Recent Posts
- Are Extraterrestrials a Greek thing?
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 [...]
- Archaeoastronomy on YouTube
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 [...]
- The Difference between ‘Above the Horizon’ and ‘In the Sky’
[Cross-posted to Revise & Dissent]
Here’s another paper I’ll have to cite, Time-Space Context of Moon-Related Beliefs by Jaak Jaaniste. It’s downloadable as a PDF paper from Folklore: The Electronic Journal of Folklore which I listed yesterday. I’ll have to read it a few times, but there are several ideas in it which are really interesting.
The [...] - Patterns in the Sky by Stephen M. Fabian
An old review of a book I wrote from a site that will be closing shortly.
Ethnoastronomy is the anthropological twin of archaeoastronomy, being the study of how astronomy is practiced from an ethnographic perspective. Perhaps because of the reliance of American and Polynesian archaeoastronomy on ethno-historical records, the link between archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy is somewhat [...] - Mursi Astronomy II
Mursi Man. Photo by CharlesFred.
Yesterday I introduced the Mursi calendar, which might not be very good but was good enough for the needs of the Mursi. While it is ostensibly a lunar calendar, in reality agricultural activity is decided by close examination of the local environment rather than astronomy. This creates a flexible calendar which [...] - Assumption #1: You’ve got to have astronomy because you’ve got to have an accurate calendar (Mursi Astronomy)
The Mursi. Photo by CharlesFred.
I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while. I need it online as a reference note because it tackles a common problem I have when talking to some people about ancient astronomy. Sometimes the reason I disagree with an astronomical interpretation of a site, like Fiskerton, is that there’s [...] - Ancient African Skies
When I get time™ I’d like to have a go at writing a SETI paper from a classical perspective. There’s a lot that can be said about biological and astronomical speculation in ancient Greece and the ancient authors weren’t averse to mixing the two. In the meantime there’s an article on the Borana calendar at [...]
- Are Extraterrestrials a Greek thing?
