Posts tagged Ethnoastronomy
Are Extraterrestrials a Greek thing?
Mar 2nd
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. (more…)
Archaeoastronomy on YouTube
Jun 26th
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 of sites over here. However, the wealth of historical records from Classical Greece and Rome leads me to think there might be some useful tips I could pick up on method. I shall have to start saving my pennies and see if I can afford to go to the next one.
In the meantime there’s plenty of other interesting films to watch on John Sefick’s YouTube Channel.
The Difference between ‘Above the Horizon’ and ‘In the Sky’
May 20th
[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 most salient section for me is found on pages 190-1:
The psychology of seeing causes us to perceive a “half of the skies” above which we lose contact with the horizon to be about 20 degrees (Eelsalu 1996).
Thus – if the moon moves at more than 20 degrees above the horizon, it is simply “in the sky” and its exact position is considered of no importance. And, if the moon moves at less than 5 degrees above the horizon, it is significantly concealed by earthly objects.
This is because I don’t know if urban astronomy was a problem in the ancient world. The reason it might be is that a lot of sites I’m looking at are in urban contexts, even built into the hearts of cities which might have made observing the horizon difficult.
The horizon is important because the height of the horizon will change the day More >
Patterns in the Sky by Stephen M. Fabian
Aug 18th
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 stronger than the relationship between archaeology and anthropology, at least from the British perspective. Archaeoastronomers and ethnoastronomers frequently attend the same conferences, submit papers to the same journals and many books are cross-breeds of the two disciplines. The connection is so great that the two are often connected under the term of “Cultural Astronomy”. An introduction to Ethnoastronomy should therefore be of great interest to many archaeoastronomers, particularly the archaeology undergraduates taking the archaeoastronomy module at Leicester.
Patterns in the Sky by Stephen M. Fabian could have been written with them in mind. Not only is it written for the beginner with no previous knowledge of the subject, it also has an important quality lacking in so many textbooks. It is affordable, being available for under £10, thanks to its 126 pages. Of course with such brevity a comprehensive survey of ethnoastronomical work is not possible, More >
Mursi Astronomy II
Apr 20th
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 adapts to the variability of the Ethiopian climate. Today I’ll talk about a second problem. While most of the Mursi schedule is flexible, the flooding of the River Omo, at the edge of Mursi territory, is an annual and more or less fixed event.
According to the locals the Omo floods four times. Timing the planting of the sorghum crop is therefore crucial. Plant to early and the floodwaters will wash the seeds away. Plant too late an you may have missed your chance to grow sorghum on the river bank this year. This is critical as Ethiopia is not currently known for its bountiful landscape.
The flooding of the Omo is related to the thawing of snow in the nearby mountains. This causes the problem of timing, because this flooding is related to the solar cycle and so cannot be measured in the lunar cycle the More >
Assumption #1: You’ve got to have astronomy because you’ve got to have an accurate calendar (Mursi Astronomy)
Apr 19th
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 an unchallenged assumption that ancient people were on a quest for accuracy and prediction like modern scientists. It seems a reasonable assumption for some societies. Mayan calendars were more accurate than those of Europe in the same period. Sometimes though you find something which blows all your preconceptions out of the water. Astronomy, as practiced by the Mursi, is one example.
The Mursi live in southwestern Ethiopia by the banks of the River Omo. They live on sorghum, which is planted to coincide with either the flooding of the Omo or the rains, and from their livestock. Agriculture in Ethiopia can precarious at the best of times, so these people really need to know what they’re doing. Miss the rains or the floods and your sorghum crop is lost. Similarly you want to make sure you’re up in the mountains when the pasture is there for More >
Ancient African Skies
Apr 13th
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 the SETI Institute.
The Borana calendar is interesting to me because it’s based to a large extent around the constellation Triangulum. The name Triangulum should pretty well sum up how distinctive the constellation is. It’s an important reminder that just because a star or a might seem important to us, it wasn’t automatically important to the ancients.
