Anthony Aveni

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Anthony F. Aveni holds the title of Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy, Anthropology, and Native American Studies Emeritus at Colgate University. He began his academic path as an astronomer, completing his BA at Boston University in 1960 and his PhD at the University of Arizona in 1965. Across his career, he built a sustained conversation between astronomy and archaeology, anthropology, history, and religious studies, work that helped shape the interdisciplinary fields we now call archaeoastronomy and cultural astronomy. He is widely credited as one of the founding figures of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, thanks in large part to his studies of the astronomical knowledge, calendrical systems, architecture, and ceremonial life of the ancient Maya and Aztec.

Fieldwork spanning Mexico, Central America, Peru, North America, Europe, and the Middle East allowed him to trace the links between celestial events and cultural life across a wide range of ancient civilizations. Through his work on architectural orientation, calendar systems, hieroglyphic texts, and sacred landscapes, he helped establish that Indigenous American astronomical traditions were sophisticated bodies of knowledge, fully bound up with the social, religious, and environmental worlds that produced them.

Among his most influential publications is Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico (1980), a landmark study of Mesoamerican astronomy and calendrics that has gone through many editions and translations. His broader body of work includes Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (1989), The Lines of Nazca (1990), Conversing with the Planets: How Science and Myth Invented the Cosmos (1992), Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures(1997), The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays (2002), People and the Sky: Our Ancestors and the Cosmos (2008), 

Alongside his scholarly output, he has worked to bring the study of astronomy and culture to broader audiences — through public lectures, books written for general and young readers, and appearances on PBS, BBC, NPR, the Discovery Channel, and other outlets worldwide. He has given lectures at more than 300 universities.

Aveni joined the Colgate University faculty in 1963 and taught there for fifty-four years before retiring in 2016. He often brought students into the field with him in Mexico, Central America, and Peru, where they studied Indigenous history, hieroglyphic writing, calendrical systems, architecture, and sacred landscapes — many of them going on to coauthor publications that grew out of that research. His teaching was recognized nationally when the Council for Advancement and Support of Education named him National Professor of the Year in 1982, and Rolling Stone named him one of the country's ten leading university professors.

In 2004, Harvard University's Peabody Museum and the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project awarded him the H. B. Nicholson Award for Excellence in Mesoamerican Studies. Through decades of scholarship, teaching, and his long association with MMARP's interdisciplinary community, Aveni has reshaped how we understand the connections among sky, time, landscape, and cultural life — in ancient Mesoamerica and around the world.