Skyscape archaeology in the longue durée: Insights from cultural astronomy applied to the deep past
Skyscape archaeology in the longue durée: Insights from cultural astronomy applied to the deep past
The sky is filled with entities – the sun, the moon, the planets, individual stars, asterisms and constellations, the milky way – that are as much a part of the environment of a given society as the land, trees, animals, birds, mountains, rivers, lakes and the sea that surrounds them. As such, they are prone to feature in the symbolic and cognitive frameworks of most, if not all, societies. Cultural astronomy, archaeoastronomy, ethnoastronomy and skyscape archaeology are all academic fields concerned with the study of how people have engaged with such celestial entities, how they conceived them, and how they feature in material and immaterial symbolic repertoires that have endured the test of time. Moreover, given this topic has given rise to much atheoretical speculation, skyscape archaeologists must be cautious. The session will explore these issues, both by discussing important theoretical and methodological points but also through recourse to case studies that illustrate the role and importance of the skyscape in the past.
Skyscapes in Archaeology: Current problems, paths ahead
Fabio Silva, Department of Archaeology, University of Bournemouth, United Kingdom & Sofia Center, University of Wales, UK
Archaeoastronomy tries to shed light on the cosmologies of past societies through the study of the orientation of their monumental structures. Alignments to the sun, moon and stars have been reported, with some boasting significance through recourse to statistical considerations. However, the number of prehistoric European sites that have been convincingly interpreted as including celestial alignments are rather reduced in number – fewer still are relevant enough to be embraced, debated or cited by other scholars. This talk will discuss the present latent state of the field and highlight the need to engage with current theoretico-methodological trends in the wider humanities.
Tracing celestial projections of bear ceremonialism from the Upper Palaeolithic to the present
Roslyn Frank, University of Iowa, USA
Debates over the evidence for the existence of a bear cult during the Upper Palaeolithic have gone on for years along with the question of whether survivals of the archaic cosmology associated with historically attested examples of circumpolar bear ceremonialism among hunter-gathers peoples can be used as proxies for reconstructing this earlier worldview and the skyscape that might have once been projected as part of it. In this talk cross-cultural comparisons will be used to explore the question of how in times past the landscape and skyscape might have been fused through recourse to an animistic belief system centered on bear ancestors.
The Milky Way and its place in culture
Steven R. Gullberg, School of Integrative and Cultural Studies, College of Professional and Continuing Studies, University of Oklahoma, USA & International Astronomical Union (IAU), Working Group for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture
The striking appearance of our galaxy in the night sky captivated many cultures, and imagined images became part of their cosmologies. The Milky Way is examined from prehistory, with an emphasis on cultures of the Southern Hemisphere that embraced dark constellations – those imagined in the dark dust lanes in the Milky Way rather than using bright stars. Beliefs and societal uses are explored, as well as the greater effects that this may have had upon those cultures. An introduction to perceptions of dark constellations in the Milky Way is presented, along with an examination of common cultural themes and inspirations.
The “astral symbolism” of the Pala Pinta rock shelter paintings: Some methodological considerations
Luís Tirapicos, Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal
The prehistoric rock shelter of Pala Pinta, located near Alijó, north Portugal, depicts several paintings which have been interpreted, among other proposals, as solar, cometary or meteoric representations. In this talk I will address the difficult question of prehistoric rock art interpretation, focusing my attention on elements usually seen as symbols of celestial objects or phenomena. Given the diversity of possible interpretations, I will use this particular case to discuss more general methodological questions following the recent trend of rock art studies of integrating, as much as possible, all available contextual evidence – including the skyscape and a comparative analysis with other analogous cases. Being a system of visual communication rock art is also an unequivocal earlier manifestation of human cognitive awareness.
Roslyn M. Frank is Professor Emeritus in Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Iowa, USA and Treasurer of SEAC, the European Society for Astronomy in Culture. Her research areas include cultural, cognitive, and historical linguistics as well as ethnography with a special emphasis on the Basque language and culture. She has also published extensively in the areas of ethnomathematics and ethnoastronomy. Over the past twenty years her publications have brought together ethnographic and linguistic evidence pointing to the existence of an archaic European belief, namely, that humans descended from bears, a belief retained by the Basques into the 20th century and reflected in a panoply of similar European folk-beliefs, ritual performances and practices.
Fabio Silva is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Archaeology at the University of Bournemouth in Dorset, United Kingdom; and Tutor at the Sophia Center for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales. His main research interests focus on how humans perceive and conceive their environment and use that knowledge to time and adjust social, productive and magico-religious behaviors. This steered him, at large space and time scales, to the computational modelling and statistical analysis of culture-dependent dispersal dynamics, of human-environment relations and of palaeodemography; and at more regional scales to landscape and skyscape archaeology of (mostly) late prehistoric societies. He is Co-Founder and Co-Editor of the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology and Secretary of SEAC, the European Society for Astronomy in Culture.
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