FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

What the Hell Is an Archaeoastronomer? (And How to Become One)

Put astronomy, archaeology, and anthropology in a blender, add a lunatic fringe, and enjoy responsibly.
Stonehenge at sunset. Image: Solipsist.

We live in a world of rockets, telescopes, and deep space probes. We’ve seen pictures of our planet as a pale blue dot in the distance, and we’ve sent robotic emissaries into the interstellar medium (kind of, maybe). Sure, more mysteries remain unsolved than resolved, but in 2014, most people are on the same page about the Earth being spherical, stars being nuclear fusion factories, and space being ridiculously big.

But for the majority of humanity’s tenure on Earth, outer space has been a pervasive question mark, an itch that couldn’t be adequately scratched. The tantalizing patterns of celestial motion cultivated our curiosity, and shaped our identity as grandiose problem-solvers. Take, for example, the nameless Aurignacian stranger who carved a representation of the constellation Orion onto a mammoth tusk about 32,500 years ago. What did he/she think the constellation was? Why the compulsion to have a permanent record of it?

Advertisement

These are the kinds of questions that the fledgling field of archaeoastronomy was made to answer. The field is a hodgepodge, interdisciplinary attempt to understand how ancient cultures interacted with the sky and space. People have been pondering these questions for centuries, but an umbrella term for it wasn’t coined until 1973, in a paper by historian Elizabeth Chesley Baity.

The term actually doesn’t fully capture the range of research done under the banner of archaeoastronomy. Naturally, astronomy and archaeology are major tent poles for the field, but plenty of anthropologists, historians, ethnologists, statisticians, and other specialists bring their own unique angles to the enterprise.

Indeed, archaeoastromy’s inherent appeal has attracted perhaps too much diversity of opinion. Professor Clive Ruggles described it as a “field with academic work of high quality at one end but uncontrolled speculation bordering on lunacy at the other.” And Ruggles should know, because he is a strong contender for the title of World’s Leading Archaeoastronomy. (Incidentally, if you happen to be near the Rollright Stones in the United Kingdom this Saturday, July 26, you should check out Ruggles’ presentation on them).

The Rollright Stones. Image: Dennis Turner.

Not counting the lunatic fringe (ie. the Ancient Aliens crowd), the main division in the field is between “green” and “brown” methodologies. The green camp focuses on the nascent scientific side of monuments and artifacts. Pioneered by the Scottish engineer Alexander Thom, this subfield relies solely on statistical analysis of sites, with the aim of discovering whether cultures purposefully noted astronomical events, or whether people were just randomly erecting stones out of boredom.

Brown archaeoastronomy, on the other hand, is much more anthropologically driven. Instead of gauging the relative astronomical sophistication of a culture, brown archaeoastronomists ask why monuments were built—what ritual purposes the structures may have had, and how the monuments fit into other historical and archaeological findings.

Advertisement

It should be no shocker that brown archaeoastronomists are the bigger camp, because few things are more fun than pondering the reason why long-dead cultures built the weird crap they did.

At this point, I’m hoping you’re interested in leaving your day job to pursue a career in the field, so you may as well lock down a specialty region now. You might be tempted to pick Stonehenge, since it inspired the birth of archaeoastronomy more than any other monument. But Stonehenge is so overplayed these days, plus it’s always packed with Neo-Druids.

The ancient Maya city of Uxmal is a great site for anyone eager to marry green and brown archaeoastronomy. The Palace of the Governor, built somewhere between the years 600-800, is aligned to a very particular southern rising of Venus that occurs every eight years. It could be shrugged off as a coincidence, except for the fact that the structure literally has Venus written all over it in glyphs, suggesting a ritual preference for our sister planet over other celestial objects.

You could also go for or the El Castillo pyramid in the Yucatán, which is built to cast a snakelike shadow on the the temple steps at the equinoxes. Or, Cheomseongdae, an astronomical observatory in Korea built by a seventh century brainiac queen. Or, Namoratunga, a third century BCE collection of pillars that track both the lunar calendar and seven constellations.

Honestly, you really can’t go wrong when selecting archaeoastronomical sites. Any structure built by ancient peoples to better understand space is bound to be bizarre, fascinating, and beautiful all at once. So give your two weeks notice, find your special monument, and dream big, because you could be the next Clive Ruggles.