Posts tagged Books
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 >
Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings by E.C.Krupp
May 27th
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 More >
