My professor laughed at me for saying the Antikythera mechanism was just an astronomy tool, and now I think he was too easy on me

Val Carr · 2026-10-11T09:00:05.271612+00:00

Back in my sophomore year at a small school in Ohio, I wrote a paper arguing the Antikythera mechanism was only a star chart. My professor, Dr. Whitfield, gave me a C minus and said I was missing the whole point of how ancient tech works. I spent three weeks re-reading the 2006 Nature paper on the gear ratios and realized the thing could predict eclipses and track the Olympic cycle, not just stars. Last month I saw a new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science that found evidence of a lunar anomaly pin on the front dial, which means it was way more complex than even I thought. So my question is, why do so many of us still learn that it was just an early calendar when the data says otherwise?

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My professor laughed at me for saying the Antikythera mechanism was just an astronomy tool, and now I think he was too easy on me | Archaeology Discoveries - Free To Speak