about us
We are an educational platform offering courses on the study of ancient societies and the sky that are accessible, inspiring, and rigorous.
Our Vision
Humans have always watched the sky, and our relationship with celestial objects and events is embedded in culture, for example by informing our sense of time, place and identity. Understanding the human/skyscape connection is necessarily a multi-disciplinary endeavor, engaging archaeology, anthropology, art, astronomy, religion, history and other fields.
We believe that building expertise should include both depth and breath, while remaining accessible. Our mission is to teach archaeoastronomy / skyscape archaeology with clarity, avoiding unnecessary jargon without sacrificing the rigour that scholarship demands.
Grounded in the highest academic standards, our courses are built on peer-reviewed research, field-tested methodologies, and global case studies—from European megaliths to Indigenous star knowledge, from Asian correlative cosmologies to the cosmovisions of the Americas. We seek to empower learners worldwide with tools that are both scholarly robust and relatable, inviting them into humanity’s oldest dialogue: between earth, sky, and culture.
Through this approach, we aim not only to transmit knowledge, but to cultivate thoughtful observers—able to trace the human impulse to orient, to align, and to connect across space and time.
The Team
Dr Fabio Silva
An astronomer turned archaeologist, Fabio’s interests lie with how societies have perceived their environment (skyscape and landscape) and used that to time and adjust social, productive and magico-religious behaviours. His research is global, but in this field he has largely focused on Portugal and the United Kingdom (including Stonehenge). Fabio has been teaching archaeoastronomy / skyscape archaeology at university level for 15 years. During this time he also published dozens of research papers and edited volumes and co-founded the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology. His “outstanding contributions” to the fields of cultural astronomy and archaeoastronomy have led to him receiving the Carlos Jaschek Award from the European Society for Astronomy in Culture in 2016. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at Bournemouth University, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and runs Stone x Sky a consultancy focused on skyscape archaeology activities.
Dr Erica Ellingson
Erica completed degrees at MIT and the University of Arizona and for several decades has been a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado, specializing in using multi-wavelength observations of quasars and galaxy clusters to trace invisible dark matter and dark energy and determine how they control the evolution of the Universe. Her work and travels took her around the world and her curiosity shifted to understanding how people see and connect with the sky. In 2015 she began her work as a consulting astronomer for US National Parks in the southwest and in 2019 she joined the editorial team at the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology. Along with her work with the Skyscape Academy, Erica continues to teach at the University of Colorado, host astronomical events and create planetarium shows and other educational materials in archaeoastronomy / skyscape archaeology.
Fabio and Erica are excellent communicators who bring both expertise and passion to their teaching.
— Dr Amanda Chadburn, University of Oxford