There is no reason investigations of people’s perceptions of the skies should be limited to past societies, and a field known as ETHNOASTRONOMY has emerged in recent years alongside archaeoastronomy, concerned with studies of beliefs and practices relating to the sky among modern indigenous peoples. Since there is no hard line between past and present, many scholars prefer to merge the two fields and to speak instead of cultural astronomy. Regardless of how the subject is divided up, the study of people’s perceptions of the skies has a deep resonance and helps us appreciate the richness and diversity of human cognition and belief (see COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY).
This said, our knowledge of particular practices is always indirect, whether the evidence we are working with is ethnographic, historical, or archaeological, and questions of METHODOLOGY are highly important. For example, when studying an astronomical alignment (such as a building or temple oriented upon solstitial sunrise) it is necessary to have reasonable confidence that the alignment was actually intentional. This is not self-evident, since everything must, after all, point somewhere. In the 1970s, an abyss developed between two groups of academics regarding the interpretation of British megalithic monuments (see MEGALITHIC MONUMENTS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND). On the one side were those who paid great attention to STATISTICAL ANALYSIS but little to anthropological theory and tended to argue that “MEGALITHIC ASTRONOMY” was highly mathematically sophisticated. On the other were those who did the reverse and reached the diametrically opposite conclusion: that ancient peoples had no interest in the sky at all.
To get past this impasse, it is important to distinguish between “our” science, which provides tried and tested methods for fairly selecting and assessing evidence, and “their” science, the worldview (ancient, historical, or indigenous) we are interested in (see PALAEOSCIENCE; SCIENCE OR SYMBOLISM?). Those who are mathematically adept but anthropologically naive tend to try to show, in a proprietary way, that people in the past were our intellectual equals by demonstrating that they were capable of sophisticated mathematics and astronomy. The flaw, and also the irony, in this approach lies in the desire to measure the achievements of a past society against the yardstick of our own. This tendency, well known to anthropologists as ETHNOCENTRISM, amounts to putting our own culture on a pedestal. It is necessary to recognize that the worldview we are studying might well be logical enough in its own terms even though it does not conform in every respect to our rationality, since it is built upon different assumptions and principles. A few thousand years is nothing in human evolutionary terms, and thus people living a few thousand years ago were undoubtedly our intellectual equals: however, their way of thinking was different. We pay respect to that difference by trying to understand their way of thinking in its own terms rather than trying to make it conform to ours. It is for this reason that many prefer to avoid using the singular term astronomy to describe ancient peoples’ interest in the skies, speaking instead, if they use the term at all, of ancient astronomies.
All people develop a personal view of the world. It is influenced by their own memories and experiences in which any things that may be perceived—objects, places, events, people and their actions, other living creatures, and plants—can acquire particular meanings, as can the relationships perceived to exist between them. What is more, among the countless things that make up an individual’s experience, some come to acquire more significance than others, in a selection process that can seem, to an outsider, highly arbitrary. A “discovery” that seems important to one person may be entirely overlooked or simply of no interest to another. Thus one of the Mursi, a modern group of cultivators and herders living in southwestern Ethiopia, determined the number of days that had elapsed between the planting and first harvesting of his sorghum crop by wearing a cord round his ankle and tying a new knot in it each day. However, those to whom he proudly announced the result were mildly surprised that anyone should have taken so much trouble to deduce something so irrelevant to their daily lives— something that added nothing to their total stock of knowledge about the world.
Groups of people living together do, however, tend to develop common mindsets—sets of common perceptions and understandings. These worldviews are reinforced by shared experiences and social convention, and by regular communication, which in small groups is likely to take place by means of a common language. In the framework of modern Western thought, we organize what we perceive in nature according to the principles of Linnaean classification (deriving from the work of the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus)— that is, into a hierarchical structure of groups (taxa) based upon their observable characteristics. We also tend to believe that the universe is an empirical reality existing independently of the human mind that can progressively be understood through rational argument and scientific experimentation. Other worldviews, however, do not generally classify objects and phenomena into taxa familiar from a Western viewpoint: categories and relationships are not determined by “objective” criteria but simply by whether enough people agree on them. As a result there is generally no clear distinction between the sacred and the mundane, the animate and the inanimate, the empirically real and the fantastic; nor indeed between the terrestrial and the celestial. In traditional cultures, creatures such as fish-man or bird-woman may be seen as fellow beings, every bit as much a part of the perceived universe as entities a Westerner would identify as physically real. As an example, Old Star, chief protector of the inhabitants of the sacred He world of the Barasana of the Colombian Amazon, is at once a short trumpet, a constellation corresponding to ORION, the fierce thunder jaguar, and a human warrior.
The sky is a crucial component in practically every indigenous worldview. For earlier peoples and for many indigenous groups around the world today, what we in the modern Western world separate out and categorize as astronomical and meteorological phenomena were an integral part of the environment as a whole. This total environment, including things both real and imagined, was the cosmos; the words COSMOLOGY (as widely used in anthropological literature) and cosmovisiуn are broadly synonymous with worldview. In non-Western worldviews, direct associations between the terrestrial and the celestial are commonplace. A good example of this is the BARASANA “CATERPILLAR JAGUAR” CONSTELLATION, whose behavior is believed to relate directly to that of earthly caterpillars, which fall out of trees and provide an important food source at a certain time of the year.