The Incas’ Sky: From Myths to History and Astronomy

This book introduces readers to the astonishing civilisation of the Incas. Its novelty lies in its general but highly informative synthesis of their history and astronomy through the accounts of contemporary chronicles and recent archaeological findings. Richly illustrated with the author’s own photographs, it will attract the attention of seasoned travellers interested in ancient civilisations and keen to discover what people were capable of achieving so long ago, but also any reader interested in the history and prehistory of South American peoples, including students or university researchers wanting to know more about the pre-Columbian civilizations of Peru. The Inca civilisation was in fact the culmination of cultural contributions from a dozen or so complex pre-Columbian civilizations, such as those of Chavín, Nazca, Wari, or Tiwanaku. Intensely spiritual, the Inca people attributed metaphysical powers to all manner of objects and places they considered sacred, but at the same time the numerous alignments in their buildings show that they result from careful observations of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars at different times of the year. Indeed, the Incas were an essentially agrarian people, so time measurement and calendar devices were essential for the purely pragmatic problem of planning agricultural tasks during the tropical year. The book sets out to describe the Incas in their historical and geographical context, avoiding specialization or excessive technicality, but retaining a certain scientific rigor, and including a detailed consideration of their interest in the sky and astronomy.

Emile Biémont is Honorary Research Director of the belgian FNRS, Honorary professor of the University of Mons (Belgium) and Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. His fields of investigation concern theoretical and experimental atomic spectroscopy with applications to laser physics, plasma physics and astrophysics. He has been involved also intensively in teaching and research in astrophysics and particularly in solar and stellar physics, namely in abundance determinations. He is also interested in the history of science and popularization of science. He is the author (or co-author) of approximately 370 scientific publications in physics and astrophysics. He has published 15 books on subjects as diverse as the light, the meteors, the calendars, the rainbow, the astronomy in the islamic world, the atomic and molecular spectroscopy, the time measurement and the history of atomic physics.