Archaeoastronomy

The rising sun illuminates the inner chamber of Newgrange, Ireland, only at the winter solstice.

Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the study of how peoples in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used phenomena in the sky and what role the sky played in their cultures." Clive Ruggles argues it specifically is not the study of ancient astronomy, as astronomy is a culturally specific concept and ancient peoples may have related to the sky in a different way. It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical traditions.

Archaeoastronomy uses a variety of methods to uncover evidence of past practices including astronomy, statistics and probability, anthropology, history as well as archaeology. Because these methods are so diverse and pull data from such different sources the problem of integrating them into a coherent argument has been a long-term issue for archaeoastronomers.

Archaeoastronomy fills complimentary niches to Landscape archaeology and Cognitive archaeology. One such example would the extensive work on Hopi skywatching. A combination of ethnoastronomical and archaeoastronomical studies has shown that phenomena in the sky can give different parts of the landscape different meanings. This connects use of the landscape with how people think about their place within it. The astronomical phenomena add a further element of seasonality, showing how the landscape is embedded in a sense of time. In turn this reveals more about how the Hopi make sense of other parts of their lives such as the use of colour symbolism, and their relationship with fauna. Other examples which have brought together ideas of cognition and landscape include studies of the cosmic order embedded in the roads of settlements.

Archaeoastronomy can be applied to all cultures and all time periods. The meanings of the sky vary from culture to culture, nevertheless there are scientific methods which can be applied across cultures when examining ancient beliefs.. It is perhaps the need to balance the social and scientific aspects of Archaeoastronomy which led Clive Ruggles to describe it as: "...[A] field with academic work of high quality at one end but uncontrolled speculation bordering on lunacy at the other."

History of archaeoastronomy

"In his short history of 'Astro-archaeology' John Michell argued that the status of research into ancient astronomy had improved over the past two centuries, going 'from lunacy to heresy to interesting notion and finally to the gates of orthodoxy.' Nearly two decades later, we can still ask the question: Is archaeoastronomy still waiting at the gates of orthodoxy or has it gotten inside the gates?"

Two hundred years before Michell wrote the above, there were no archaeoastronomers and there were no professional archaeologists, but there were astronomers and antiquarians. Some of these are considered the precursors of archaeoastronomy, as antiquarians interpreted the astronomical orientation of the ruins that dotted the English countryside, as William Stukeley did of Stonehenge in 1740, while John Aubrey in 1678 and Henry Chauncy in 1700 sought similar astronomical principles underlying the orientation of churches. Late in the nineteenth century astronomers such as Richard Proctor and Charles Piazzi Smyth investigated the astronomical orientations of the pyramids.

The term archaeoastronomy was first used by Elizabeth Chesley Baity (at the suggestion of Euan MacKie) in 1973, but as a topic of study it may much older, depending on what you say is archaeoastronomy. Clive Ruggles says that Heinrich Nissen, working in the mid-nineteenth century was arguably the first archaeoastronomer. Rolf Sinclair says that Norman Lockyer, working around the late 19th and early 20th Centuries could be called the 'father of archaeoastronomy.' Euan MacKie would place the origin even later, stating: "...the genesis and modern flowering of archaeoastronomy must surely lie in the work of Alexander Thom in Britain between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Early archaeoastronomy began by surveying alignments of Megalithic stones in the British Isles and sites like Auglish in County Londonderry in an attempt to find statistical patterns

In the 1960s the work of the engineer Alexander Thom and that of the astronomer Gerald Hawkins, who proposed that Stonehenge was a Neolithic computer, inspired new interest in the astronomical features of ancient sites. The claims of Hawkins were largely dismissed, but this was not the case for Alexander Thom;s work, whose his survey results of megalithic sites also proposed widespread practice of accurate astronomy in the British Isles. Euan MacKie, recognised that Thom’s theories needed to be tested and he excavated at the Kintraw standing stone site in Argyllshire in 1970 and 1971 to check whether the latter’s prediction of an observation platform on the hill slope above the stone was correct. There was an artificial platform there and this apparent verification of Thom’s long alignment hypothesis (Kintraw was diagnosed as an accurate winter solstice site) led him to check Thom’s geometrical theories at the Cultoon stone circle in Islay, also with a positive result. MacKie therefore broadly accepted Thom’s conclusions and published new prehistories of Britain. In contrast a re-evaluation of Thom’s fieldwork by Clive Ruggles argued that Thom's claims of high accuracy astronomy were not fully supported by the evidence. Nevertheless Thom's legacy remains strong, Krupp wrote in 1979, "Almost singlehandedly he has established the standards for archaeo-astronomical fieldwork and interpretation, and his amazing results have stirred controversy during the last three decades." His influence endures and practice of statistical testing of data remains one of the methods of archaeoastronomy.

It has been proposed that Maya sites such as Uxmal were built in accordance with astronomical alignments

The approach In the New World, where anthropologists began to more fully consider the role of astronomy in Amerindian societies, was markedly different. They had access to sources that the prehistory of Europe lacks such as ethnographies and the historical records of the early colonizers. Following the pioneering example of Anthony Aveni, this allowed New World archaeoastronomers to make claims for motives which in the Old World would have been mere speculation. The concentration on historical data led to some claims of high accuracy that were comparatively weak when compared to the statistically led investigations in Europe.

This came to a head at a meeting sponsored by the IAU in Oxford in 1981. The methodologies and research questions of the participants were considered so different that the conference proceedings were published as two volumes. Nevertheless the conference was considered a success in bringing researchers together and Oxford conferences have continued every four or five years at locations around the world. The subsequent conferences have resulted in a move to more interdisciplinary approaches with researchers aiming to combine the contextuality of archaeological research, which broadly describes the state of archaeoastronomy today. Rather than merely establishing the existence of ancient astronomies archaeoastronomers seek to explain why people would have an interest in the night sky.

Archaeoastronomy and its relations to other disciplines

"...[O]ne of the the most endearing characteristics of archaeoastronomy is its capacity to set academics in different disciplines at loggerheads with each other."

Reflecting Archaeoastronomy's development as an interdisciplinary subject, research in the field is conducted by investigators trained in a wide range of disciplines. Authors of recent doctoral dissertations have described their work as concerned with the fields of archaeology and cultural anthropology; with various fields of history including the history of specific regions and periods, the history of science and the history of religion; and with the relation of astronomy to art, literature and religion. Only rarely did they describe their work as astronomical, and then only as a secondary category.

Both practicing archaeoastronomers and observers of the discipline approach it from different perspectives. George Gummerman and Miranda Warburton view archaeoastronomy as part of an archaeology informed by cultural anthropology and aimed at understanding a "group’s conception of themselves in relation to the heavens', in a word, its cosmology. Todd Bostwick argued that "archaeoastronomy is anthropology – the study of human behavior in the past and present." Paul Bahn has described archaeoastronomy as an area of cognitive archaeology. Other researchers relate archaeoastronomy to the history of science, either as it relates to a culture's observations of nature and the conceptual framework they devised to impose an order on those observations or as it relates to the political motives which drove particular historical actors to deploy certain astronomical concepts or techniques. Art historian Richard Poss took a more flexible approach, maintaining that the astronomical rock art of the US Southwest be read employing "the hermeneutic traditions of western art history and art criticism" Astronomers, however, raise different questions, seeking to provide their students with identifiable precursors of their discipline, and are especially concerned with the important question of how to confirm that specific sites are, indeed, intentionally astronomical.

The reactions of professional archaeologists to archaeoastronomy have been decidedly mixed. Some expressed incomprehension or even hostility, varying from a rejection by the archaeological mainstream of what they saw as an archaeoastronomical fringe to an incomprehension between the cultural focus of archaeologists and the quantitative focus of early archaeoastronomers. Yet archaeologists have increasingly come to incorporate many of the insights from archaeoastronomy into archaeology textbooks and, as mentioned above, some students wrote archaeology dissertations on archaeoastronomical topics.

Since archaeoastronomers disagree so widely on the characterisation of the discipline, they even dispute its name. All three major international scholarly associations relate archaeoastronomy to the study of culture, using the term Astronomy in Culture or a translation. Michael Hoskin sees an important part of the discipline as fact-collecting, rather than theorizing, and proposed to label this aspect of the discipline Archaeotopography. Ruggles and Saunders proposed Cultural Astronomy as a unifying term for the various methods of studying folk astronomies. Others have argued that astronomy is an inaccurate term, what are being studied are cosmologies and people who object to the use of logos have suggested adopting the Spanish cosmovisión.

When debates polarise between techniques, the methods are often referred to by a colour code, based on the colours of the bindings of the two volumes from the first Oxford Conference, where the approaches were first distinguished. Green (Old World) archaeoastronomers rely heavily on statistics and are sometimes accused of missing the cultural context of what is a social practice. Brown (New World) archaeoastronomers in contrast have abundant ethnographic and historical evidence and have been described as 'cavalier' on matters of measurement and statistical analysis. Finding a way to integrate various approaches has been a subject of much discussion since the early 1990s.

Methodology

"For a long time I have believed that such diversity requires the invention of some all-embracing theory. I think I was very naïve in thinking that such a thing was ever possible."

Because of the wide variety of evidence, which can include artifacts as well as sites, there is no one way to practice archaeoastronomy. Despite this it is accepted that Archaeoastronomy is not a discipline that sits in isolation. Because Archaeoastronomy is an interdisciplinary field, whatever is being investigated should make sense both archaeologically and astronomically. Studies are more likely to be considered sound if they use theoretical tools found in Archaeology like analogy and homology and if they can demonstrate an understanding of accuracy and precision found in Astronomy.

Artifactual analysis

The Antikythera mechanism (main fragment)

In the case of artifacts such as the Sky Disc of Nebra, alleged to be a Bronze Age artifact depicting the cosmos, the analysis would be similar to typical post-excavation analysis as used in other sub-disciplines in archaeology. An artifact is examined and attempts are made to draw analogies with historical or ethnographical records of other peoples. The more parallels that can be found, the more likely an explanation is to be accepted by other archaeologists.

Another well-known artifact with an astronomical use is the Antikythera mechanism. In this case analysis of the artifact, and reference to the description of similar devices described by Cicero, would indicate a plausible use for the device. The argument is bolstered by the presence of symbols on the mechanism, allowing the disc to be read.

Symbolic analysis

Diagram showing the location of the sun daggers on the Fajada Butte petroglyph on various days

In some cases the use of an artefact may be known, but its meaning may not be fully understood. In such cases an examination of the symbolism on the artefact may be necessary.

A mundane example is the presence of astrological symbols found on some shoes and sandals from the Roman Empire. The use of shoes and sandals is well known, but Carol van Driel-Murray has proposed that astrological symbols etched onto sandals gave the footwear spiritual or medicinal meanings. This is supported through citation of other known uses of astrological symbols and their connection to medical practice and with the historical records of the time.

More problematic are those cases where the movement of the Sun at different times and seasons causes light and shadow interactions with petroglyphs. A widely known example is the Sun Dagger of Fajada Butte at which a glint of sunlight passing over a spiral petroglyph. The location of the dagger on the petroglyph varies throughout the year. At the solstices a dagger can be seen either through the heart of the spiral or to either side of it. It is proposed that this petroglyph was created to mark these events. Recent studies have identified many similar sites in the US Southwest and Northwestern Mexico. It has been argued that the number of solstitial markers at these sites provides statistical evidence that they were intended to mark the solstices. If no ethnographic nor historical data are found which can support this assertion then acceptance of the idea relies upon whether or not there are enough petroglyph sites in North America that such a correlation could occur by chance. It is helpful when petroglyphs are associated with existing peoples. This allows ethnoastronomers to question informants as to the meaning of such symbols.

Alignment analysis

The Sun rising behind the Heel Stone at Stonehenge

One aspect of archaeoastronomy is alignment analysis, the study of the orientation of constructs and structures and calculation of the relation of the direction in which they faced with astronomical events. Stonehenge's Avenue is hypothesized to have an orientation to the summer solstice sunrise. In pyramids of Egypt are oriented in the cardinal directions.

Alignment analysis may vary depending upon the researcher. As a coarse stereotype archaeoastronomers from an historical background tend to have an idea which is then tested by examining structures for alignments. Astronomically-minded archaeoastronomers may analyze large numbers of sites and attempt to find statistical patterns. This approach was employed in papers by pioneers in the field. Alexander Thom conducted extensive survey work of megalithic stone circles and concluded many sites were situated to observe the moon. In this instance the aim was to prove that there is an astronomical problem which requires an historical explanation. This latter approach continues to an extent in some modern research but it has comparatively little direct impact on mainstream archaeology. Prof. Clive Ruggles has referred to this as "...a bewildering ignorance of the archaeoastronomical literature since 1980"

One reason the statistically-led approach has proven unpopular with archaeologists and anthropologists was stated by the anthropologist Keith Kintigh:

In light of the fact that archaeoastronomers bring considerable energy and expertise to their efforts, what accounts for archaeologists’ indifference? I think the principal reason is that archaeologists see archaeoastronomers as answering questions that, from a social scientific standpoint, no one is asking. To put it bluntly, in many cases it doesn’t matter much to the progress of anthropology whether a particular archaeoastronomical claim is right or wrong because the information doesn’t inform the current interpretive questions.

Recently archaeoastronomers have argued for closer ties between statistically led research and historical or ethnographic records to place the findings in a social context. Schafer states: "a word of ethnography is worth a thousand alignments."

An alignment is calculated by measuring the azimuth, the angle from north, of the structure and the altitude of the horizon it faces The azimuth is usually measured using a theodolite or a compass. A compass is easier to use, though the deviation of the Earth’s magnetic field from true north, known as its magnetic declination must be taken into account. Compasses are also unreliable in areas prone to magnetic interference, such as sites being supported by scaffolding. Additionally a compass can only measure the azimuth to a precision of a half a degree.

A theodolite can be considerably more accurate if used correctly, but it is also considerably more difficult to use correctly. There is no inherent way to align a theodolite with North and so the scale has to be calibrated using astronomical observation, usually the position of the Sun. Because the position of celestial bodies changes with the time of day due to the Earth’s rotation, the time of these calibration observations must be accurately known, or else there will be a systematic error in the measurements. Horizon altitudes can be measured with a theodolite or a clinometer.

Recreating the ancient sky

"...[A]lthough different ways to do science and different scientific results do arise in different cultures, this provides little support for those who would use such differences to question the sciences' ability to provide reliable statements about the world in which we live."

Once the researcher has data to test, it is often necessary to attempt to recreate ancient sky conditions to place the data in its historical environment.

Declination

Main article: Declination

File:Star trails over mountain.jpg

A time lapse photo showing the stars rotating around the celestial pole.

To calculate what astronomical features a structure faced a coordinate system is needed. The stars provide such a system. If you were to go outside on a clear night you would observe the stars spinning around the celestial pole. This point is +90° if you are watching the North Celestial Pole or −90° if you are observing the Southern Celestial Pole. The concentric circles the stars trace out are lines of celestial latitude, known as declination. The arc connecting the points on the horizon due East and due West (if the horizon is flat) and all points midway between the Celestial Poles is the Celestial Equator which has a declination of 0°. The visible declinations vary depending where you are on the globe. Only an observer on the North Pole of Earth would be unable to see any stars from the Southern Celestial Hemisphere at night (see diagram below). Once a declination has been found for the point on the horizon that a building faces it is then possible to say if a specific body can be seen in that direction.

Diagram of the visible portions of sky at varying latitudes.

Solar positioning

While the stars are fixed to their declinations the Sun is not. The rising point of the Sun varies throughout the year. It swings between two limits marked by the solstices a bit like a pendulum, slowing as it reaches the extremes, but passing rapidly through the mid-point. If an archaeoastronomer can calculate from the azimuth and horizon height that a site was built to view a declination of +23.5° then he need not wait until June 21 to confirm the site does indeed face the summer solstice. For more information see History of solar observation.

Lunar positioning

The Moon’s appearance is considerably more complex. Its motion, like the Sun, is between two limits — known as lunastices rather than solstices. However, its travel between lunastices is considerably faster. It takes a sidereal month to complete its cycle rather than the year long trek of the Sun. This is further complicated as the lunastices marking the limits of the Moon’s movement move on an 18.6 year cycle. For slightly over nine years the extreme limits of the moon are outside the range of sunrise. For the remaining half of the cycle the Moon never exceeds the limits of the range of sunrise. However, much lunar observation was concerned with the phase of the Moon. The cycle from one New Moon to the next runs on an entirely different cycle, the Synodic month. Thus when examining sites for lunar significance the data can appear sparse due the extremely variable nature of the moon. See Moon for more details.

Stellar positioning

Main article: Precession of the equinoxes

Precessional movement.

Finally there is often a need to correct for the apparent movement of the stars. On the timescale of human civilisation the stars have maintained the same position relative to each other. Each night they appear to rotate around the celestial poles due to the Earth’s rotation about its axis. However, the Earth spins rather like a spinning top. Not only does the Earth rotate, it wobbles. The Earth’s axis takes around 25,800 years to complete one full wobble. The effect to the archaeoastronomer is that stars did not rise over the horizon in the past in the same places as they do today. Nor did the stars rotate around Polaris as they do now. In the case of the Egyptian pyramids, it has been shown they were aligned towards Thuban, a faint star in the constellation of Draco. The effect can be substanstial over relatively short lengths of time, historically speaking. For instance a person born on December 25 in Roman times would have been born under the astrological sign of Capricorn. In the modern period a person born on the same date is now a Sagittarian due to the precession of the equinoxes.

Transient phenomena

Halley’s Comet depicted on the Bayeux tapestry

Additionally there are often transient phenomena, events which do not happen on an annual cycle. Most predictable are events like eclipses. In the case of solar eclipses these can be used to date events in the past. A solar eclipse mentioned by Herodotus enables us to date a battle between the Medes and the Lydians, which following the eclipse failed to happen, to May 28, 585 BC. Other easily calculated events are supernovae whose remains are visible to astronomers and therefore their positions and magnitude can be accurately calculated.

Some comets are predictable, most famously Halley’s Comet. Yet as a class of object they remain unpredictable and can appear at any time. Some have extremely lengthy orbital periods which means their past appearances and returns cannot be predicted. Others may have only ever passed through the solar system once and so are inherently unpredictable.

Meteor showers should be predictable, but the meteors are cometary debris and so require calculations of orbits which are currently impossible to complete. Other events noted by ancients include aurorae, sun dogs and rainbows all of which are as impossible to predict as the ancient weather, but nevertheless may have been considered important phenomena.

Major topics of archaeoastronomical research

"What has astronomy brought into the lives of cultural groups throughout history? The answers are many and varied..."

The use of calendars

Aztec Stone of the Sun replica in El Paso, Texas, cast from the original to be found in Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. A religious artefact showing how the Mexica people thought about time.

A common justification for the need for astronomy is the need to develop an accurate calendar for agricultural reasons. Ancient texts like Hesiod’s Works and Days, an ancient farming manual, would appear to contradict this. Instead astronomical observations are used in combination with ecological signs, such as bird migrations to determine the seasons. Ethnoastronomical work with the Mursi of Ethiopia shows that haphazard astronomy continued until recent times in some parts of the world. All the same, calendars appear to be an almost universal phenomenon in societies as they provide tools for the regulation of communal activities.

An example of a non-agricultural calendar is the Tzolk'in calendar of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, which is a cycle of 260 days. This count is based on an earlier calendar and is found throughout Mesoamerica. This formed part of a more comprehensive system of Maya calendars which combined a series of astronomical observations and ritual cycles.

Other peculiar calendars include ancient Greek calendars. These were nominally lunar, starting with the New Moon. In reality the calendar could pause or skip days with confused citizens inscribing dates by both the civic calendar and ton theoi, by the moon. The lack of any universal calendar for ancient Greece suggests that coordination of panhellenic events such as games or rituals could be difficult and that astronomical symbolism may have been used as a politically neutral form of timekeeping.

Myth and cosmology

The constellation Argo Navis drawn by Johannes Hevelius in 1690.

Another motive for studying the sky is to understand and explain the universe. In these cultures myth was a tool for achieving this and the explanations, while not reflecting the standards of modern science, are cosmologies.

The Incas arranged their empire to demonstrate their cosmology. The capital, Cusco, was at the centre of the empire and connected to it by means of ceques, conceptually straight lines radiating out from the centre. These ceques connected the centre of the empire to the four suyus, which were regions defined by their direction from Cusco. The notion of a quartered cosmos is common across the Andes. Gary Urton, who has conducted fieldwork in the Andean villagers of Misminay, has connected this quartering with the appearance of the Milky Way in the night sky. In one season it will bisect the sky and in another bisect it in a perpendicular fashion.

The importance of observing cosmological factors is also seen on the other side of the world. The Forbidden City in Beijing is laid out to follow cosmic order though rather than observing four directions the Chinese saw five, North, South, East, West and Centre. The Forbidden City occupied the centre of ancient Beijing. One approaches the Emperor from the south, thus placing him in front of the circumpolar stars. This creates the situation of the heavens revolving around the person of the Emperor. The Chinese cosmology is now better known through its export as Feng Shui.

There is also much information about how the universe was thought to work stored in the mythology of the constellations. The Barasana of the Amazon plan part of their annual cycle based on observation of the stars. When their constellation of the Caterpillar-Jaguar falls they prepare to catch the pupating caterpillars of the forest as they fall from the trees. This provides planning for food procurement at a time when hunger otherwise could be a problem.

A more well-known source of constellation myth are the texts of the Greeks and Romans. The origin of their constellations remains a matter of continuing and occasionally fractious debate.

Displays of power

The Precinct of Amun-Re was aligned on the midwinter solstice.

By including celestial motifs in clothing it becomes possible for the wearer to make claims the power on Earth is drawn from above. It has been said that the Shield of Achilles described by Homer is also a catalogue of constellations. In North America shields depicted in Comanche petroglyphs appear to include Venus symbolism.

Solsticial alignments also can be seen as displays of power. When viewed from a ceremonial plaza on the Island of the Sun (the mythical origin place of the Sun) in Lake Titicaca, the Sun was seen to rise at the June solstice between two towers on a nearby ridge. The sacred part of the island was separated from the remainder of it by a stone wall and ethnographic records indicate that access to the sacred space was restricted to members of the Inca ruling elite. Ordinary pilgrims stood on a platform outside the ceremonial area to see the solstice Sun rise between the towers.

In Egypt the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak has been the subject of much study. Evaluation of the site, taking into account the change over time of the obliquity of the ecliptic show that the Great Temple was aligned on the rising of the midwinter sun. The length of the corridor down which sunlight would travel would have limited illumination at other times of the year.

In a later period the Serapeum in Alexandria was also said to have contained a solar alignment so that, on a specific sunrise, a shaft of light would pass across the lips of the statue of Serapis thus symbolising the Sun saluting the god.

Major sites of archaeoastronomical interest

Main article: List of archaeoastronomical sites sorted by country

"At Stonehenge in England and at Carnac in France, in Egypt and Yucatán, across the whole face of the earth, are found mysterious ruins of ancient monuments, monuments with astronomical significance... They mark the same kind of commitment that transported us to the moon and our spacecraft to the surface of Mars."

Newgrange

The sunlight enters the tomb at Newgrange via the roofbox built above the door.

Main article: Newgrange

Newgrange is a passage tomb in the Republic of Ireland dating from around 3,300 to 2,900 BC For a few days around the Winter Solstice light shines along the central passageway into the heart of the tomb. What makes this notable is not that light shines in the passageway, but that it does not do so through the main entrance. Instead it enters via a hollow box above the main doorway discovered by Michael O'Kelly. It is this roofbox which strongly indicates that the tomb was built with an astronomical aspect in mind. Clive Ruggles notes:

...[F]ew people - archaeologists or astronomers- have doubted that a powerful astronomical symbolism was deliberately incorporated into the monument, demonstrating that a connection between astronomy and funerary ritual, at the very least, merits further investigation.

The Pyramids of Giza

The pyramids of Giza.

Main article: Giza pyramid complex

The pyramids at Giza appear to be aligned to the cardinal directions, deviating only slightly from north. It has been argued that examining these deviations could allow the date of construction to be identified. This is done by calculating the positions of two stars in the Plough / Big Dipper which was known to Egyptians as the thigh. It is thought that a vertical alignment between these two stars checked with a plumb bob was used to ascertain where North lay.

Some have argued that the pyramids were laid out as a map of the three stars in the belt of Orion, although this theory has been criticized by reputable astronomers.

El Castillo

Plumed Serpent

Main article: El Castillo, Chichen Itza

El Castillo, also known as Kukulcán, is a Mesoamerican step-pyramid built in the centre of Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico. It has a couple of features which have suggested it may have astronomical elements built into it. Each of the stairways built into the sides of the pyramid has 91 steps. Along with the extra one for the platform at the top, this totals 365 steps, which is possibly one for each day of the year. A more striking effect is seen every March and September as an unusual shadow effect occurs each equinox. A shadow appears to descend the west balustrade of the northern stairway. The visual effect is of a serpent descending the stairway, with its head at the base in light. Additionally the western face points to sunset around May 25, traditionally the date of transition from the dry to the rainy season

Stonehenge

The sun rising over Stonehenge at the 2005 Summer Solstice.

Main article: Stonehenge

Many astronomical alignments have been claimed for Stonehenge, a complex of megaliths and earthworks in the Salisbury Plain of England. The most famous of these is the midsummer alignment, where the Sun rises over the Heel Stone. However this interpretation has been challenged by some archaeologists who argue that the midwinter alignment, where the viewer is outside Stonehenge and sees the sun setting in the henge, is the more significant alignment, and the midsummer alignment may be a coincidence due to local topography. As well as solar alignments, there are proposed lunar alignments. The four station stones mark out a rectangle. The short sides point towards the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. The long sides if viewed towards the south-east, face the most southerly rising of the moon. Aveni notes these have never gained the acceptance which the claims solar alignments have.

Uxmal

The Palace of the Governor at Uxmal.

Main article: Uxmal

Uxmal is Mayan city in the Puuc Hills of Yucatan, Mexico. The Governor's Palace at Uxmal is often used as an exemplar of why it is important to combine ethnographic and alignment data. The palace is aligned with an azimuth of 118º on the pyramid of Cehtzuc. This alignment is also towards a southerly rising of Venus which occurs once every eight years. By itself this would not be sufficient to argue for a meaningful connection between the two events. The palace has to be aligned in one direction or another and why should the rising of Venus be any more important than the rising of the Sun, Moon, other planets, Sirus et cetera? The answer given is that not only does the palace point towards the rising of Venus, it is also covered in glyphs which stand for Venus and Mayan zodiacal constellations. It is the combination of the alignment and the ethnography which suggests that the city was built with cosmic order in mind.

Fringe Archaeoastronomy

"At least now we have all the archaeological facts to go along with the astronomers, the Druids, the Flat Earthers and all the rest."

Archaeoastronomy owes something of this poor reputation among scholars to its occasional misuse to advance pseudo-historical accounts of the antiquity of certain cultures in certain regions. Since the Nineteenth Century numerous scholars have sought to use archaeoastronomical calculations to demonstrate the antiquity of Ancient Indian Vedic culture, computing the dates of astronomical observations ambiguously described in ancient poetry to as early as 4000 BCE. David Pingree, a historian of Indian astronomy, condemned "the scholars who perpetrate wild theories of prehistoric science and call themselves archaeoastronomers."

Another example was the attempt by Gallagher, Pyle, and Fell to interpret inscriptions in West Virginia as a description in Celtic Ogham alphabet of the supposed winter solstitial marker at the site. The controversial translation was supposedly validated by a problematic archaeoastronomical indication in which the winter solstice sun shone on an inscription of the sun at the site. Subsequent analyses criticized its cultural inappropriateness, as well as its linguistic and archeaoastronomical claims, to describe it as an example of "cult archaeology."

The Politics of Archaeoastronomy

"The problem is in the fact that there are influences, but they don't show up in 'dirt archaeology.' Basically, they show up in ideological materials: mythology, astronomy, calendrics. These are precisely the areas which are hardest to deal with archaeologically. And so they don't get much attention from traditional archaeologists." -- University of Calgary professor emeritus of archaeology David H. Kelley

Spectators await their turn to witness first light of day illuminating an inscribed rock knob deep inside Crack Cave on the vernal equinox of 2005. Helping to interpret and validate this and related unorthodox petroglyphic panels and solar archaeoastronomical alignments in southeastern Colorado and the Oklahoma panhandle in the 1980s was retired NASA astronomer, engineer and mathematician Rollin Gillespie.

Not everyone believes archaeology should control archaeoastronomy. Such dissension irritates many archaeologists, anthropologists and university academics who presume themselves the primary and indisputable authorities over a field of science, hybridized and compromised. Archaeology and astronomy are strange bedfellows embracing diametrically opposite perspectives and data points. The first hunches over, looking down and sifting the terra firma for answers and artifacts; the second gazes ever farther into space for myriad intangibles and insights into the wonder of the universe. Astronomy is visionary and dynamic, frequently updating its knowledge base. In 2006, while the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was redefining our solar system, TIME magazine scolded archaeology for "a dogma that has kept it in an intellectual straitjacket since Franklin Roosevelt was President". This dogma is a widely-defended institutional belief within archaeology and its parent science, anthropology, that there has been no pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with North America except for a short encampment by Vikings about a millenium ago at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. Dennis Stanford, the Smithsonian's chief archaeologist and his Solutrean hypothesis have rattled most of his colleagues. Stanford has been studying artifacts in strata below the eleven-thousand-year-old layer of the first Clovis points found in all of the lower 48 states and much of Central America. This points to a European presence in America at least five thousand years ahead of human migration via the Bering land bridge. Stanford understands his unorthodox investigations invite institutional intimidation: "When you dig deeper than Clovis a lot of people do not report it because they're worried about the reaction of their colleagues." Furthermore, entrenched resistance to diffusionism (regardless of whether it came 16,000 years ago or between the time of Christ and Columbus) may have suppressed other evidence unsupportive of the status quo. Have AmerIndian ethnographies been cherry-picked to validate only those 1500 to 2500-year-old archaeoastronomy constructs meeting archaeology's litmus test for an indigenous origin? Native American activist Vine Deloria, Jr., a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota and a professor at the University of Colorado, believes it's a case of reverse racism:

There's no effort to ask the tribes what they remember of things that happened. Numerous tribes do say that strange people doing this or that came through our land, visited us, and so on. Or they remember that we came across the Atlantic as refugees from some struggle, then came down the St. Lawrence River, and so forth. There's a great reluctance among archaeologists and anthropologists to break centuries-old doctrine and to take a look at something new.

So, when archaeologists reject claims of non-indigenous archaeoastronomy in America, their reasoning probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the archaeoastronomy. The only issue that matters --- and indeed that fails such claims --- is its non-indigenousness. CBS News documented twin examples in Colorado and Oklahoma suggestive of Celtic archaeoastronomy on the spring equinox of 1987. Astronomer Rollin Gillespie who was instrumental in launching NASA, helped design the Saturn V rocket engines for the Apollo mission, and was lead mathematician in plotting the S-curved trans lunar injection trajectories that sent men to the moon and safely returned them to earth, volunteered in interpreting and validating some unconventional archaeoastronomy in southeastern Colorado and the Oklahoma panhandle in the mid-1980s. So from a political standpoint, irregardless of the volume of academic papers and static generated by archaeologists relative to the diminutive numbers of thoughtful astronomers who display an interest in this hybrid field, the perspectives of an astronomer may serve to better judge some evidence than the perspectives of those who refuse to exhibit any genuine intellectual curiosity or scientific impartiality regarding evidence they refuse to accept as possible.

Archaeoastronomical organisations and publications

There are currently three academic organisations for scholars of archaeoastronomy. ISAAC—the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture—was founded in 1995 and now sponsors the Oxford conferences and Archaeoastronomy — the Journal of Astronomy in Culture. SEAC— La Société Européenne pour l’Astronomie dans la Culture—is slightly older; it was created in 1992. SEAC holds annual conferences in Europe and publishes refereed conference proceedings on an annual basis. There is also La Sociedad Interamericana de Astronomía en la Cultura, primarily a Latin American organisation which was founded in 2003.

Additionally the Journal for the History of Astronomy publishes many archaeoastronomical papers. For twenty-seven volumes it also published an annual supplement Archaeoastronomy.

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See also

• Cultural astronomy
• List of archaeoastronomical sites sorted by country Sites where claims for the use of astronomy have been made.
• List of artefacts of archaeoastronomical significance Artefacts which have been interpreted as being used for some astronomical purpose.
• European Megalithic Culture
• Australian Aboriginal Astronomy
  • Aboriginal stone arrangements
• Lunar standstill
• Medicine wheels
• Mound builders
• Petroforms
• Astronomical chronology

External links

• Archaeoastronomy A Thinkquest website surveying archaeoastronomical sites across the world.
• Astronomy before History, by Clive Ruggles and Michael Hoskins, a chapter from The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy, Michael Hoskin ed., 1999
• Clive Ruggles's webpage: images, bibliography, software, and synopsis of his course at the University of Leicester
• Space Imaging’s Ancient Observatories gallery — Satellite pictures of ancient observatories.
• Traditions of the Sun — NASA and others exploring the world’s ancient observatories.

Societies

• ISAAC, The International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture.
• SEAC La Société Européenne pour l’Astronomie dans la Culture. Site in English.
• SIAC La Sociedad Interamericana de Astronomía en la Cultura.
• Society for the History of Astronomy

Journals

• Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy News
• Archaeoastronomy: Supplement to the Journal for the History of Astronomy
• Archaeoastronomy: The Journal of Astronomy in Culture
• Culture and Cosmos
• Journal for the History of Astronomy