigenous literature. From a perspective anchored to Indigenous cosmologies and religions, Aldana y Villalobos delves into how we may understand Indigenous science and discovery—both its parallels and divergences from modern globalized perspectives of science. Calculating Brilliance brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy. Join the seminar for a presentation by the author and a discussion of this important new book.

 

For further information, please contact Matt Shindell at 202-633-5897; ShindellM@si.edu

 

Please register in advance for this talk.

 

Before the talk, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. The link you receive should not be shared with others; it is unique to you.

 

 

Matt Shindell, Ph.D. (he/him)  /  Space History Curator SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM o:202-633-5897  /  shindellm@si.edu AIRANDSPACE.SI.EDU