A Unified Interpretation of Ancient Sites Through the Afterimage Visual Model — Connecting the Pyramids with World Heritage Monuments Across the Globe

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A newer version of this work has been published at a different DOI. Please access and cite the latest version here:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18250597

Afterimage Archaeoastronomy proposes that ancient star myths, architectural alignments, and ritual cosmologies emerged from universal visual afterimage responses to the night sky. Under dark-sky conditions, human vision organizes stars not as isolated points but as perceptual structures—lines, vessels, swarms, and luminous layers—generated by micro-saccades, brightness gradients, and afterimage persistence.

These perceptual modes explain why independent civilizations produced similar celestial narratives without cultural contact. The framework integrates four stable visual templates:

• Line-image structures, exemplified by Orion’s Belt
• Vessel-image structures, seen in the Big Dipper
• Swarm-image clustering in the Pleiades
• Layer-image perception of the Milky Way band

Architectural orientations materialize these percepts: Giza aligns with Orion and Thuban, Teotihuacan synchronizes with Orion rising and the Pleiades, and Stonehenge encodes the Milky Way’s solstitial layer pattern. These case studies demonstrate that ancient sky interpretations were grounded in shared physiological perception rather than symbolic invention.

The work synthesizes archaeoastronomy, cognitive science, and cultural anthropology into a unified explanatory model and introduces a preliminary mathematical framework for reconstructing afterimage salience in ancient skies.