Archive for June, 2009
Archaeoastronomy on YouTube
Jun 26th
I’ve just found this video on the 2009 Conference on Archaeoastronomy of the American Southwest. The 2009 presentations look like they were really interesting. As a whole I find archaeoastronomy in the American southwest interesting because the methods used are often very different to Europe. We simply don’t have the ethnographic data for a lot of sites over here. However, the wealth of historical records from Classical Greece and Rome leads me to think there might be some useful tips I could pick up on method. I shall have to start saving my pennies and see if I can afford to go to the next one.
In the meantime there’s plenty of other interesting films to watch on John Sefick’s YouTube Channel.
People and the Sky by Anthony Aveni
Jun 24th
It’s a common gripe that archaeologists don’t have much interest in public archaeology. I’m not convinced it’s true and it’s certainly not true of archaeoastronomy. People and the Sky is Anthony Aveni’s latest (original) book. He’s the most prolific of the popular archaeoastronomy authors, so it’s no surprise his prose is pretty well polished. I like this book, and if you don’t have any by him it’s well worth buying. If you’ve Stairways to the Stars, his earlier archaeoastronomy overview then I’m not so sure.
I’ve been thinking about whether the World Archaeoastronomy approach works. Anthony Aveni’s work would be an argument in its favour. While he’s best known for his work in Mesoamerica, he’s also done original research in the Mediterranean and the southwestern USA. One of the reasons he can do this without being trivial is that he’s interesting in how to relate astronomy to archaeology and vice versa. Wherever it is you’re studying in the world, there’s the problem of tying the global perspective of astronomy to archaeology, which is always local. People and the Sky could be said to be a collection of a dozen ways of trying to solve that problem.
The introduction starts by saying why the sky was More >
Carnivals
Jun 21st
4SH 69 has anthro-blogging from the past fortnight at Wanna be an Anthropologist?. It includes a plug for the Open Anthropology Cooperative, which is definitely worth looking at if you’re an Anthropologist.
I missed mentioning Carnival of Space 107 last week, which means I’ll miss Carnival of Space 108 this week. You can either imagine what astronomical gems you’re missing, or I can go back and insert the link once I have it for 108.
Food History has Carnivalesque for June. It’s an Ancient/Medieval edition this month. It seems more medieval than usual this month, which suggests ancient history bloggers aren’t submitting links. Fortunately I have a sign on my desk saying “The buck went thattaway–>”, which means I can blame everyone else for that.
Speculations on the sex of the Moon
Jun 12th
I may be busy, but not too busy to point and laugh. You’ve probably seen this story in the Examiner about the Japanese crashing an orbiter into the Moon. If you haven’t then it’s Satya Harvey complaining that scientists will be penetrating a female moon without first asking her permission. Lots of people have found it a remarkable public display of ignorance. In fact she’s elevated ignorance to an art form, because she is also clearly unaware that, in Japanese mythology, the Moon is male and the Sun is female.
If you live in the West you might think that makes the Japanese freaks. I’ve got a book, The Moon: Myth and Image by Jules Cashford, which picks up on this. The Second World War alliance between Germany and Japan was blamed (only in part I hope) on the two nations both perceiving the Moon as male. She found Laurens van der Post on one of his off-days writing: “…[S]ome ominous perversity of the aboriginal urgings of both Germans and Japanese, was rendered into a fixed and immutable masculinity.” If you’re keen to sample some perversity then you may not need to travel that far. Cashford also has an incomplete list More >
Time Savers
Jun 11th
Normally blog entries here are written days in advance, so when I have busy days things continue as usual. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been very busy, hence the lack of blogging. On the plus side I have had some help from other people who found me some time saving tools.
Mick Morrison has been reading the Google Earth EULA, like we all did before we clicked ‘accept’. He points out that the guidelines on the Google site say:
You may use Google Maps and Google Earth content including photographic imagery in brochures, marketing collateral, packaging, trade show displays/banners, newspapers, academic publications, journals, and books.
Quite reasonably he’s asking why they aren’t being used in academic publications. The answer in my case is that it didn’t occur to me that getting permission would be simple. I’ll be using the maps in my thesis now.
The other big time-savers are the applets from The Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project. What I need to do is create some diagrams like the one below showing how apparent star paths change with latitude, how the sunrises over different parts of the horizon at different times of the year, and so on. The NAAP Astronomy Labs have More >
Social Astronomy and Intentional Inaccuracy
Jun 8th
Can you spot the Moon in this photo? Photo (cc) Andréia.
One of the reasons I’m putting up more stuff recently is that it’s a spin-off from polishing the thesis. Reasonable questions would be: What do is Social Astronomy? and Why is that Archaeoastronomy and not History of Astronomy? The answers to both questions are connected.
Social Astronomy is the study of astronomy as used for social purposes. This fits very neatly with Archaeoastronomy which these days tends also to be referred to as Cultural Astronomy. In contrast History of Astronomy, especially in the ancient world, has tended to be the story of how Astronomy in its modern sense grew from ancient practices. An example of very good History of Astronomy in an ancient context would be James Evans’s book The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy. It’s a very good book covering the mathematical basis ancient astronomy and how people got progressively more accurate at predicting the movement of the planets. I think that’s going to be a defining work on ancient astronomy for a generation, but there’s still things it misses. The quest for accuracy is the underlying narrative of a lot of ancient astronomy books. It misses the factor that More >
The Carnival of Space and other distractions
Jun 7th
The Carnival of Space 106 is now online at Next Big Future.
Mark Steel has put some of his television and radio shows online. Ancient historians might e particularly interested in the Aristotle and Hannibal shows. Though they may also wish to cover their ears when he says that Xenophobia came from Xenophon.
Finally, C.A.Hoard & Associates will be putting up information on Digital technology in archaeology shortly. Nothing as yet, but it could be worth adding to your RSS feed if Digital Humanities are your thing.
Caerleon
Jun 6th
World Archaeoastronomy
Jun 5th
Does everyone see the same Moon around the world? Photo (cc) Luz A. Villa
Last week I put up a review of Ed Krupp’s Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings, which was a book about archaeoastronomy around the world. Next week or the week after, I hope, it’ll be Anthony Aveni’s People and the Sky, which is a book about the various uses people had for the sky using various examples from around the world. I’m also trying to get my hands on Giulio Magli’s new book, Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy. The subtitle is From Pre-history to Easter Island, which should be a hint that he looks at practices around the world, though he has a twist in the second half of the book. It’s an approach you could all World Archaeoastronomy.
Martin Rundkvist has said about Archaeology that it’s a heavily regionalised discipline. His view is that if all Japanese archaeology disappeared overnight, that really wouldn’t have much effect on Viking archaeology. While there may be similar interests like farming, building and burial, you don’t need to know about Japanese farming to understand Viking farming. In fact the difference in foodstuffs means that Japanese agricultural practice tells you nothing of use for More >
Another Petition
Jun 4th
This time in support of Simon Singh.
I thought quite a bit before putting this up. While I support Simon Singh, I have doubts about Sense About Science. Sense About Science is loosely connected with Spiked Online through Living Marxism, which seems to think Christopher Monckton is a credible speaker on climate change. The climate change debate is one of the major sources of pseudoscientific nonsense on the web, so it’s disappointing that Sense About Science has so little on the topic. In the end I signed because Jack of Kent is asking for signatures. It was a big help that George Monbiot and Nick Cohen, who are aware of the history of the group, signed. Even now I’m not comfortable with the title of the letter, which implies scientists might somehow be exempt from laws that apply to everyone else.
This is another reason why I’m wary of signing anything that gets passed along by a group. If you want to sign with honesty you need to look into exactly what you’re signing. Often there simply isn’t time to do that.
