Maryland Archeology Month

-April 2009-

Sponsored by:

St. Mary's City:
375 years old, thousands of years young

Explore!

Archeology Gallery

Sundial gnomon

The gnomon is the part of the sundial that casts the shadow which enables you to read the time. The angle of the gnomon should be equal to the latitude for which it was designed. Our specimen was designed for use in the latitude of the Mediterranean Sea. It is from a pocket sundial and was designed to fold down when not in use.

Books such as Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Dyalling explained how to create and subdivide dials using simple rules of geometric construction. This book was published after Moxon's death in 1698, but the description of how to geometrically construct a dial had been published by at least 1692.