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 Scandinavia. I’d certainly be very wary of a notion of World Archaeology (though I should note that others would certainly not, like a former university where I got an MPhil in the subject). I’m not sure what common theme could meaningfully tie Palaeolithic Europe, Mayan Guatemala and Modern Africa without being somewhat superficial. It raises the question: Does it make sense to pursue a World Archaeoastronomy view? Isn’t a book which draw on lunar markings on Palaeolithic bones, the Mayan Calendar and Mursi marking of time going to be equally shallow? How can you justify taking a global perspective?
One reason for taking a World Archaeoastronomy approach is sheer pragmatism. There are so few researchers spending a lot of time researching archaeoastronomy that the same names crop up as conference organisers again and again. There’s plenty more people with an interest, but if you want to have a conference you have to accept that if it’s going to attract speakers you’ll need to be flexible on both locations and time periods. If you want to persuade a publisher there’s a market for your book then you will need global appeal. There may be better reasons.
Alice Gorman has an application on Facebook where you can send people gifts of various pieces of space heritage. If you sign up for it, you can also help her with the work. One of the gifts is The Night Sky: the oldest space landscape on Earth. I’ve tended to describe the night sky as an artefact than a landscape. If you think the stars were placed there by gods, which was a common belief around the world, then the constellations are conceptually artworks. The advantage of Gorman’s description is that I think it emphasises the universality of the night sky. Physically, the view of the sky is the same at any given latitude.
That last sentence is such a basic statement that it’s too obvious to be worth saying if you’re an astronomer. There’s no French stars which only shine over France, Saint-Pierre and Tahiti. The same sky was accessible to everyone for most of the past. It wasn’t until the 1900s that humans were able to interfere with the view of the sky, except for things like building roofs on houses. Build in that hook for a global constant and World Archaeoastronomy makes sense because you’re talking about the same thing all over the world. I’ve been struggling trying to think of a terrestrial equivalent. The best I can come up with is Marine Archaeology. Water has similar properties all over the world, so would a World Marine Archaeology be possible, and does it happen? At the moment I don’t know.
The idea of a common sky is anthropologically justified. Steve McCluskey has a paper Different Astronomies, Different Cultures and the Question of Cultural Relativism, in a recent Oxford conference volume. The idea of ‘days’ and ‘years’ are universal, but McCluskey goes deeper and draws out similarities between Greek and Pawnee astronomies. These, he notes, are stellar-based astronomies as opposed to luni-solar observations that you find in Puebloan and Megalithic European astronomies. The reason he gives for this is that he Greeks and Pawnee were much more mobile and so needed a more portable astronomy which wasn’t tied to observing from a specific location. I think the Greek model is more complex than that, there’s a locationally-fixed element to Greek astronomy in society tied to specific civic activities. Still this does match his claims that there are meaningful categories you can classify astronomies into, based on the use of skywatching in society.
Another reason for a World Archaeoastronomy view is that in many ways there’s still no agreement on what constitutes a proper methodological or theoretical background. Archaeologists have an agreement on the importance of stratigraphy and a framework for relative dating, even it if is localised. There are terms which can found used in various places like band or tribe, though the exact meaning can shift depending on where it is you’re talking about. At the moment there is no firm consensus on what exactly are the best way to present results or conduct a survey. Despite the prefix archaeoastronomy, some archaeoastronomers see their work as being a form of anthropology, others as social history or art history. Opinion varies according to location period and the interests of the researcher. In fact there’s a quote from Stanislaw Iwaniszewki:
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.
Archaeoastronomy conferences can be a melting pots of ideas, methods and theories. If there is a lack of interest in the one way to do archaeoastronomy then cross-fertilisation of methods from researchers from different parts of the will continue.
Despite that there’s still good reason to keep the artefact model too. This is a more culturally specific view of astronomy. If you’re going to look at the stars you need a space to stand and framework to interpret them. In modern astronomy there’s a common framework set down by the IAU which was created to ensure astronomers across the world were talking about the same sky. There was no similar uniform sky in the ancient world. The World Archaeoastronomy approach is very good at looking at common phenomena, but is the pay-off that you lose sight of what is special about individual cultures?
At it’s worst it leads to the shopping list method of archaeoastronomy where you turn up for a survey and check for pre-defined attributes almost as if you’re awarding marks. Ten points for an accurate luni-solar calendar, but lose one for not realising the Morning and Evening stars are the same planet… It’s an interest that very few historians share. Most Greek historians aren’t interested in how the Greeks differ from the Chinese, they’re just interested in Greeks. Geoffrey Lloyd is a bit unusual in that respect. To interact meaningfully with most historians there’s a need for a tight focus on a specific culture.
This is one of the reasons I’m looking forward to Giulio Magli’s book when it comes out. Half of it is the World Archaeoastronomy approach, but the second half is a much tighter look at Egypt. I’ll be interested to see if he can pull the global perspective common amongst archaeoastronomers into an argument that has meaningful conclusions about a specific site. His papers are all culturally specific, so I’m optimistic he can tie the two approaches together to make an interesting book.
