Introduction

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.— Oscar Wilde.

Hello! I’m Luke Piwalker. “Archaeocryptographers” Carl P. Munck and Michael Lawrence Morton are my “Yoda” and “Obi-Wan” respectively. Being people, we have all had our differences in the ways we work with and interpret ancient numbers and architecture, but what we have most had in common is that we have been seekers of answers to ancient mysteries, particularly the mysteries of ancient mathematics and metrology (the study of ancient units of measure). If you’ll bear with me, that’s neither as dry or boring as it must sound.

All three of us in our own way, like so many others, have held the conviction that ancient peoples possessed unappreciated and demonstrable mastery of mathematics, mathematics that is deeply intertwined with other ancient mysteries. Our group, however, often seems particularly inquisitive. We can for example (and do), ask not only why Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid were constructed, but why they were designed and proportioned the particular way that they were. Some of the possible answers may surprise you – they certainly surprised me.

For the record, I decline the use of the expressions “archeocryptography” or “code” to describe the numbers I work with. Quite the contrary, I think the ancients very plausibly went out their way to make things “readable”, presumably so to anyone who was versed in the units of measurement of their day. I can’t imagine that anything was so hidden as to merit terms that seemingly imply they were concealed as if for some select elite few.

For background, Carl Munck held the view that the geographic coordinates of ancient monuments are encoded in some of the details of their composition to tell us “why they are where they are”. Michael Morton and I worked with this view for a decade or more, and he eventually attempted to plot out a stellar cartography grid to mirror and supplement the geographic earth grid that Munck espoused, called the “Archaeo-Sky Matrix”, the celestial equivalent of Munck’s “Pyramid Matrix”.

About ten or twelve years ago, I came to the harsh realization that none of us working with these global grid were adequately qualified to work with the maps and cartography we relied on, and had likely placed too much faith in the skill of modern cartography to afford us the clarity and quality of mapping and geographic data we relied on. I decided to take a break from the whole thing to return later when I could make a fresh start at it, but many things happened along the way and it’s only the last 3 years that I’ve been able to return to the subject with more of a clean slate.

I have from the beginning based on much experience working with Munck’s style of mathematics, staunchly supported the idea that he has the mathematics and some of most important parts of the ancient metrology right. However, my disillusionment with Munck’s ideas about mapping and global coordinate systems left a burning question in its wake – if the proportions and design of ancient monuments aren’t talking about “why they are where they are” after all, what are they talking about through the numbers built into them?

Three years I was inspired to go back to working with “Munck’s” system of math by a discussion on the Great Pyramid, which brought back many memories about the amount of effort I spent working with associated numbers. My renewed searches for reliable architectural data on ancient Egyptian architecture serendipitously found a wealth of data on ancient Mayan architecture and I began to explore it, hoping that it held the missing key to understanding what ancient architects were trying to express through proportion, ratio, measurement and other areas in which we had already noted consistent patterns.

Even though many years ago, I made a few “discoveries” (I question the idea that I am “discovering” anything, as opposed to re-discovering things) in the data from Mayan temple pyramids at Tikal gathered by Teobert Maler, when I returned to the data to look deeper for patterns and clues, I was perplexed. It wasn’t until the question of what ancient Mayan mathematics might be expressing was reduced to the question of what was important to the ancient Maya that was numerical in nature, that any apparent progress was made.

The answer to that pivotal question is of course calendars. The ancient Maya and Aztecs, to name only two of many peoples with similar inclinations, are duly renowned for their preoccupation with calendars, their skill at keeping and correcting calendars, and for creating remarkable calendar-related artifacts such as the Aztec Sun Stone (frequently seen mislabeled as “The Mayan Calendar”) and the related Tizoc Stone.

To try to keep things short for now, my view the last three years is that Munck was right about the importance of geography and geodesy to ancient architects and about the highly integrated system of numbers that they used; Morton was right that celestial objects command a great deal of importance to ancient architects, albeit that the planets, their cycles, and the inter-relatedness of these cycles, may take precedence over any mathematical attributes of stars.

If we combine the best ideas from both researchers, we may have enough of a foundation to begin to paint a more complete picture for the first time.

Since the logic of what I do with numbers can be elusive to others even with voluminous notes attached, perhaps particularly those who have been tempted incessantly with simple, prefabricated and often rigidly orthodox answers in spite of their admirable open-mindedness, I’ve decided to start this blog to share my ideas and discoveries, which I hope will continue to come along on a regular basis.

Often enough, we have been like exiles, fleeing one Internet forum for another and having to start fresh. Relatively little of Munck’s printed material may be available now, most of what Morton and I posted to the Internet is now vanished. That must be somewhat ironic in its way – we study monuments that have retained their messages written on the “parchment” of stone for thousands of years, yet most of our published work about numbers, their meanings, and their relationships has already vanished into the mist of time in barely a decade, even while many of us must harbor hope that the Internet will serve so that people’s efforts and the histories of those efforts do not so easily disappear.

Since I’m making a new start here, there will be a lot of catching up to do, but I will try my best to share anything and everything that I think people might want to know in order to appreciate what I’m talking about and to be able to experiment with trying out a similar perspective to my own, because it’s been an immensely, if not immeasurably, rewarding perspective.

My search for the meaning of ancient numbers may have taken me back as far as to the very roots of mathematics, to what may literally be the very first numbers known to man as we first began to try to measure the cycles of the heavens and the seasons of their earth, cycles that may be the roots of countless customs and traditions. My search may have led me to units of measure of space and of time that have been handed down to us with astonishing dedication as both heritage and inheritance.

–Luke Piwalker