There are more things in heaven and earth, cobber, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Alun Science, The Past 7 Comments , , , , , ,

This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.org Study­ing astro­nomy in cul­ture should be simple. There’s only so much that is vis­ible by the naked eye, and it fol­lows pre­dict­able pat­terns. Mod­ern astro­nomy means that we can recon­struct what was vis­ible any­where in the world in human his­tory, within cer­tain bound­ar­ies for errors. If we know what hap­pens when, then study­ing a cul­ture should just be a case of tak­ing a shop­ping list of astro­nom­ical phe­nom­ena and see­ing what a cul­ture does with them. And some bad his­tor­ies of astro­nomy read like the author is award­ing marks to cul­tures for astro­nom­ical achievements.

There’s vari­ous things that don’t work with that plan, but the biggest is that you sup­posedly are examin­ing cul­ture and are fit­ting a study to a very spe­cific view of astro­nomy, a mod­ern west­ern view. It’s awk­ward because we live in a cul­ture where a mod­ern Pla­tonic view of sci­ence is rarely chal­lenged. There’s a good reason for that. Our view of sci­ence makes sense within our cul­ture. But if we don’t acknow­ledge that sci­ence is a social con­struct then we don’t fully under­stand other cul­tures. Real­ity is the same for all of us, but not our way of mak­ing sense of it. An Over­view of Aus­tralian Abori­ginal Astro­nomy by Philip A. Clarke in Archae­oastro­nomy is a good paper that helps show the dif­fer­ence between under­stand­ing the use of astro­nomy in a cul­ture and com­par­ing an indi­gen­ous astro­nomy with ours to see how much they got right.

The paper starts at the very best place to start, as after a brief intro­duc­tion it con­siders the sources of the data. It’s a key point because if the source data is full of lead­ing ques­tions and pre­con­ceived notions then you’ll only get the answers you were look­ing for.

Clarke then looks at how Abori­ginal peoples saw their world. If you’re going to exam­ine the sky, it helps to know how the people describ­ing it saw it in rela­tion to the rest of the world. A com­mon fea­ture of abori­ginal cos­mo­logy is that the sky was seen as con­nec­ted to the land. Clarke refers to the sky as the “Land of the Dead” or the “Land to the West”, because spir­its are thought to travel to the west to enter the sky. The meth­ods of get­ting there var­ied. Tas­mani­ans saw their foot tracks in the forest as lead­ing to the Milky Way. This reminds me a bit of the Green­landic idea that the shaman could walk to the moon. In the far north the moon can roll across the hori­zon, so that it has a vis­ible con­nec­tion to the Earth. From that view the idea that the Milky Way is a foot track con­nec­ted to the Earth where it meets the hori­zon makes sense. Oth­ers have the idea that birds could trans­port people to the Sky­world, which again matches obser­va­tions of birds being between land and sky. Still more say that you can reach the Sky­world by climb­ing tall trees and get­ting help from a passing tornado.

The abori­ginal Sky­world seems to be a very richly described place. The abori­gin­als have no truck with celes­tial spheres. Their Sky­world has topo­graphy, trees and inhab­it­ants. The Sky­world is where the ancest­ors live, and so it’s a handy place to visit if you’re in need of a bit of ancient wis­dom. They should be easy enough to find as some of the ancest­ors are thought to be vis­ible as stars.

The iden­ti­fic­a­tion of ancest­ors in the sky brings a whole series of fur­ther factors. Kin­ship is import­ant in abori­ginal soci­ety and the same is true for the ancest­ors. Ant­ares is Butt Kuee Tuukuung in south­w­est Vic­toria, and the fainter close stars are his wives. Bright­ness and loc­a­tion explains a lot of the other rela­tion­ships that Clarke lists. Time is also an issue. In north­ern Queens­land the Even­ing Star is Dog and the Morn­ing Star is Bitch. All these fea­tures are cat­egor­ised in clans and sec­tions just like the rest of the abori­ginal world includ­ing anim­als and plants on the land.

Opin­ion is divided on how the Sun and Moon return from the west to the east. For some people this is through a path in the under­world. The people of Arnhem land have a tale the Sun becomes a great fish and swims under the land through the ocean. That appeals to me at a nar­rat­ive level. Other regions have other tales and some include the pas­sage of stars beneath the earth as well as the Sun and Moon.

One of the inter­est­ing fea­tures that comes out of this paper is that the Abori­ginal people seem to have a concept of stars, but not so much of stick-figure con­stel­la­tions. Clarke men­tions a sur­vey by Haynes that finds evid­ence of some faint stars being Unwala the Crab Ancestor [PDF], but not both­er­ing with Pro­cyon and Reg­u­lus — two much brighter stars close by. My reac­tion was that maybe this shouldn’t be too much of a sur­prise. If a bright star is an ancestor then it’s an indi­vidual not part of a lar­ger fig­ure. There are already kin­ship con­nec­tions between stars so the idea of Greco-Roman style con­stel­la­tions is prob­ably a bit too con­fus­ing. Another factor is that because the Milky Way is so vis­ible, there are already plenty of dark-cloud con­stel­la­tions that actu­ally look like things. For example one patch of neb­ula in the Milky Way blots out the stars mak­ing the sil­hou­ette of an emu in the sky. That makes draw­ing stick fig­ures between stars an uncon­vin­cing altern­at­ive for con­stel­la­tions. But there are other bet­ter reas­ons too.

Clarke makes the point that col­our is very import­ant in abori­ginal cos­mo­lo­gies. One example he gives are the Arrente people of Cent­ral Aus­tralia who give more import­ance to red­dish or white stars than yel­low or blue stars. It won’t sur­prise you the same people value red ochres and white clays as sym­bols of power. Col­our becomes more com­plic­ated when you exam­ine the Sun or Moon, which are red at the hori­zon but change col­our as they climb and fall. A red Sun seems to a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem as it’s a fem­in­ine sym­bol and red is a power­ful col­our. One tra­di­tion describes it as a kangaroo skin dress that is given to her by men who spend the night with her. The mottled face of the Moon seems to be explained by scars of con­flict, but the exact nature of the fight var­ies from region to region.

Clarke cov­ers time­keep­ing, espe­cially sea­son­al­ity in depth. The only thing I’ve found miss­ing here is when the day starts. Some cul­tures see it start­ing at sun­rise, oth­ers at sun­set but I’ve no idea if there’s a shared day concept in Abori­ginal cul­ture. The Plei­ades seem to be par­tic­u­larly import­ant in the turn­ing of the sea­sons [PDF]. Clarke notes that Tindale has fifty dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Plei­ades myth­o­logy con­nect­ing them to chan­ging of the sea­sons. That might indic­ate a lot of dis­agree­ment, but the fact that so many abori­ginal cul­tures over such a large area are using the same gen­eral idea and dis­agree­ing on the details points to inter­con­nec­tion between peoples.

The sad­dest sec­tion is The Col­lapse and Rebirth of the Cos­mos. Abori­gin­als did not pass­ively sit wait­ing for white set­tle­ment and news of the Europeans pre­ceded their arrival in many places. Clarke can show this is reflec­ted in their cos­mo­logy. The Brit­ish arrived in the east and thanks to small­pox brought death with them. Vis­ions of the Aurora Aus­tralis and met­eors were inter­preted as omens of dire times. Given the res­ults it’s easy to see how the arrival of the Brit­ish could be seen as a cos­mic apo­ca­lypse.

The com­mon theme in this paper, apart from sheer vari­ety and oth­er­ness of abori­ginal astro­nomy is that this is also a con­tinu­ing tra­di­tion. I’m acutely aware I may have mixed up tenses in the descrip­tion because some of these ways of life have gone, while oth­ers are still alive. This life isn’t simply a rut that people return to, but a tra­di­tion that can adapt can appro­pri­ate new ideas, like Abori­ginal beliefs about UFOs, or sci­entific dis­cov­er­ies. Clarke men­tions the met­eor­ite strike that cre­ated the Wolfe Creek Crater has been woven into tales of the Dream­time.

Astronomically inspired indigenous art at the Ilgarijiri exhibition on display in Geraldton. Photo (cc) AstroMeg.
Astro­nom­ic­ally inspired indi­gen­ous art at the Ilgar­ijiri exhib­i­tion on dis­play in Ger­aldton. Photo (cc) AstroMeg.

Good writ­ing can trans­port you to strange new places. Some­times its an evoc­at­ive geo­graph­ical descrip­tion, but it can also show you the uni­verse in a new light. Astro­nomy can show the majesty of the cos­mos and the sheer scale of cre­ation. At the oppos­ite end of the scale you can go on safari with micro­scopic bac­teria far too small to be seen by the human eye. In the case of work like Clarke’s, it can be a guide to show how spe­cial the appar­ently mundane is. The night sky we see is more or less the same as seen by the abori­ginal peoples of Aus­tralia, allow­ing for some effects of lat­it­ude of the observer.

What I like about this paper is that at each step Clarke is link­ing back to the cul­ture that the astro­nomy is in. The fact that abori­ginal astro­nomers are inter­ested in the col­ours of stars is, by itself, a foible. Because Clarke makes that point that col­our is con­nec­ted to all sorts of ter­restrial sym­bol­ism and mean­ing then the con­nec­tions between sky and soci­ety become much more mean­ing­ful. Like­wise the lack of con­stel­la­tions might be taken as a sign that Abori­ginal peoples aren’t that inter­ested in many stars. Know­ing about the kin­ship sys­tem shows how mis­taken that is, and that state­ments about the Sky­world are also strong polit­ical state­ments about life in the world below.

The many pages of ref­er­ences at the end of the art­icle are the icing on the cake, because this paper is very much an over­view. Any single sec­tion of the paper is a gate­way to many many more art­icles research­ing abori­ginal astro­nomy and cul­ture. You never want to take one author’s work as the last word on a sub­ject, but if you’re inter­ested in Aus­tralian indi­gen­ous astro­nomy you could do a lot worse than take Clarke’s art­icle as the start­ing point.

ResearchBlogging.orgClarke, P.A. (2007). An Over­view of Aus­tralian Abori­ginal Eth­noastro­nomy Archae­oastro­nomy: The Journal of Astro­nomy in Cul­ture, XXI, 39–58 (Mendeley link)

Theorising Space Archaeology

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , , , , ,

The future archae­olo­gical site of Spa­ce­port Amer­ica. Photo (cc) Jared Tar­bell

There’s a thought-provoking post on Space Archae­ology about how you define the term Space Archae­ology. I’ve gen­er­ally just thought of it as the archae­ology of remains asso­ci­ated with space­flight, but I’ve never seen the need to give the defin­i­tion any ser­i­ous thought. It’s a small enough field as it is without draw­ing up bound­ar­ies. Steve Wilson (I assume, the blog is uncred­ited) has given it more thought, and he’s come up with a much more inter­est­ing way of look­ing at it. He sees Space Archae­ology as being made up from Aerospace Archae­ology (the bit I was think­ing about), Xenoar­chae­ology (the mater­ial remains of alien civil­isa­tions) and Exoar­chae­ology (any mater­ial remains that are offworld).

My first reac­tion was does this add any­thing? Adding in Xenoar­chae­ology is awk­ward as there are no known alien arte­facts. There’s crank mater­ial of ancient astro­nauts and vari­ous forms of SETI which are anthro­po­lo­gical con­cerns and not spe­cific­ally archae­olo­gical. Adding Exoar­chae­ology only adds fic­tional mater­ial. Things like the archae­ology of ter­ra­form­ing would fit in this cat­egory. As it stands it only adds an archae­ology of things that don’t exist. The dia­gram also excludes Space Her­it­age and Space Junk, which do exist. As a defin­i­tion, I’m don’t think it helps. How­ever as an ana­lyt­ical tool, I think it could be very clever.

I’ll start with Xenoar­chae­ology, because that’s the field that’s easi­est to dis­miss as barmy. What’s the evid­ence of palaeo­con­tact? There isn’t any really. But think­ing about how people do Xenoar­chae­ology, and what would be neces­sary to show the pres­ence of alien mater­ial on earth could be use­ful. Tools developed in this area can then be applied to ‘crash sites’ like Roswell in the dia­gram where Xenoar­chae­ology and Aerospace Archae­ology inter­sect. You won’t learn any­thing about alien civil­isa­tions by study­ing Roswell, but you could learn about how humans react to per­ceived alien vis­it­a­tion. Such research could have helped at Caran­cas. Like­wise a ser­i­ous study of how xenoar­chae­ology is prac­ticed could give genu­inely use­ful insights into the assump­tions in SETI programmes.

Sim­il­arly Exoar­chae­ology poses its own prob­lems when look­ing at inac­cess­ib­il­ity. Think­ing about these issues could high­light how the archae­ology of space­flight in orbital space makes demands and chal­lenges that we simply don’t have on the ground. Think­ing about it this way Space Her­it­age and Space Junk could straddle every zone between Exoar­chae­ology and Space Archae­ology. It depends on whether you class the human waste mat­ter on the Moon as part of Aerospace Archae­ology or not. I’d include Space Junk / Exog­ar­bology too, because a lot of ter­restrial archae­ology is the study of junk.

While Space Archae­olo­gists might not need bound­ar­ies, draw­ing up defin­i­tions can high­light what makes a field inter­est­ing and also throw some basic assump­tions that need ques­tion­ing. The one that both­ers me is the idea of Xenoarchaeology.

Oddly, it’s not the Xeno bit. I could be pedantic and say archae­ology is the study of the human past through mater­ial remains. Still, the stick­ing with human is a throw­back to the early nine­teenth cen­tury when Man (prefer­ably with a mous­tache and stovepipe hat) was a cre­ation apart from the anim­als. Early palaeo­lithic archae­ology, palae­on­to­logy and prim­ato­logy are sim­ilar enough that it’s look­ing more and more like an arbit­rary dis­tinc­tion about where human ends. It’s the archae­ology bit that troubles me. The study through mater­ial remains when, so far as is known, there are no known mater­ial remains of extra-terrestrial activ­ity near Earth. I think study­ing the human reac­tion to pro­posed alien inter­ven­tions is an inter­est­ing research prob­lem. We study ancient faiths, so why not study mod­ern faiths too? It’s just that archae­ology isn’t always the best way of doing it. Some­times a bet­ter approach is anthropology.

Think­ing about Space Anthro­po­logy could have two advant­ages. One is that it recog­nises the inter­est­ing work done by eth­no­graph­ers. Alice Gor­man has poin­ted out that indi­gen­ous peoples have a rough enough time as it is get­ting any recog­ni­tion in their sac­ri­fices for space explor­a­tion. Tak­ing American-style four-field anthro­po­logy as a model also points to some other inter­est­ing research top­ics. For example is there any­thing bio­anthro­po­logy could con­trib­ute, and how do bio­anthro­po­lo­gical con­cerns integ­rate with research that is already being done?

I real­ise that by now my response is a bit longer than the ori­ginal post, which was flag­ging up an idea and not inten­ded as a fully formed model of Space Archae­ology. Even so I think it’s an inter­est­ing way of think­ing about what archae­olo­gists of space explor­a­tion do. I’d love to see it developed further.

Preserving a culture in wild honey

Alun Featured, The Past 7 Comments , , , ,

This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.org

“What is her­it­age?” sounds like the kind of essay ques­tion a lec­turer might set when they run out of inspir­a­tion. It depends where you ask it. In some places it’s a ques­tion that car­ries a sting for the unwary. In the UK it’s almost always old build­ings. Some­times it’s very old build­ings, but we build our her­it­age around the things we build. Some­times a place can have a his­tor­ical potency, like a medi­eval bat­tle­field, but usu­ally we insist that some­thing leaves a mark before we acknow­ledge its his­tor­icity. It’s not sur­pris­ing. The UK is an indus­trial soci­ety. It’s a settled soci­ety. So is the rest of indus­tri­al­ised world. So how to you even start to exam­ine the her­it­age of a non-industrial soci­ety? Is the very concept of her­it­age loaded in a way that dis­em­powers some peoples? Mick Mor­rison, Dar­lene McNaughton and Justin Shiner have a paper ‘Mission-Based Indi­gen­ous Pro­duc­tion at the Weipa Pres­by­terian Mis­sion, West­ern Cape York Pen­in­sula (1932–66)’ that tackles the prob­lems of power in 20th cen­tury Aus­tralia by look­ing at indi­gen­ous activ­ity around Weipa.

Weipa, North Queens­land. Image © Google, used under edu­ca­tional terms.

Weipa is in the north­ern part of North Queens­land on the west side of Cape York, the pointy bit at the top of Aus­tralia. It’s around here that the Dutch made first land­fall in Aus­tralia. The set­tle­ment was built due to the arrival of a Pres­by­terian Mis­sion in last years of 19th cen­tury. The mis­sion was moved closer to the shore and it’s the later mis­sion that the art­icle is about. There’s a plan of the mis­sion and the first thing that struck me was the pos­i­tion of the Boy’s Dorm­it­ory and the Girls Dorm­it­ory. I wondered where the adults slept, then I wondered why the chil­dren were sleep­ing in dorm­it­or­ies any­way and not with their fam­il­ies. Finally, because I’m a bit slow of think­ing, I real­ised what the mis­sion was doing there.
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Are Extraterrestrials a Greek thing?

Alun Featured, Science, The Past 2 Comments , , , , ,

I had a slight worry earlier today. I have an idea that I think has cross-over rel­ev­ance between SETI and Ancient His­tory about ancient spec­u­la­tions on extra­ter­restrial life. I was slightly alarmed when I read Jean Schneider’s new pre-print on arXiv, The Extra­ter­restrial Life debate in dif­fer­ent cul­tures. In it Schneider argues that argu­ments about life on other worlds can be traced back to ancient Greece. It sounds like an idea I’ve been kick­ing around for a couple of months. It was a topic raised by the atom­ists like Demo­critus and Leu­cip­pus who said that in an infin­ite cos­mos with an infin­ite num­ber of atoms there must be infin­ite worlds. Plato rejec­ted this idea, as did Aris­totle who argued for a hier­arch­ical cos­mos. Schneider says debates in other cul­tures are derived from this and then asks why it should be only the Greeks who spec­u­lated on off­world life.
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New 4SH

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There’s a new edi­tion of Four Stone Hearth live at Afar­en­sis. He’s done a great job with it, and he’s found plenty that I’ve missed.

Also, while I’m point­ing at things, Michael E Smith has a thought­ful post on agency and the prob­lems that hap­pen when archae­olo­gists try talk­ing about it. I’ve found often agent is a syn­onym of indi­vidual. Someone else I know sug­ges­ted soul. It might sound woolly, but a lot of talk about agency is, because people don’t often define what sort of agency they’re talk­ing about. Smith’s post shows another sort, from the polit­ical sci­ences, which clearly could be have applic­a­tions in archaeology.

Speculations on the sex of the Moon

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 1 Comment , , , , , , ,

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 of cul­tures with male lunar deit­ies which includes, Ainu, Anato­li­ans, Armeni­ans, South­ern Ara­bi­ans, Aus­tralian Abori­gines, Balts, Basques, Canaan­ites, Eski­mos, Finns, Ger­mans, Geor­gi­ans, Green­land­ers, Hindus, Hittites, Hur­ri­ans, Japan­ese, Lithuani­ans, Melane­sians, Mon­go­li­ans, Per­sians, Phrygi­ans, Poles, New Guineans, North Amer­ican Indi­ans of Brit­ish Columbia, the Machiv­anaga of Peru, Scand­inavi­ans, Slavs and Tar­tars. With the Moon being a rock, and the Sun a nuc­lear implo­sion there’s no reason to assume the genders have to be fixed one way or the other.

If you’re after a more adven­ter­ous myth­o­logy you don’t even need the Sun and Moon to be oppos­ite genders. For example the Bororo of South Amer­ica have the Sun and Moon as twin broth­ers who ascen­ded from the Earth. A male Sun and Moon myth­o­logy might be use­ful if you want to have a cos­mic example of Men going out and doing stuff while women… umm… don’t. If you want some­thing more soph­ist­ic­ated, the Aztecs and the Egyp­tians saw the Moon as male or female or both as the mood took them.

In fact it’s the female Moon which may be odder than a male Moon. If you want oppos­ite genders for the two bod­ies, a female Sun might make more sense because it drives life. The reason the Sun is male in astro­logy (and I assume Ms. Har­vey means spe­cific­ally Graeco-Roman Astro­logy) is because it was asso­ci­ated with Apollo in reli­gion. Thanks to the Roman Empire that’s the basis for Astro­logy which sur­vived in the West. Indian Astro­logy is some­what dif­fer­ent. Where does that leave the Sun’s role as a life-force? The Greeks saw the male as the source of life. The womb was where you depos­ited the seed to grow, the credit for the fin­ished product belonged to the man. Did that belief come from the same root as a male Sun? I wouldn’t know; it’s pos­sible one caused the other. In any event it would seem reas­on­able to ask how the gender of celes­tial bod­ies affected the way people saw the universe.

It’s the fact that sci­ent­ists see the Moon as gen­der­less that helps open up new ways of look­ing at the uni­verse. We can ask new ques­tions, find new answers and dis­cover new mys­ter­ies which we couldn’t even just fifty years ago. In con­trast Satya Har­vey offers a narrow-minded and blinkered view of the moon which cas­u­ally dis­misses any­thing which doesn’t fit her own pre­con­cep­tions. A uni­verse where women are tied to 2000 year old gender roles seems a claus­tro­phobic little place. If a Japan­ese probe can help smash a way out of that, I’m all for it.

And while I’m at it, I’ll crow­bar a link into Steven Renshaw’s page on Japan­ese Astro­nomy.

Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings by E.C.Krupp

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Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings by E.C.Krupp

I was sur­prised to find I haven’t already put up a page say­ing how good this book is, so I’ll cor­rect that now. This is one of the best books you can get on archae­oastro­nomy, and it’s also one of the more affordable.

One of the big attrac­tions of the book is that not only does he answer the ‘how’ ques­tion but also the ‘why’. The book starts with a dis­cus­sion of the centre of the world which, depend­ing on your myth­o­logy, can be found at Delphi, Beijing, Chaco Canyon or sev­eral other places he men­tions. The point he makes is that if the uni­verse revolves around you, then you must be a spe­cial kind of per­son. The rest of the book is an explor­a­tion of how people con­nec­ted them­selves to the stars.

The meth­ods aren’t simply by align­ing stones. Krupp is one of those people with a very wide geo­graph­ical grasp of his sub­ject which means he can draw on eth­no­graph­ies from around the world. Along with the usual sus­pects in any pop­u­lar archae­oastro­nomy book, you also get Mon­go­li­ans, San bush­men and Chu­mash sham­ans. He shows that while the meth­ods might vary around the world, there was a uni­ver­sal con­cern in hav­ing the heav­ens on your side. This isn’t simply about time­keep­ing or mys­tic har­mony. This is also about the dis­play of power.

gazebo
Sil­ver Four Ladies of Hol­ly­wood Gazebo.
Photo (cc) Floyd B. Bar­iscale.

The book opens with the chapter on The Cen­ter of the World, and pulls from a diverse pool of examples includ­ing Hopi set­tle­ment, Evenki drums and a gazebo on the Hol­loy­wood Walk of Fame to illus­trate the concept of world quar­ter­ing. This tends to be the divi­sion of the world into the car­dinal dir­ec­tions in the Old World, and pos­sibly the quar­ter­ing of the sky between sol­sti­cial sunrise/sunset pos­i­tions, or the path of the Milky Way in the New World. Krupp uses this as an intro­duc­tion that order was seen as being inher­ent in the cos­mos, rather than some­thing imposed on it. In fact the word cos­mos ori­gin­ally meant order, rather than universe.

Chapter two is about Plug­ging into Cos­mic Power and the meth­ods of doing that. Celes­tial con­cerns are accessed via sham­anic ritual, pos­sibly with some chem­ical assist­ance. The aim may be to reach to the stars, but Krupp keeps an eye on the fact that these prac­tices were earth-bound. The Cen­ters of Cre­ation and Mother Earth chapters look at birth, cre­ation and renewal, with Agents of Renewal giv­ing more details on how people dropped the hint to the uni­verse that fer­til­ity was a good idea.

The chapters on Sham­ans, Chiefs and Sac­red Kings and Celes­tial Empires talk more about the con­sol­id­a­tion of power with Enlightened Self-Interest and Ulterior Motives examin­ing how that could be sub­ver­ted. Of course there’s no point in hav­ing power if you don’t let people know you have it, which is the topic of It Pays to Advert­ise. All of this then gets pulled together in the con­clud­ing chapter Upward Mobil­ity, which draws the threads of the argu­ments con­nect­ing astro­nomy and power together.

If you’ve read his Ram­bling Through the Skies column which used to be in Sky and Tele­scope, then you’ll know Krupp has a neat turn of phrase and an eye for an arrest­ing ana­logy. As an example in It Pays to Advert­ise, he com­pares the astro­nom­ical imagery found on sham­anic cloth­ing with the icons found on super­hero cos­tumes. Just as Bat­man, Spi­der­man and Green Lan­tern show the sources of their power, so too ancient peoples used sym­bols related to the sky to emphas­ise their abilities.

If there is a cri­ti­cism to be made of the book it’s that Krupp picks up and drops examples within a page or two, so the reader is whisked from one corner of the world to another and bat­ted between cen­tur­ies. It’s all con­nec­ted with the point Krupp is try­ing to make but it can be dizzy­ing on occa­sion. Pos­sibly fewer and more rooted examples would have helped. This wouldn’t have affected the impres­sion of uni­ver­sal­ity of astro­nom­ical sym­bol­ism and power which he argues for.

That is a rel­at­ively minor cri­ti­cism, and the main reason for mak­ing it is just to demon­strate I have read book. It is a great tour of the archae­ology and anthro­po­logy of astro­nomy. It was afford­able when I bought it and, if you pick it up from the right shop, it’s even more so now. If you’re look­ing for more than a super­fi­cial intro­duc­tion to the diversity of archae­oastro­nom­ical evid­ence then it’s a great place to start.

Neanderthal Ethics

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 7 Comments , , , ,

Here’s an oddity I star­ted think­ing about fol­low­ing a tweet by Dr Kiki who poin­ted to this art­icle Return of the Neander­thals: If we can resur­rect them through fossil DNA, should we?. The strange thing was my reac­tion to this. The answer seems obvi­ous. I thought I’d missed the boat on this when The Philo­soph­ers’ Magazine blog covered it. Again the author, Jean Kazez, missed the obvi­ous objec­tion, so I left it in a com­ment, and it was eas­ily dis­missed — or rather ignored. See­ing as two people see no prob­lem with what I see as an insur­mount­able prob­lem I have to be open to the idea I’m being dog­matic.
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UFOs versus the Rainbow Serpents

Alun Science 4 Comments , , , , ,

Statistics

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchOne of the advant­ages of trip­ping to other lib­rar­ies is that you get to browse journ­als you’d oth­er­wise miss. One example is the Journal of the Royal Insti­tute for Anthro­po­logy, which I wouldn’t see at Leicester. That is a pity because I’m miss­ing some stuff like Close encoun­ters: UFO beliefs in a remote Aus­tralian Abori­ginal com­munity by Eirik Saethre.

The com­munity Saethre looked at is well qual­i­fied for the term ‘remote’. He was con­duct­ing research with the Warlpiri, an abori­ginal people who live around 300 miles or 500 kilo­metres north-west of Alice Springs in the Tanami Desert. The com­munity he was in was cre­ated spe­cific­ally to provide work for Abori­gin­als far from Alice Springs. How­ever there is little work there to do, which leads to high unem­ploy­ment and plenty of time for watch­ing tele­vi­sion like the X-Files. At night in this com­munity it’s not uncom­mon to see UFOs. Saethre reports that he and other kardiya, non-aboriginals, were warned not to drive on their own at night or else they were risk­ing alien abduction.

Saethre says he never saw any­thing he would regard as a UFO, but most of the people in the set­tle­ment were quite adam­ant about their exist­ence. The age range of people see­ing UFOs was from 12 to 51 and they were seen by men and women. Not only that, but only around half the claimed sight­ings were by sole wit­nesses. The UFOs were a loc­al­ised phe­nomenon. Saethre vis­ited other Warlpiri com­munit­ies, but if peoples in these set­tle­ments men­tioned UFOs, it was only in rela­tion to Saethre’s home. The UFOs were also said to be spe­cific in their tar­gets. Kardiya could be abduc­ted, but not Warlpiri people. The inhab­it­ants in the UFOs recog­nised that the abori­ginal peoples were where they belonged.

As for the people in the UFOs, the Warlpiri had some details. They were extra-terrestrial, trav­el­ling great dis­tances. The X-Files had more or less got it right (Saethre 2007:909). It would be nice to neatly solve the mys­tery by tying the arrival of one with the other, but Saethre couldn’t get an accur­ate sense of time for when the UFOs first appeared. Odder was that they didn’t seem to have much effect on the lives of Abor­gin­als. They were cer­tainly scary to some wit­nesses, and most people would rather not see one but they didn’t seem to do a lot else. They didn’t bestow prestige or stigma. They didn’t steal or bestow wealth. The only way they really made much dif­fer­ence is that they were thought to take water from waterholes.

If all I told you about were the UFO encoun­ters in isol­a­tion, then this would all seem to be mundane bat­ti­ness. Immensely intel­li­gent and power­ful ali­ens travel the unima­gin­able dis­tances of the uni­verse –and when they choose to refuel with water the place they stop is the middle of the Aus­tralian Desert? As it hap­pens the Tanami desert has reg­u­lar floods, but even so there are bet­ter places on the planet to go for water. What makes the idea of water-powered UFOs remotely beliiev­able? This is the clever bit of the paper because Saethre inter­twines the UFOs with the local Abori­ginal cosmology.

It’s not just UFOs which take water. The warna­yarra, the rain­bow ser­pents which the Abori­gin­als believe in, are also cap­able of tak­ing water down into the earth with them. You could argue that this too is batty, but this would be more obvi­ously miss­ing the point. The reason for the warna­yarra is to explain a vari­ety of nat­ural causes and effects. Their exist­ence in Aus­tralia isn’t explained by bio­logy, it’s explained by cul­ture. Look­ing more closely at the warna­yarra reveals some inter­est­ing sim­il­ar­it­ies with UFOs. Warna­yarra can abduct Abori­gin­als, espe­cially Abori­ginal people who are out­side their own ter­rit­ory. The warna­yarra recog­nise local peoples as belong­ing to the land, but a man out­side his ter­rit­ory can be in danger if he hasn’t been form­ally intro­duced to the local warna­yarra by someone who belongs.

Saethre is able to draw up a series of com­par­is­ons between rain­bow ser­pents and UFOs. In some ways they are thought of as quite sim­ilar. Neither is cursed for tak­ing resources, they’re accep­ted as a fact of life. They both are tied to ideas of belong­ing to the land. In other ways they’re mir­ror images. Saethre notes that warna­yarra take water down, while UFOs take it up. They are dan­ger­ous to dif­fer­ent tar­gets. They also seem to occupy dif­fer­ent con­cep­tual spaces. Des­pite oper­at­ing in the same land­scape, they don’t inter­act. UFOs seem to occupy an ambigu­ous social space. They’re con­sidered as part of the land­scape as other tra­di­tional Abori­ginal beings but not fully integ­rated with abori­ginal cos­mo­logy. Nor are they a cos­mo­logy bolted-on to the cul­ture for assim­il­at­ing Kardiya into abori­ginal cos­mo­logy. Saethre observed abori­ginal peoples talk­ing about nat­ural events and attrib­ut­ing their actions to ali­ens as other abori­ginal peoples would to ancestor spirits.

Saethre’s con­clu­sions are that declar­ing nat­ive and west­ern beliefs as ‘incom­men­sur­able’ doesn’t work. Instead he argues that the UFO tales show that the local people are tak­ing west­ern con­cepts and re-casting them into abori­ginal cos­mo­logy. Rather than simply being wacky, Saethre states that indi­gen­ous UFO beliefs offer a way of observing the inter­ac­tion and accul­tur­a­tion which occurs between indi­gen­ous and non-indigenous peoples.

It’s an import­ant point to bear in mind. Archae­olo­gists routinely use eth­no­graph­ies as the basis for ana­lo­gies to explain archae­olo­gical depos­its. It’s import­ant to remem­ber that peoples liv­ing now are not straight­for­ward prox­ies for those liv­ing in the past. One eas­ily recog­nised way is that hunter-gatherers today have been pushed out to harsher envir­on­ments as mod­ern soci­ety expands. In the Meso­lithic and earlier hunter-gatherers would have had access to the most boun­ti­ful land­scapes. At the same time we can­not think of hunter-gatherers of any period as liv­ing in an inter­change­able time­less­ness. Saethre’s UFO study is a par­tic­u­larly effect­ive demon­stra­tion that indi­gen­ous peoples today live in the 21st cen­tury just like every­one else.

Peer Reviewed Saethre, E. (2007). Close encoun­ters: UFO beliefs in a remote Aus­tralian Abori­ginal com­munity. Journal of the Royal Anthro­po­lo­gical Insti­tute, 13(4), 901–915. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467–9655.2007.00463.x

Making sense of meteorites

Alun Science 3 Comments , , , , , , , , ,

Were-llama
A were-llama?

There’s been a couple of inter­est­ing posts on the Peru Ill­ness Flap recently. If you haven’t been read­ing about this, some­where in the Andes near Lake Tit­ic­aca vil­la­gers saw a flash of light and heard a bang. They went to invest­ig­ate and found a crater. They say there was a strange smell and that people are get­ting ill.

I’d been plan­ning to blog about this when there was more inform­a­tion, so I was pleased to read Hys­ter­ical about hys­teria on the SciAm blog. A lot of sites have been rub­bish­ing the idea that this was an extra-terrestrial ill­ness, which is fine, but George Musser at SciAm gets it exactly right when he argues that if you want to talk about the incident’s effect on the local people simple Geo­logy isn’t enough. Geo­logy is great when it comes to rocks, but it’s a remark­ably poor method to invest­ig­ate people.
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