The earliest astronomers?

Nov 14, 2011 Alun Featured, Science, The Past 1 Comment Archaeoastronomy, Archaeology, Ethnoastronomy, Europe, Palaeolithic, Research Blogging

The short ver­sion of this post is that Astro­nomy in the Upper Palaeo­lithic? by Hay­den & Vil­len­euve is a great paper. If you’re inter­ested in astro­nomy in hunter-gatherer soci­et­ies you should read it. I’m going to dis­agree with some parts of the paper below, but if Hay­den & Vil­len­euve are wrong about some things, then it’s for inter­est­ing reas­ons. And it’s by no means cer­tain that I’m right to dis­agree about the things that I do.

Reach­ing for the stars in Las­caux Cave. Photo (cc) tourisme_vezere.

The archae­ology of astro­nomy is con­ten­tious at the best of times, but the Palaeo­lithic is a par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult period to study, because the remains are so frag­ment­ary and few in num­ber. So to put this in con­text we need to know when the Upper Palaeo­lithic is.

You’re prob­ably famil­iar with the Three Age Sys­tem, Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. In this sys­tem in Europe the Stone Age ends roughly between 4000 and 2500 BCE depend­ing on where you are and exactly where you want to draw the line. Everything before this is a long time period so you can split it up fur­ther. The Neo­lithic is a period when people settle down and become farm­ers, it starts between 8000 and 4000 BCE in Europe depend­ing on where you are. The south-east of Europe adopts farm­ing much sooner than the people in the north-west. The Palaeo­lithic, if you ignore all sorts of sub­tleties is the period before that. To nar­row down things fur­ther the Palaeo­lithic is sub-divided into three sec­tions, Lower, Middle and Upper. Again, roughly speak­ing, the Lower Palaeo­lithic is the time of early humans, the Middle is the time of Neander­thals roughly 300,000 BCE to 35,000 BCE, and the Upper Palaeo­lithic is the period after that with Homo Sapiens.

This gives the astro­nom­ical read­ers a rough idea of when we’re talk­ing about. Archae­olo­gical read­ers could very eas­ily pick holes in more or less everything I’ve said about the dates. One import­ant reason we’ll get to later is that when we use terms like Bronze Age or Palaeo­lithic, we’re not dir­ectly talk­ing about a spe­cific time, we’re talk­ing about the tech­no­logy we find that’s asso­ci­ated with a spe­cific time. So some ‘peri­ods’ make no sense out­side of Europe. If you live some­where where Obsidian was much easier to get than Bronze, then it’s pos­sible local people never bothered with a Bronze Age.

Hay­den & Vil­len­euve real­ise that evid­ence from the Upper Palaeo­lithic is scant, but they also recog­nise that the Upper Palaeo­lithic is not just a time, but it’s tied to a place. What they’re inter­ested in is whether or not eth­no­graph­ies of mod­ern hunter-gatherer soci­et­ies can give us inform­a­tion about pos­sible uses for astro­nomy. You can’t simply say that mod­ern hunter-gatherers from now were exactly like hunter-gatherers twenty thou­sand years ago, but you can see if tack­ling astro­nom­ical prob­lems pro­duces debris sim­ilar to what archae­olo­gists find. You can also see if there are com­mon fea­tures in astro­nomy around the world from hunter-gatherers. If you can see hunter-gatherer astro­nomy in action then you have clues why hunter-gatherers used astro­nomy in the past and that can pro­duce work a lot more inter­est­ing than “there’s marks on this bone, people could be count­ing moon phases.“

After a quick recap of vari­ous claims of palaeo­lithic astro­nomy, such as paint­ings at Las­caux and vari­ous mark­ings on bones, they get down to ask­ing what sort of hunter-gatherers we should use for com­par­ison with Upper Palaeo­lithic Europeans. This is Hayden’s field and he has a few fea­tures that would affect the pos­sible use of astro­nomy. He points out com­plex hunter-gatherers don’t just wander. They can set up long-term bases for sea­sons, or even year round. There is eco­nomic activ­ity, stor­age of sur­pluses, com­pet­it­ive con­sump­tion, and the cre­ation prestige objects. This helps cre­ate the abil­ity for people to have a social élite and these people can attempt to defend their pos­i­tion by con­trolling access to super­nat­ural powers. Most sur­pris­ingly (to me) he argues for “com­plex count­ing sys­tems that extend into the hun­dreds or thousands.”

If these are the kind of things you’re look­ing for you need eth­no­graph­ies of soph­ist­ic­ated hunter-gatherers, and he says there’s plenty to draw upon from Cali­for­nia and the Pacific north­w­est coast, as well as Siberia and Japan in Asia. How­ever, Hay­den hasn’t argued for a shop­ping list approach to eth­no­graph­ies. It’s not enough that a mod­ern people has sim­ilar traits, do they also live in a sim­ilar environment?

In the mod­ern world hunter-gatherers have been pushed to mar­ginal envir­on­ments, that agri­cul­tural soci­et­ies can’t find much use for. In con­trast Upper Palaeo­lithic Europe would have had prime farm­ing land, had there been any farm­ers. There weren’t, so hunter-gatherers had con­trol over a fer­tile land­scape. For this reason Hay­den & Vil­len­euve prefer the Pacific north­w­est as the most apt eth­no­graphic ana­logy. The astro­nom­ic­ally import­ant fea­ture is that these people could settle in a place for years at a time.

So what do hunter-gatherers look for?

Hay­den & Vil­len­euve examined many eth­no­graph­ies and found almost all peoples had a concept of the extreme lim­its of the Sun, the sol­stices. They also tied lunar cycles to envir­on­mental events, like the appear­ance of first ber­ries. In some ways this is sim­ilar to Hesiod’s astro­nomy which is a factor in a wider cos­mo­lo­gical view that ties astro­nomy, weather and nature into one whole cos­mos to be observed. They also — and this is big — found no evid­ence of obser­va­tion of the equi­noxes, except for one group. This ties neatly with the Clive Ruggles paper Whose Equi­nox? where he has argued that look­ing for equi­noxes in pre-Greek astro­nom­ies is an anachronism.

Sol­stice obser­va­tions could be accur­ate, but they say the obser­va­tions used “trees, posts or rock align­ments” They give an example of a man sit­ting on a cer­tain stump watch­ing the shadow from a spe­cific tree, and we know this astro­nom­ical activ­ity happened because an anthro­po­lo­gist was there record­ing it, but what debris did it leave? If people used a sim­ilar tech­nique in the Palaeo­lithic what would you look for in the archaeology?

Hay­den & Vil­len­euve reflect on how these spe­cial places and the tech­niques for using them trans­late into social rela­tion­ships. They argue that it leads to what is effect­ively a ‘secret soci­ety’ of people with astro­nom­ical know­ledge. Archae­olo­gic­ally this raises the pos­sib­il­ity of equip­ment being stored in secret spaces, that might be marked with art for those in the know.

A secret soci­ety implies spe­cial­ist know­ledge, but that cre­ates a prob­lem. If you don’t have writ­ing how to you trans­mit know­ledge? This is a major topic for the paper.

One way is to embed tales in con­stel­la­tions. A sur­vey of 26 mod­ern hunter-gather groups revealed 18 con­stel­la­tions, with some com­plex­it­ies. The inter­est­ing find­ings are that sur­pris­ingly few con­stel­la­tions or stars were recog­nised by more than a third of peoples. Orion was known to 16 groups, Venus 15, the Plei­ades 12 and the Milky Way and Ursa Major 10. There’s a long tail of other stars with many being import­ant to only one or two groups. That, to me, sug­gests that astro­nom­ical know­ledge is often local and specific.

Hay­den & Vil­len­euve take the inter­pret­a­tion the other way and emphas­ise that there is evid­ence of cross-cultural import­ance to some clusters, like the Plei­ades. They note they’re usu­ally seen as a group of indi­vidu­als, often women or chil­dren and recog­nised through­out the world. It’s obvi­ously not an arbit­rary gen­er­al­isa­tion and if you’re look­ing for gen­eral pat­terns in Palaeo­lithic beha­viour, then it’s a use­ful hook for show­ing evid­ence of com­mon behaviour.

They also note that Ursa Major is seen around the world as a bear. I find this a more inter­est­ing obser­va­tion, because it really doesn’t look like a bear. Yet if people in the Amer­icas and Europe are see­ing a bear then either it’s an amaz­ing coin­cid­ence, or else there’s a com­mon source for the myth. If there is a com­mon source that has to be in the Palaeo­lithic. So when Brian Cox tells every­one about the Great Bear this winter in Star­watch, he’ll could be con­nect­ing back to a 20,000+ year old tra­di­tion of story telling. That’s pretty mind-blowing. If I’d been peer-reviewing the paper, this is one of two sec­tions that I’d have any con­cerns about. In this case there’s a lot of work on Sky Bears that is uncited. Roslyn Frank has done a lot of work on them. I don’t know if they ignored it or, with quite a bit being in obscure SEAC pub­lic­a­tions, they simply weren’t aware. This sec­tion isn’t bad, but if they’d made ref­er­ence to Frank’s work it could have been bet­ter. I think Hay­den & Vil­len­euve clearly would have had some­thing inter­est­ing to say about it.

They view Palaeo­lithic con­stel­la­tions as being dif­fer­ent from the mod­ern concept of the term, and I think they’re dead right. I really need to get my paper about this out, and this is another art­icle to cite in it.

They also look how astro­nom­ical prac­tice can be embed­ded in social prac­tices. This sec­tion talks a lot of sense but I would say that as one of the points I’ve already writ­ten in this blog, which I’m sure they haven’t read. It’s cliché num­ber one: Astro­nomy was developed so that ancient peoples knew when to plant the crops / fol­low the herds / do some­thing else weather depend­ent. They men­tion that weather changes from year to year. The first snow does not always fall on Novem­ber 28, and plan­ning your food around the idea that must hap­pen is a recipe for dis­aster. What you can do is sched­ule social activ­ity around astro­nom­ical events.

This is what Hay­den & Vil­len­euve sug­gest. Com­pet­it­ive feast­ing, they argue, emerges in com­plex hunter-gatherers. This is com­pet­it­ive in the sense of who can provide the most food rather than who can gobble the most in five minutes. This is where Hay­den & Vil­len­euve come up to an altern­at­ive to the “you need to know when to plant crops idea”.

We sug­gest that it was emer­ging élite aggrand­izers who, in the con­text of cre­at­ing feast­ing and ritual sodal­it­ies (like secret soci­et­ies) for the pur­pose of increas­ing their polit­ical con­trol, developed or super­vised the devel­op­ment of accur­ate astro­nom­ical sys­tems and cal­en­dars espe­cially for the pur­pose of set­ting dates for feast­ing and cre­at­ing ritual esoterica.

Hay­den & Vil­len­euve (2011:346)

Work­ing out the implic­a­tions of that could be a whole book. Does this mark the begin­ning of Time as a concept against a vaguer notion of Dur­a­tion? Con­stel­la­tions in the north­ern hemi­sphere today are at least two thou­sand years old. Does this mean that our earli­est con­stel­la­tions are ten or twenty times older than that? And instead of know­ledge start­ing with eat­ing for­bid­den fruit, did it start with someone telling us when it was for­bid­den to eat the fruit?

So how do you archae­olo­gic­ally test for this?

There’s the depos­ition of arte­facts in caves, but with my scep­tical hat on I think that might be dif­fi­cult to link to an astro­nom­ical motive. Their reas­on­ing makes sense, but not all secret soci­et­ies have to be astro­nom­ical, and you can see why people might be wary of an astro­nom­ical soci­ety hold­ing meet­ings in the back of a dark cave.

Another method they con­sider are tal­lies and they use the example of the Thaïs bone. This is an Ice Age bone that has mark­ings like some kind of count on it. It could be a count of moons, but Hay­den & Vil­len­euve give other examples of tal­lies being used to track debts in mod­ern hunter-gatherer soci­et­ies. It ties in with the devel­op­ment of social élites, who is track­ing a debt to whom, but des­pite other examples of Palaeo­lithic tal­lies no single one can be neatly tied to astronomy.

One idea they sug­gest is one I dropped a few years ago, and I might be wrong about that. After the incised art at Creswell was dis­covered I noticed it would have been best lit around sun­set in high sum­mer. I wondered if this is why it was a cave on the south­ern side of the gorge that was chosen, and if examin­ing the azi­muths of caves with art could give details about sea­sonal use. The same idea came back to me when I heard of incised art on Levanzo in the Aega­dian Islands. My idea was if it’s incised it needs a graz­ing angle of light to be seen best, so art would be most likely to have been cre­ated and used when the con­di­tions were the best for see­ing on that sur­face. It’s a simple idea and — if you ignore the evid­ence that Palaeo­lithic people had port­able light, else how could they paint deep in caves, pretty sound. It was remem­ber­ing about port­able light that killed the idea for me.

Hay­den and Vil­len­uve haven’t worked around that prob­lem, but they argue that access­ib­il­ity to light is a factor that should be thought about in rock art. Not all sites will rely on sun­light, but a large sample could pull a sig­nal of sea­sonal use from ran­dom noise of arti­fi­cially lit cave sites. They present some res­ults and there’s an inter­est­ing pref­er­ence for 304º for dec­or­ated caves (think sum­mer sun­sets) and 124º for rock shel­ters (think winter sun­rises). For undec­or­ated caves and shel­ters there’s a slight pref­er­ence for 0º (where would the light come from? I think there could be met­eor­o­lo­gical reas­ons for avoid due North, like the wind, but the res­ults are def­in­itely inter­est­ing enough to be worth pursuing.

All in all I think this is one of the best papers I’ve read this year. For a start Hay­den & Vil­len­euve stay focused on the inter­est­ing aspect of ancient astro­nomy, the people who did it. It’s all very well say­ing this stone row aligns to this sun­set or whatever, but a list of things that align to other things would be utterly tedi­ous. The authors nearly always stick to explain why that should matter.

The only place where I think they miss is dis­cuss­ing the Abri Blan­chard bone, which they inter­pret as a record of the highest zenith of the moon. They see this as the res­ult of sys­tem­atic obser­va­tions almost like mod­ern sci­entific obser­va­tion. I’m bothered by this. One is why would someone want to know the vari­ation of zenith height for the moon to any great detail, as opposed to the phases? Else­where through the paper they back up astro­nom­ical motives with examples from mod­ern hunter-gathers. I don’t see any­thing sim­ilar for the zenith obser­va­tions. I’m also con­cerned with how the obser­va­tions were made. I can under­stand qual­it­at­ive obser­va­tions, like this is the fur­thest north or south the moon rises, but I’m wary of quant­it­at­ive meas­ure­ments, like the Moon is X units above the hori­zon. In this case there is a paper that argues when the moon is more than around 20º above the hori­zon it’s simply per­ceived as being ‘in the sky’. (Jaan­iste 2006:191)

It’s not worth over­play­ing this prob­lem, it’s about a para­graph in the whole paper and the reason it stands out is that it is so much in con­trast to the extremely well-reasoned argu­ment in the rest of the article.

Another fea­ture I really like about the paper is that you can read it. It’s cyn­ical to see that people with some­thing inter­est­ing to say write well to explain it, while people with noth­ing to say write poorly to hide it. Some people just write poorly. But you can’t write with clar­ity if your ideas are vapid, and Hay­den & Vil­len­euve do write with clarity.

I’ve wracked my brains to think of a com­par­able intro­duc­tion to Palaeo­lithic astro­nomy. It gets men­tioned in a few books, but often as a couple of pages as a pre­lude to astro­nomy by settled pop­u­la­tions. That’s under­stand­able, the evid­ence is very frag­ment­ary, but I think it means that if you’re look­ing for an intro­duc­tion European Palaeo­lithic Astro­nomy you can’t do bet­ter than this art­icle. Even if you’re more inter­ested in North Amer­ica or Aus­tralia it’s still a use­ful read in show­ing what a good argu­ment looks like.

Ref­er­ences:

Hay­den, B., & Vil­len­euve, S. (2011). Astro­nomy in the Upper Palaeo­lithic? Cam­bridge Archae­olo­gical Journal, 21 (03), 331–355 DOI: 10.1017/S0959774311000400

Jaan­iste, J. (2006). On the Time-Space Con­text of Moon-Related Beliefs Folk­lore, 32, 185–196 [PDF]

Photo: Bal­ade au Thot en vallée Vézère by tourisme_vezere. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC-SA licence.