chaos and honey

returned last night with the family, from our camping at dor habonim.......
for the last couple of weeks i have had a dialogue with a friend regarding the astronomical investigation & accomplishments of the mayan and aztec. he has basically said that it was not a great achievement in astronomy and merely a good accounting of time.
i have been doing a bit of reading and a proper presentation on my part would include phd level thesis on the subject.
allow me in the meantime to offer the following thought that would guide my soon to be not written thesis.......
the mathematical accomplishments of these two groups (lets not make the feats of the inca small either) were no tiny endeavor.
while my friend casts cynical eyes at their religious entanglements and 'science' ability, i think at best it would be ethnocentric to judge only the 'written' records and archeaological sites.
what do i mean? there is a recorded history that shows the spaniards when they found many of the locations of 'study' of these people whether being used or vacated, destroyed as much as possible under orders because their 'generals, priests, and fellow conquistodors' viewed the sites as places of the devil.
this is not an apologia, this is to point out that in the name of religion from the west, great studies were destroyed in which some are trying to claim that merely a religious site was ruined.
i suspect within the great mathematical knowledge and ability to chart stars, galaxies (see the mayan calender documenting the world till the year 2012 a.d in which they predict end of the 'old' world because under their observation earth and the milky way will be center of universal cosmos as they 'accounted' for it and a new world will begin) that:
somewhere somehow somebody associated with the mayan had a thought that was not religious in regards to warranting further astronomical investigation.
i suggest that there were people among them that kept on the robes of their religious titles to further what they really wanted to know.
of course that is ethnocentric of me to suggest, but the fact is that in order to keep an accounting of the calander (two actually - a religious one and a civil one) that were so accurate that they had to know and study the stars with great insight.
and thus my suggestion that all of this is merely an introduction to a great thesis, one which i find myself with limited amounts of time to write during this lifetime.
which takes me full circle to the camp grounds at the beach on the sea this weekend. the moon was in dead center north of sky for a good deal of the night. the sky was thus illuminated too much because of the moon and not all the stars were able to be seen fully........but if we were able to view the full sky and all stars shining how much more do we know than our predessesors on an individual basis?
our knowledge is compartmentalized, while we say one group had better knowledge than others because one group was trying to attain reason because of religious implications we are selling them short.
seems to me galileo was made to wear the robe of the religious too or face (he did suffer actually) punishment.
a lot of us know how to bearly turn a screwdriver, we hire someone to do it for us. we have become a conveyor belt world, one in which people are responsible for little as individuals but are merely a plug for a certain technique, able to be replaced in a moments notice with some proper training of the underlings.........these our my sunday thoughts.......thank you.