“Reverse engineering” of a horoscope?

Question

I'll start with a disclaimer -- this is not a question about astrology itself, I'm neither trying to refute nor to defend astrology. I'm interested in purely technical things, which are mostly related to astronomy.

Given a time and a place (usually related to the moment of birth of a person) one can create a horoscope -- kinda diagram, which represents the positions of planets, Sun and Moon, usually projected on ecliptic. The information about position is usually represented in a form of astrological "houses", which are related to the horizon position.

I'm interested in a "reverse" process: given the horoscope with ecliptic coordinates of Sun and Moon and planets, and given those "houses" -- can one find the place and time for which the horoscope was constructed? I'm pretty sure that such kind of problems would be interesting for, say, historians -- maybe there are some research papers or literature describing techniques that allows one to do such things?

Answer 1

There is the field of archeo-astronomy where people try to date historical events from accounts of celestial events. Such things as supernovae can help to link seperate events to one particular time frame. It has been applied to biblical timings with mixed success.

Answer 2

"Simple" celestial mechanics. We've known how objects in the sky behave for centuries (milenia even), although the actual mathematics is only a few hundred years old. Given the location of stars, planets, the moon and the sun, determining the time of someone's birth shouldn't be a problem. One would need a bit more information though to determine a location.

The labels of houses and such are purely manmade nonsense though.

Answer 3

The houses are not manmade nonsense, however they do not provide enough information to distinguish between different degrees of latitude. I am not aware of any part of the natal charts that contain information about the subject's latitude.