There’s a new edition of Four Stone Hearth live at Afarensis. He’s done a great job with it, and he’s found plenty that I’ve missed.

Also, while I’m pointing at things, Michael E Smith has a thoughtful post on agency and the problems that happen when archaeologists try talking about it. I’ve found often agent is a synonym of individual. Someone else I know suggested soul. It might sound woolly, but a lot of talk about agency is, because people don’t often define what sort of agency they’re talking about. Smith’s post shows another sort, from the political sciences, which clearly could be have applications in archaeology.

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.

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 important in the ancient world. It’s brief and rapidly turns into a paragraph on each chapter. Anyone who’s bought the book is presumably already sold on the idea that the sky was important, so brevity is not an issue. The opening chapter The Storyteller’s Sky introduces the role of the sky in ancient cosmologies. This section is heavily biased to the New World, with Mayans, Aztecs and the Navajo and the Babylonians from the Old World. The selection reflects Aveni’s expertise. The next chapter, Patterns in the Sky, opens with a personal anecdote, but the range of sources is much greater. Here Aveni’s world archaeoastronomy approach works to show the diversity of patterns seen in the night sky. As well as the Babylonians and Mayans, he also throws in many more cultures including the Egyptians, Barasana of the Amazon and the Incas. This last group is interesting because for them the patterns in the sky include spaces where the stars aren’t visible. In the Milky Way dark nebulae blot out stars, making distinctive silhouettes which the Inca recognised.

The Sailor’s Sky descibes one of my favourite artefacts, Polynesian stone canoes. They sound like something out of the Flintstones, but they’re better described as simulators. A novice naviagator would sit by the stones looking out at the horizon learning which stars rise over it. With this knowledge he’d be able to navigate across the vast distances of the Pacific ocean. There’s some discussion of Inuit navigation, but this is mainly a Polynesian chapter.

The Hunter’s Sky includes and handy guide on how to tell the time using the Plough, assuming there’s no clouds over it and you’ve forgotten your watch. This draws on Plains Indians, the G/wi of Botswana, the Mursi and Stonehenge. The inclusion of Stonehenge here is interesting. It’s a Neolithic monument, and that’s usually associated with farming. Aveni argues that Britons were semi-nomadic in this period. It’s plausible, archaeological evidence is suggesting there was plenty of movement in the landscape through to the Early Bronze Age, so seasonal use of megalithic sites would make sense.

It’s the next chapter that tackles the Farmer’s Sky. He opens by discussing Works and Days by Hesiod, which he dates to the ninth-century BC. That seems a bit early to me, I would have said it was written at a hundred years later. However, I would agree that the integration of astronomical and ecological imagery in the poem is important and points to an extensive knowledge of the sky. He uses the word ’systematic’ to describe the astronomy, but I’d be wary of saying there was a system as such. He moves on to Rujm el-Hiri, a site which I haven’t read much about after hearing it called “the Stonehenge of the Levant”. If I hear anything is called “the Stonehenge of anywhere that isn’t Stonehenge” then I become wary. Thankfully Aveni’s explanation isn’t an attempt to shoehorn a Stonehenge model onto a site, but I’ll have to read the relevant articles before I’m convinced of some of the claims. He also describes Indonesian rice farming using bamboo as a sighting tool, which was entirely new to me.

The later chapters move more towards ideology. The House, the Family and the Sky is about the organisation of domestic space, based on cosmological principles. The Navajo, Pawnee and the various tribes of the Orinoco make up much of this chapter but he also mentions the Batammaliba of Benin and Togo and Gilbert Islanders, before moving back the the Americas with the Inca. This may be one of the bigger growth areas in archaeoastronomy in the coming decades as it deals with the kind of things people do without thinking. This connects the sky with terrestrial order.

This is expanded on in The City and the Sky. The Mayan city of Teotihuacan makes an appearance, not surprisingly as Aveni has done a lot of work on pecked cross circles there. He’s also looked at the Etruscan basis for town planning, and this can be found here too. He also talks about another obvious example of celestial planning, Beijing, and the astronomical records of the Chin Shu dynasty (3rd century AD). This use of power leads neatly onto The Ruler’s Sky. The Powhatan attacks on Virginia led by Opechancanough add an interesting alternative viewpoint to the Mayan and Babylonian uses of astronomy and astrology elsewhere in the chapter. China and Babylon form the basis of the following chapter The Astrologer’s Sky, though there is also a discussion of Cheyenne shamanism and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention of India.

The Timekeeper’s Sky concentrates on just two cultures, the Romans and the Mayans. I don’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed about that. I find the Greek calendar cheerfully chaotic and worth looking at in its own right. On the other hand I’m willing to bet that if Aveni had done that, he would have come across some of the same curiosities I have. So while I’d say there’s a gap here, it’s not one I’m actually complaining about. To some extent this chapter covers similar material to the earlier hunting and farming chapters.

The final chapter of the book is The Western Sky. It’s a slightly different chapter to the others. It asks an obvious question. Given the existence of so many astronomies, why has one come to dominate science? This why question is re-visited in the Epilogue which Aveni uses to reiterate that for many people Astronomy had been something very different both in methods and aims to the modern science it is day.

As a whole, the book shows some of the limitations of a world archaeoastronomy approach. I didn’t see anything substanstial about India in the book. References to China were limited and there was nothing of Korea or Japan that I saw. To a large extent this reflects fault-lines in academia. A lot of far eastern material isn’t published in western languages. That’s not really true for India though. There’s some extremely good archaeology happening there and a large amount of historical material, including astrological texts. It works for textbooks introducing the subject, but I am wondering to what extent a World Archaeoastronomy approach can be used in research publications.

Compared with his other works, this is definitely at the shallow end but it’s not fair to dismiss it as shallow. Like the best introductory texts it leads on to other material. For instance I’ll be looking up more about Rujm el-Hiri now. If you’re looking to buy a book and you have Stairways to the Stars, then this is one to get out of the library. If you don’t have Stairways to the Stars, then this would be the better book to buy.

4SH 69 has anthro-blogging from the past fortnight at Wanna be an Anthropologist?. It includes a plug for the Open Anthropology Cooperative, which is definitely worth looking at if you’re an Anthropologist.

I missed mentioning Carnival of Space 107 last week, which means I’ll miss Carnival of Space 108 this week. You can either imagine what astronomical gems you’re missing, or I can go back and insert the link once I have it for 108.

Food History has Carnivalesque for June. It’s an Ancient/Medieval edition this month. It seems more medieval than usual this month, which suggests ancient history bloggers aren’t submitting links. Fortunately I have a sign on my desk saying “The buck went thattaway–>”, which means I can blame everyone else for that.

After forty-seven forty-eight attempts I’ve finally won When on Google Earth, which has its own Facebook group. I was tempted to put up a site that’s been puzzling me and see if someone could identify it for me, but that could so easily backfire. Instead here’s a site I know.

Update 1: Perhaps not as easy as I thought, some of these places you either know or you don’t. So you’re not stuck looking at the same picture, I’ll progressively zoom out until someone gets it.

I’ve a couple more images at 1400m and 3000m scales which I’ll upload tomorrow and the day after if no-one gets it.

The Rules of When on Google Earth are as follows:
Q: What is When on Google Earth?
A: It’s a game for archaeologists, or anybody else willing to have a go!

Q: How do you play it?
A: Simple, you try to identify the site in the picture.

Q: Who wins?
A: The first person to correctly identify the site, including its major period of occupation, wins the game.

Q: What does the winner get?
A: The winner gets bragging rights and the chance to host the next When on Google Earth on his/her own blog!

I may be busy, but not too busy to point and laugh. You’ve probably seen this story in the Examiner about the Japanese crashing an orbiter into the Moon. If you haven’t then it’s Satya Harvey complaining that scientists will be penetrating a female moon without first asking her permission. Lots of people have found it a remarkable public display of ignorance. In fact she’s elevated ignorance to an art form, because she is also clearly unaware that, in Japanese mythology, the Moon is male and the Sun is female.

If you live in the West you might think that makes the Japanese freaks. I’ve got a book, The Moon: Myth and Image by Jules Cashford, which picks up on this. The Second World War alliance between Germany and Japan was blamed (only in part I hope) on the two nations both perceiving the Moon as male. She found Laurens van der Post on one of his off-days writing: “…[S]ome ominous perversity of the aboriginal urgings of both Germans and Japanese, was rendered into a fixed and immutable masculinity.” If you’re keen to sample some perversity then you may not need to travel that far. Cashford also has an incomplete list of cultures with male lunar deities which includes, Ainu, Anatolians, Armenians, Southern Arabians, Australian Aborigines, Balts, Basques, Canaanites, Eskimos, Finns, Germans, Georgians, Greenlanders, Hindus, Hittites, Hurrians, Japanese, Lithuanians, Melanesians, Mongolians, Persians, Phrygians, Poles, New Guineans, North American Indians of British Columbia, the Machivanaga of Peru, Scandinavians, Slavs and Tartars. With the Moon being a rock, and the Sun a nuclear implosion there’s no reason to assume the genders have to be fixed one way or the other.

If you’re after a more adventerous mythology you don’t even need the Sun and Moon to be opposite genders. For example the Bororo of South America have the Sun and Moon as twin brothers who ascended from the Earth. A male Sun and Moon mythology might be useful if you want to have a cosmic example of Men going out and doing stuff while women… umm… don’t. If you want something more sophisticated, the Aztecs and the Egyptians saw the Moon as male or female or both as the mood took them.

In fact it’s the female Moon which may be odder than a male Moon. If you want opposite genders for the two bodies, a female Sun might make more sense because it drives life. The reason the Sun is male in astrology (and I assume Ms. Harvey means specifically Graeco-Roman Astrology) is because it was associated with Apollo in religion. Thanks to the Roman Empire that’s the basis for Astrology which survived in the West. Indian Astrology is somewhat different. Where does that leave the Sun’s role as a life-force? The Greeks saw the male as the source of life. The womb was where you deposited the seed to grow, the credit for the finished product belonged to the man. Did that belief come from the same root as a male Sun? I wouldn’t know; it’s possible one caused the other. In any event it would seem reasonable to ask how the gender of celestial bodies affected the way people saw the universe.

It’s the fact that scientists see the Moon as genderless that helps open up new ways of looking at the universe. We can ask new questions, find new answers and discover new mysteries which we couldn’t even just fifty years ago. In contrast Satya Harvey offers a narrow-minded and blinkered view of the moon which casually dismisses anything which doesn’t fit her own preconceptions. A universe where women are tied to 2000 year old gender roles seems a claustrophobic little place. If a Japanese probe can help smash a way out of that, I’m all for it.

And while I’m at it, I’ll crowbar a link into Steven Renshaw’s page on Japanese Astronomy.

Normally blog entries here are written days in advance, so when I have busy days things continue as usual. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been very busy, hence the lack of blogging. On the plus side I have had some help from other people who found me some time saving tools.

Mick Morrison has been reading the Google Earth EULA, like we all did before we clicked ‘accept’. He points out that the guidelines on the Google site say:

You may use Google Maps and Google Earth content including photographic imagery in brochures, marketing collateral, packaging, trade show displays/banners, newspapers, academic publications, journals, and books.

Quite reasonably he’s asking why they aren’t being used in academic publications. The answer in my case is that it didn’t occur to me that getting permission would be simple. I’ll be using the maps in my thesis now.

The other big time-savers are the applets from The Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project. What I need to do is create some diagrams like the one below showing how apparent star paths change with latitude, how the sunrises over different parts of the horizon at different times of the year, and so on. The NAAP Astronomy Labs have put together some really useful tools for this, so now I can include images like this one:

Paths of the stars over Sicily.

If you visit their site you’ll see the outputs are bigger, better quality with vector graphics and interactive so you can animate them. They’re very kindly allowing me to use prints, which will save me a lot of time and frustration with my graphics tablet.

Now all I need is some affordable way of creating circular histograms on a Mac. Suggestions are welcome.

Can you spot the Moon in this photo? Photo (cc) Andréia.

One of the reasons I’m putting up more stuff recently is that it’s a spin-off from polishing the thesis. Reasonable questions would be: What do is Social Astronomy? and Why is that Archaeoastronomy and not History of Astronomy? The answers to both questions are connected.

Social Astronomy is the study of astronomy as used for social purposes. This fits very neatly with Archaeoastronomy which these days tends also to be referred to as Cultural Astronomy. In contrast History of Astronomy, especially in the ancient world, has tended to be the story of how Astronomy in its modern sense grew from ancient practices. An example of very good History of Astronomy in an ancient context would be James Evans’s book The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy. It’s a very good book covering the mathematical basis ancient astronomy and how people got progressively more accurate at predicting the movement of the planets. I think that’s going to be a defining work on ancient astronomy for a generation, but there’s still things it misses. The quest for accuracy is the underlying narrative of a lot of ancient astronomy books. It misses the factor that people, especially the ancient Greeks, might have also wanted and aimed for inaccurate astronomy. That is an odd claim, after all isn’t astronomy a science?

Below is an example from Thucydides. To give this some context, this happened in 419 BC during the Peloponnesian War. This was the big war between Athens and the Pelopennesian League, led by Sparta at the end of the 5th century BC. At this time Athens was trying to stir up trouble by supporting some cities on the Peloponnese in their attacks against others. One ally was Argos, who wanted to attack Epidauros. The Argives sent their army to the edge of their territory ready to invade. Unfortunately for them Epidauros was an ally of Sparta. Sparta had sent its army. The Spartans didn’t leave their territory because the omens were bad, but they were ready to defend Epidauros if the Argives attacked. At this time Sparta was invincible on land. Argos could be confident of beating Epidauros, but attacking Epidauros and Sparta would be suicide. In addition Argos was up against a time-limit. The festival of the Karneia was approaching. The army had to be home for the month of Karneios; fighting during this month would be sacreligious. The armies were all stuck at the limits of their territories in a stalement, and all the Spartans had to do to defend Epidauros was wait out the month. The month would start with New Moon.

The Argives were stuck. As they watched the Moon wane, so did their hopes of victory. Eventually it was the fourth day before the end of the month and the start of Karneios. Sparta had won. There was no way the Argives could march in to Epidaurian territory, fight and get back home for the start of the month. To make sure they weren’t away from Sparta for this hugely sacred month, the Spartan army packed up and went home. This next bit comes from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War:

Upon the retreat of the Spartans the Argives marched out on the last day but three of the month before Karneios, and keeping this as the day during the whole time that they were out, invaded and plundered Epidauros. The Epidaurians summoned their allies to their aid, some of whom pleaded the month as an excuse; others came as far as the frontier of Epidauros and there remained inactive.

Thuc. 5.54.3-4

Is one of the earliest examples of sarcasm being deployed as an offensive weapon? It’s plain that everyone would have been able to see the phase of the moon. Yet each city had its own calendar, and could fix it how they liked. There’s plenty of historical evidence that extra days were inserted or cut out of the year, presumably for the timing of rituals. The Greeks knew this was mucking about with the calendar. Steve McCluskey has referred back to van der Waerden’s work on Greek inscriptions referring to dates by the civic calendar and by the moon, which could differ by twenty days. Argos was merely taking it to an extreme. Perhaps Historians of Astronomy could argue that the intent to deliberately de-couple the moon phase from the calendar means that it’s not really Astronomy, but the Argive plan could only work if they thought other cities were observing the month correctly.

Reading around makes me think there is a huge pool of material which relates to science but doesn’t fit the usual narratives of history of science waiting to be analysed. In fact a lot of scientific texts have never had English translations published. If you’re science-literate and interested in history there’s probably plenty of basic research that you can do.

The Carnival of Space 106 is now online at Next Big Future.

Mark Steel has put some of his television and radio shows online. Ancient historians might e particularly interested in the Aristotle and Hannibal shows. Though they may also wish to cover their ears when he says that Xenophobia came from Xenophon.

Finally, C.A.Hoard & Associates will be putting up information on Digital technology in archaeology shortly. Nothing as yet, but it could be worth adding to your RSS feed if Digital Humanities are your thing.

Audio and photos from my recent trip to Caerleon. It’s past of the test I did of Audioboo.

You can see the full set of Caerleon photos, which is mainly me trying out different photo settings, here.