Modern folk calendars and associated traditions that still exist in many parts of the world, particularly in rural communities, often preserve an inherently holistic worldview, integrating earth and sky in a mixture of what the modern scientist would be inclined to view as rationality and superstition. In the Baltic States of Latvia and Lithuania, for instance, a mixture of prognostications survives that relate people’s character, health, and happiness to the phase of the moon at the time of their birth and at important moments in their lives. This Baltic tradition leads to a related issue: the role of ASTROLOGY. The history of astronomy is clearly intimately bound up with the history of astrology; the distinction between the two is only an issue in the context of the modern scientific way of understanding the world. Taking an anthropological viewpoint, we must realize that systems of thought including beliefs that we might describe as “astrological” may themselves constitute ways of understanding the world that are perfectly coherent and logical in their own terms. Thus by considering the biblical skies from the point of view of the astrologers of the time, rather than simply as modern astronomers, a very plausible solution has recently been suggested to the riddle of the identity of the STAR OF BETHLEHEM, which has perplexed astronomers for years.
Ancient peoples generally did not share the modern conception of time as an abstract entity, as a line along which we move through our lives (see SPACE AND TIME, ANCIENT PERCEPTIONS OF). The earliest calendars almost certainly did not come into being as a result of simply conceived astronomical observations undertaken in order to mark the passage of abstract time. They emerged in the context of complex views of the universe in which many aspects of natural and human activity were seen as tied together in fundamental ways. This concept is of vital importance when we try to interpret archaeological monuments that appear to have incorporated alignments marking sunrise or sunset on particular calendrical dates. A fundamental question is: Which regular astronomical events might have been significant to people in the past? Alongside the SOLSTICES, the EQUINOXES are widely assumed to have had inherent significance, yet many investigators have been surprised to discover the absence of equinoctial markers in the culture they are studying. From the point of view of the observers themselves, however, there is a clear difference between the two. The solstices are tangible: at these times, the sun reaches the physical extremes of its motions along the horizon. The SOLSTITIAL DIRECTIONS mark the boundary between those parts of the horizon where the sun can rise or set, only passes over, or is never seen. These define a natural division of the world, as seen from any central point of observation, into four parts. The equinoxes, on the other hand, would in practice only have been observable as halfway points between the solstices. They would generally have been no more likely than any other date in the year to be correlated with any of the other seasonal events that would actually have meant something to people. The midpoint, whether in time or space, seems significant only if one views time and space in the abstract. This is not to deny that particular groups of people in the past may have chosen to divide the year into four roughly equal divisions, but we can not simply assume that the equinox was a significant calendrical date for all.
Interpreting the Archaeological Record
As we have seen, astronomy helps us learn how the cosmos was perceived and understood in the past based on evidence we can retrieve from the material record. The “raw resource” is directly accessible to us: within certain boundaries of error we can reconstruct the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets in the night sky at any place and any time in the past. This means that we can readily identify ways in which ancient architecture could have made reference to celestial objects and events. But we must retain a sense of proportion. The astronomical ORIENTATION of a monument, to take an example, might only have conveyed meaning to a few people around the time of its construction, whereas the monument would also have been significant to people in many other ways, communicating meaning by way of its form, the materials used, and other aspects of its location.
In recent years archaeologists have applied a variety of interpretative approaches to the study of how people in the past conceptualized the LANDSCAPE. Yet landscape itself is a limiting if not excluding term. Its use reinforces a Western conceptualization of space that divides the world into three distinct parts—land, sea, and sky—and then, more often than not, leads us to ignore two out of three of these. Contrast this concept of landscape with that of the indigenous person who would, without hesitation, identify numerous connections between objects and events in the sky and many other aspects of his or her experience. In dealing with past as well as modern indigenous societies, the term worldview should mean exactly that: a people’s understanding of the totality of the perceived environment.
The evidence available to the archaeologist consists of a present-day landscape containing scattered traces of past human activity, the end result of centuries—even millennia—of processes of attrition that have served to modify and to destroy. Archaeologists can look at the remains of permanent structures such as houses, tombs, and temples, and examine their location as well as architectural features that seem to express associations with features in the visible landscape and objects in the sky. Other human activities leave traces that are fixed in space, such as rock art (see PRESA DE LA MULA; SWEDISH ROCK ART). Beyond this are numerous types of material evidence, such as small artifacts, which are not fixed in space but may still tell us a great deal in various ways.
A well-tried approach is to try to identify alignments that were deliberately incorporated in architecture or in the location of manmade structures in relation to other prominent features in the landscape. The latter approach has been successful in central Mexico, where the day of sunrise or sunset behind prominent mountains as viewed from certain pyramids and palaces has been found to correlate with calendrical ceremonies performed in sanctuaries built on those mountains. The hilltop palace of CACAXTLA, built in what is now the Mexican state of Tlaxcala in the seventh century C.E., was located directly on a preexisting alignment connecting an older ceremonial site with La Malinche, a prominent volcanic peak still important today as a source of rain and symbol of fertility. The times in the year when the sun rose behind this mountain from Cacaxtla and other temples in the alignment marked two important calendrical festivals and times of ritual pilgrimage. The observances survive, in the form of Christian festivals, to this day.
In this instance ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence confirms the meaning of symbolic alignments. Where such evidence does not exist, identifying meaningful alignments is much more problematic. Clearly, it is possible to identify alignments between manmade structures and natural features that are in fact totally fortuitous and had no meaning whatsoever to anyone in the past. One possibility is to look for (what seem to us to have been) the most prominent man-made and natural features in the landscape in order to examine possible alignments of significance between them. But even this may be misleading. Mursi sun watchers stand by a favorite boulder or tree to make observations rather than erecting a more permanent marker that would be evident in the archaeological record of the future. Many important dates in the Hopi solar horizon calendar are marked by tiny, inconspicuous skyline notches, while many more conspicuous horizon features are unused. Furthermore, there is generally no obvious natural feature (such as a prominent notch or peak) in the solstitial directions, important as these actually were and are to the Hopi. The reason is that traditional Hopi villages from which observations were made were not located with regard to astronomy and calendrics. Walpi, for example, is perched on a narrow cliff-top mesa: its inhabitants had a given horizon and could not move their position of observation except within very narrow margins in and around the village. They did make precise horizon observations, but this fact would not be recoverable from the archaeological record alone. Any future archaeologist proposing that these particular alignments were significant would be open to the accusation of being highly selective with the data.