Ten thematic articles illustrating the broad scope, diversity and cultural significance of contemporary studies in archaeoastronomy. Contents: The Study of Cultural Astronomy ( Clive Ruggles and Nicholas Saunders ); The Yao Dian and the Origins of Astronomy in China ( Chen Cheng-Yih and Xi Zezong ); The Riddle of Red Sirius: An Anthropological Perspective ( Roger Ceragioli ); Astronomies and Rituals at the Dawn of the Middle Ages ( Stephen McCluskey ); Folk Astronomy in the Service of Religion: The Case of Islam ( David King ); Cosmos and Kings at Vijayanagara ( John McKim Malville and John Fritz ); Medicine Wheel Astronomy ( David Vogt ); Venus-Regulated Warfare and Ritual Sacrifice in Mesoamerica ( John Carlson ); Astronomical Knowledge, Calendrics, and Sacred Geography in Ancient Mesoamerica ( Johanna Broda ); The Pleiades in Comparative Perspective: The Waiwai Shirkoimo and the Shipibo Huishmabo ( Peter G. Roe ).

Astronomies and Cultures

History

Saunders, Nicholas J.

Ruggles, C. L. N.

World

Ocarina Books

The proceedings of the 1998 Société Européenne pour l'Astronomie dans la Culture conference held in Dublin with 15 papers, all in English, covering various periods and parts of the world; Palaeolithic Europe, Minoan and Mycenaean Crete, pre-Hispanic Canary Islands, Greece and Rome and the Americas. Although the overall theme of the conference was landscape perception, many papers also addressed related issues of cosmology, symbolism, belief systems, mythology, studies of constellations, folklore and related ritual practices.

Astronomy, Cosmology and Landscape

Science & Math

Astronomy & Space Science

This study of archaeoastronomy looks at more than 2,500 communal tombs and sanctuaries from around the Mediterranean. After a brief discussion of Hoskin's aims and the methodology for his fieldwork, individual chapters focus on evidence from particular regions: Malta, Gozo, the Balearics, Iberia, southern France, Corsica and Sardinia, Sicily and Pantelleria, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. The author concludes that in most of these regions the monuments faced sunrise, or more generally the sun when it was rising or climbing in the sky. Along the Mediterranean coast of France, however, there is a reverse sunset custom; in North Africa tombs faced downhill and in a Minoan cemetery on Crete all the tombs faced moonrise and look towards a mountain on whose peak was a sanctuary probably sacred to a lunar god. 264p, b/w figs and photos throughout, tables (Ocarina Books 2001) ` adorned with dozens of beautiful photographs, technical diagrams, and an extraordinary Corpus Mensurarum.....a living masterpiece in the field of archaeoastronomy ' - Juan Antonio Belmonte, Instituto de Astroficia de Canarias `

Tombs, Temples and their Orientations: A New Perspective on Mediterranean Prehistory

Hoskin, Michael

Ancient Civilizations

This substantial collection of papers on indigenous astronomical knowledge is quite unequalled in its scope and extent. The authors are drawn from a variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, engineering, art history, history of science, history of religion, folklore, and mythology, and bring a variety of academic perspectives to bear upon aspects of celestial knowledge and perception in diverse social contexts from many different parts of the globe. The Americas provide the main geographical focus, with twenty of the 32 papers concerning indigenous north American groups such as the Navajo, Lakota, Zuni and Blackfoot, the Mixe and Tzotzil Maya of southern Mexico, the Andean highlands and the Amazonian region of Peru, and southern coastal Brazil. The remaining twelve articles extend to the Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa, southern India, Java, Melanesia, Australia and Polynesia, with a few addressing broader synthetic themes. For a number of the culture areas dealt with in some detail here, other published information about sky knowledge is extremely scant. Table of Contents Preface (Clive Ruggles); Foreword (John B Carlson); Introduction (Von del Chamberlain and M Jane Young); Part 1: Ethnoastronomy Perspectives: The sky is an ethnographic treasure trove (Von Del Chamberlain); The Colour of cosmic order (Edwin C Krupp); Ethnoastronomy and the problem of interpretation: A Zuni example (M Jane Young). Part 2: Western Astronomical Traditions: Ethnoastronomy and the Arab agricultural almanac (Daniel Martin Varisco). Part 3: Native Astronomical Traditions of the Americas: The seven sisters (N Scott Momaday); Raven's universe (David Vogt); Astronomy in Pueblo and Navajo world views (M Jane Young); Using a planetarium to study Navajo star lore (Mark Bunker Peterson); Black god: God of fire, God of starlight (Trudy Griffin-Pierce); Origin and meaning of Navajo star ceilings (Von Del Chamberlain and Polly Schaafsma); Transformations of the Mesoamerican Venus Turtle Carapice war shield: A study in ethnoastronomy (John B Carlson); When is a month? The moon and Mescaleros (Claire R Farrer); Ethnoastronomy of the North American plains (Alice B Kehoe); Lakota star knowledge (Ronald Goodman); Sky tales from the Anishinaubaeg (Basil H Johnston); Venus in the east and west (Stanislaw Iwaniszewski); Tzotzil Maya cosmology (Weldon Lamb); Mixe calendrics, ritual and astronomy (Frank J Lipp); Constructions of the ritual-agricultural calendar in Pacariqtambo, Peru (Gary Urton); Mythic substitution and the stars: Aspects of Shipibo and Quechua ethnoastronomy compared (Peter G Roe); Amahuaca astronomy and star lore (Joseph Holt Woodside); Búzios Island: Knowledge and belief among a fishing and agricultural community at the coast of the state of São Paulo (Edmundo Magaña); Arawak constellations: A bibliographic survey (Fabiola Jara). Part 4: Astronomical Traditions of the Non-Western World: Monotomy and surprise in Tabwa cosmology (Allen F Roberts); The moon besmirched (Dominique Zahan); The haphazard astronomy of the Mursi (Clive Ruggles and David Turton); Surya Puja temples of South India (J McKim Malville and R N Swaminathan); The planetarium and the plough: Interpreting star calendars of rural Java (Gene Ammarell); Applied ethnoastronomy: Navigating by the stars across the Pacific (Ben Finney); The Woodlark Island calendar: Contexts for interpretation (Frederick H Damon); Celestial lore of some Australian tribes (Norman B Tindale).

Songs from the Sky: Indigenous Astronomical and Cosmological Traditions of the World (Archaeoastronomy)

Politics & Social Sciences

Young, M. Jane

Chamberlain, Von Del

Carlson, J. B.

Archaeology

In 1975, Hawaiian scholars Rubellite Kawena Johnson and John Kaipo Mahelona published Nā Inoa Hōkū, a Catalogue of Hawaiian and Pacific Star Names. Though long out of print, Nā Inoa Hōkū is still widely regarded as a definitive source of reference for anyone interested in the use of astronomy in Polynesian voyaging or the nature and development of ritual and calendrical practices throughout the Pacific. Working together with British archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles, the authors have extensively revised and extended the catalogues and transformed the discussion of their wider context and significance, resulting in a much stronger focus upon the rich historical legacy of the Hawaiian Islands themselves. This new edition of Nā Inoa Hōkū is completely overhauled, vastly expanded, and includes new translation of many key primary Hawaiian sources from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

Na Inoa Hoku: Hawaiian and Pacific Star Names

Johnson, Rubellite Kawena

Mahelona, John Kaipo

Ruggles, Clive

Physics

This, the proceedings of a conference held by the Instituto Internazionale di Studi Liguri entitled "Archaeastronomy: a debate between archaeologists and astronomers looking for a shared method" explores our ancestors' knowledge of the movement of the planets and stars. The book is published by Ocarina Books in association with the Instituto Internazionale di Studi Liguri.Table of ContentsSummary Why this meeting?(Mario Codebò ) 1. Tombs, temples and their orientations: a new perspective on Mediterranean prehistory(Michael Hoskin ) 2. Archaeoastronomical measuring: from Stonehenge to Phyramids(Vittorio Castellani) 3. Relationship between morphology and orientation in Sicilian ritual architecture since the IV to II millennium B.C. (Sebastiano Tusa and Giorgia Foderà) 4. Description of some European Upper Palaeolithic supposed calendars: an attempt at distinction between the hypothesis and the reality. (Giuseppe Vicino) 5. The reflection of ancient astronomical knowledges in the rock art of Armenia (Karen Tokhatyan) 6. Carahunge: the prehistoric observatory in Armenia (Paris Herouni) 7. Archaeo-geometry at Stonehenge (Marcello Ranieri) 8. Social complexity, political planning and uses of the firmament (Maurizio Tosi) 9. The orientation of Margherita of Brabante's tomb (Riccardo Balestrieri) 10. Cupmarks: a time system annotation. Geometric analysis of configuration (Giorgio Dimitriadis) 11. Are there astronomical observation places in Bormida Valley? (Carmelo Prestipino) 12. Sky perception and rock art: methodological problems (Sergio Martini) 13. Aspects of material and spiritual culture in the discoveries of archaeoastronomy and their collocation in the paleoethnology (Pietro Gaietto) 14. Upper palaeolithic systems of notation. What do we really know about them? (Francesco d'Errico) 15. The general and the specific: some methodological problems in archaeoastronomy (Clive Ruggles) 16. Sicilian prehistory archaeoastronomical perspectives (Sebastiano Tusa) 17. Application of satellite GPS tecniques to the survey of archaeological and archaeoastronomical places (Adriano Gaspani) 18. Archaeoastronomical orientation and classical mithology (Ubaldo Lugli) 19. Rocca di Cavour (Piemonte): possible topographic data of ancient astronomical data (Vittorio Castellani and Arrigo A. Cigna) 20. The seeing row: survey method of astronomical oriented cupmarks (Giuseppe Brunod) 21. The church of Madonna del Poggio de Rey in Perinaldo(IM): orientation between history and tradition (Marina Muzi and Daniela Piliarvu) 22. Comparative megalithic palaeo-astronomy: Sardinia, Corsica, Eastern Liguria (Enrico Calzolari) 23. An astronomical measure as design support for the ancient Rome (report out of meeting) (Piero Meogrossi) Public singular and general debates with proposals

Archeoastronomia: un Dibattito tra Archeologi ed Astronomi all Ricerca di un Metodo Comune (Istituto Internazionale Di Studi Liguri)

Codebo, Mario

This volume is the proceedings of a conference held in Smolyan, Bulgaria in August-September 1993, which brought together European archaeoastronomers for the first time under the auspices of the European Society of Astronomy in Culture (SEAC). The various papers examine the relationship between archaeoastronomy, field methodology and ancient cosmology. Contributors include José Barrios, Vladimir Dermendjiev, Roslyn M. Frank, Stanis?aw Iwaniszewski, Vesselina Koleva, Arnold Lebeuf, Penka Muglova, Breen Murray, Clive Ruggles, Wolfhard Schlosser, Elbieta Siarkiewicz, Florin Stanescu, Alexei Stoev, and Francis Warther. The volume was originally published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Astronomical Traditions in Past Cultures

Koleva, Vesselina

Kolev, Dimiter

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