In summary, where we have only archaeological evidence to go on, it may be possible to gain insights into prehistoric worldviews by recognizing symbolic as-sociations in the material record. Analogy may be useful in the process of interpretation, but our conclusions will never be categorical. We can only ever have a certain degree of belief that a specific association had meaning to a particular group of people, although our belief may be strengthened or weakened by further evidence.
From Tally Marks to Calendars
How did people begin to make links between different cycles of activity they observed around them and hence begin to understand and control the periodic changes in the natural world as they perceived it? At what stage did they start consciously to plan their own actions in accordance with those perceptions?
Groups of people from the earliest times would certainly have varied their subsistence activities in accordance with the seasons, whether these involved searching for edible plants and animals, fishing, or hunting. But in this alone they were little different from many others in the animal kingdom: many birds, after all, undertake seasonal migrations. Two characteristics that have distinguished humankind for several tens of thousands of years are people’s capacity for abstract thought—making connections between things in order to satisfy the desire to make sense of them—and the use of symbolic representation to express ideas. There is ample evidence of the latter in the Upper Palaeolithic, in the form of systematic markings on many small portable objects such as pieces of bone. Their meaning is much debated, but it has been suggested that some at least represented rudimentary lunar calendars—tallies of days or some other sort of symbolic notation relating to the lunar phase cycle. The most famous example is a fragment of eagle’s wing found in a cave at Abri Blanchard in southern France, dating to around 30,000 B.C.E. (see ABRI BLANCHARD BONE). Some much more recent, and less controversial, examples of possible lunar tallies among hunter-gatherers are found in rock art from northeastern Mexico. The site of PRESA DE LA MULA, near Monterrey, is one of two petroglyphs that seem to record counts of days stretching over seven synodic (lunar-phase-cycle) months, divided up according to the appearance of the moon. However, these designs were not calendars: they were clearly not intended for regulating future activities. Rather, they were first-hand observational records, with all the vagaries and imperfections this implies.
Counting days, as such, is unlikely to have been an overriding issue for most people in the past. They had to be aware of many different cycles of activity in their lives. One of the most effective ways of keeping track of things is through myth and appropriately timed ritual performance. These were invariably tied in, along with many aspects of living and being, with the unchanging entities in the sky and the ceaseless cycles in which they were seen to move. Stories help describe the world and explain why things are as they are. Ceremonies serve in a very active way to affirm the natural order. Stories and ceremonies also involve an ele-ment of control, in that their successful performance, with adherence to strict protocols, is often seen as necessary—even vital—in order to ensure continuity, renewal, and growth. The appropriate rituals may ensure the arrival of the sun on a given morning, or bring about the reversal of the sun’s winterward movement so that it will return and give greater warmth again each spring. Whether performed by a lone shaman, by whole communities working in unison, or by a powerful priest with the active participation of a controlling elite, rituals, ceremonies, and other performances can ensure that the order of the cosmos, and of the lives of the people within it, is duly maintained. The Blessingway and other sacred rites of the Navajo people are just one example of performances of this kind recorded in modern times and, in some cases, continuing to the present day, both among native Americans and among indigenous peoples around the world. The Blessingway ceremony serves to ensure good health, prosperity, and so on by preventing misfortune, and involves detailed renditions of the Navajo creation story (see NAVAJO COSMOLOGY).
What may be an extremely old tradition of myths and performances relates to the identification of two bears circling around the northern celestial pole. The evidence to support this assertion, paradoxically, is found in modern oral traditions across Europe. In the Basque country, the bears’ motions around the celestial pole are linked to an annual cycle of storytelling and song and dance performances involving whole communities. Other variants are found throughout Europe. Constellation myths within the framework of Greek and Near Eastern thought form an integral part of the modern Western heritage, but the prevalence of indigenous bear myths suggests that two circumpolar bears are star figures emanating from much older cosmological traditions (see SKY BEARS).
In the 1969 book Hamlet’s Mill, Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend suggested that specific astronomical knowledge—namely the gradual shifting of the entire mantle of stars over the centuries due to a phenomenon known as PRECESSION—had been systematically “encoded” in mythological narratives all over the world over a period of many millennia. There are various problems with the evidence presented in support of this idea, but there is also a fundamental difficulty with the idea itself. It presupposes an almost universal concern in ancient times with a particular concept (precession) familiar to ourselves. This is very different from arguing that some communities in certain places and times might have had stable enough cosmologies—sky knowledge passed down accurately enough over several generations—to have noticed the gradually changing appearance of the sky and attempted to come to terms with it in one way or another.
The point about the sky bears, on the other hand, is that we may be glimpsing an ancient framework of understanding very different from the Western one. According to the American linguist Roslyn Frank, who has investigated the relevant European folk traditions in detail, it was a framework in which earthly bears were venerated. She argues that a human individual playing the role of a bear shaman acted to maintain the cosmic order, organizing the cycle of earthly ceremonial in tune with the annual cycles of the stars. If Frank is right, then we should not look back to some sort of universal, all-prevailing myth or cosmology, diluted with time, but rather to one that always coexisted with many others. One would have to argue that it achieved particular prevalence at high northern latitudes because it brought together what was seen on earth and in the sky in a particularly effective and understandable way; thus it tended to propagate, encountering and mixing with other traditions, and eventually leaving traces visible in folk traditions to this very day.
Another way in which a people can affirm the perceived cosmic order is by carefully timed movement through the landscape. The Lakota people of South Dakota, for example, traditionally keep their subsistence activities in tune with other seasonal cycles by moving from one place to another in an annual pattern that, as they see it, reflects the sun’s movement through the constellations (see LAKOTA SACRED GEOGRAPHY). Their annual round combines subsistence activities focused upon the terrestrial movements of the buffalo, with sacred rites focused upon the celestial movements of the sun. In doing so, it ties together earth, sky, and people into a comprehensible whole, thereby keeping everything in harmony. The Mursi of Ethiopia perceive a direct connection between the successive disappearance of four bright stars in the southern sky and events on the ground related to successive floods of the river Omo. This enables them to time their annual migration to the banks of the Omo precisely enough to carry out the vital planting of their crop of cowpeas within a few days of the river’s final flood.