During 2010, I had a chance to spend two days at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, discussing the site with a film crew from National Geographic. These clips were part of that shoot, and feature a younger me with my student Alex Hagen exploring the site, and discussing some aspects of Chaco Canyon and the astronomical motivations for its construction by the ancient culture. We filmed over an hour of footage for this documentary – but only these short clips survived the editing process!  Enjoy!  The video is entitled “Decoding the Skies” and was part of the National Geographic “Known Universe” series. These are very OLD video clips – but fun to watch and with pretty good production value too! 

 

 

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This is a clip of me discussing the astronomical motivations for Chaco Canyon, and some of the ways ancient people encoded the skies in their architecture.

 

And this is a clip of me with my student Alex Hagen (HMC ’11) exploring the Chaco Canyon Casa Rinconada and measuring its alignments

 

 

 

http://natgeotv.com/ca/known-universe/videos/ancient-astrono