Gerald Hawkins

One, he says, was a bronze device modeling the heavens built by Archimedes himself, taken as war plunder after the Roman general Marcellus captured Syracuse in 212 BCE and kept afterward as a treasured family heirloom, one Cicero claims to have personally seen, the other built more recently by his own contemporaries.

was made by the Stoic philosopher and astronomer Posidonius, who taught on the island of Rhodes.

That detail matters because the ship that sank off Antikythera is widely believed, based on other cargo aboard it, to have sailed from somewhere in the eastern Aegean, plausibly Rhodes itself, toward Italy.

Rhodes was home to a serious tradition of astronomical scholarship in this period, closely tied to the work of the astronomer Hipparchus, whose theoretical model for the Moon's uneven motion lines up remarkably well with the mechanical solution built into this device's gearing.

A correspondence detailed enough that several researchers on the imaging project have suggested the mechanism's designer may have had direct, first-hand access to Hipparchus' own astronomical tables, whether or not Hipparchus himself had any personal involvement in the device's actual construction.

None

The earliest serious researcher to study the site, Paul Kosok, noticed in 1941 that one particular line aligned with the setting sun on the date of the winter solstice, and proposed the entire complex functioned as a kind of vast astronomical calendar.

Maria Riker, a German mathematician who went on to spend most of the rest of her life living near the site, mapping and physically protecting the lines from damage at her own expense, and often at real personal cost, built much of her own life's work around a similar astronomical reading and her decades of dedicated fieldwork are largely why the site was as well documented as it was by the time more rigorous testing came along to challenge her central thesis.

This type of astronomical alignment has been found in other ancient cultures, such as the Mississippian culture at Cahokia in the United States, Stonehenge in England, and Newgrange in Ireland.

However, in 1990, experts in archaeoastronomy such as Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Avini concluded that there was not enough evidence to support a purely astronomical explanation.

Maria Rijka also believed that the figures represented constellations in the sky.

In 1998, an astronomer named Phyllis B. Pitluga suggested that the animal figures were representations of counter-constellations, which are dark patches within the Milky Way.