Помоги проекту - поделись книгой:
See also:
Pilgrimage. Cacaxtla.
References and further reading
Constanza Ceruti, Marнa.
Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1999. [In Spanish.]
D’Altroy, Terence.
Reinhard, Johan.
———. “Sacred Mountains, Human Sacrifices, and Pilgrimages among the
Inca.” In John B. Carlson, ed.,
Reinhard, Johan, and Marнa Constanza Ceruti.
Catolica de Salta, 2000. [In Spanish.]
Saunders, Nicholas, ed.
The ancient Khmer civilization flowered in southeastern Asia for over five centuries. A number of interacting and competing kingdoms had existed in the area since the early centuries C.E., and both the Buddhist and Hindu religions had been widely adopted. But in C.E. 802, several of these kingdoms joined together to form a powerful state. The capital, Angkor, situated in modern Cambodia, became the center of an empire that, at its height, stretched over 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from what is now Burma in the west across Thailand and Laos to central Vietnam in the east, and a similar distance north to south, from the Khorat plateau in northern Thailand both to the tip of southern Vietnam and down the long isthmus toward the Malay peninsula. After the early fourteenth century, the Khmer empire went into decline and Angkor collapsed. However, a new capital emerged downstream. Khmer culture endured and in many respects thrived until the arrival of the Europeans and the establishment of the French Protectorate in the mid-nineteenth century.
The word
Although it is Angkor Wat’s artistic and architectural splendor that so impresses the modern visitor, many of the temples built there also expressed vital principles of cosmic harmony. Some of these expressions are obvious: the large numbers of towers pointing at heaven; the cardinal orientation of the temple precincts and
The author Graham Hancock has gone further, arguing that the entire layout of temples at Angkor had another purpose. It formed a gigantic model on the ground of the constellation Draco, just as (he and others have supposed) the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt modeled Orion’s Belt. Although this may sound like a simple extension of the idea of human constructions modeling the cosmos, it is ill conceived at a number of levels. For one thing, the idea of producing literal “maps” of the stars in the sky, as opposed to symbolic models of the gods in heaven, has no known place in Hindu beliefs and practice. In other words, this is an idea totally divorced from the social context in which it is supposed to have operated. Second, the construction of successive temples would have needed to have conformed to a very specific grand plan conceived before any of the building started and strictly adhered to by one ruler after another. Third, in order to make the orientation fit the appearance of the constellation in the sky, one has to assume that the plan was conceived around the year 10,500 B.C.E. Though it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that sacred sites might have been recognized for one reason and then retained their sacredness, it is sheer fantasy to suggest that a fixed plan could have been perpetuated for more than 11,000 years. Likewise, the idea of a “lost golden age” at such an early date flies in the face of well-established archaeological evidence from all over the world.
But how, then, does one explain the apparent fit of the temple positions with the pattern of stars in Draco? The answer is that apparently impressive matches like this can easily arise fortuitously, especially if one is prepared to be selective with the data. There are many temples at Angkor, many bright stars in the sky to choose from, and one can project the curved surface of the sky onto the flat surface of the ground in various ways. Certain temples, such as the Baphuon and Bayon, do not fit stars, and certain bright stars in the relevant part of Draco, such as Eltanin (г Dra) and Altais (д Dra), do not fit temples. Furthermore, the fit in the remainder of cases is not always impressive. It is possible to argue that there were inevitable errors in the process of identifying the correct location, multiplicities of purpose, and other difficulties in practice. But these possibilities (for which there is no direct evidence) provide no justification for selecting data arbitrarily in order to obtain more impressive fits. This is a flawed game that one plays at one’s peril.
The example of Angkor serves to show the severe dangers of seeking astronomical correlates of spatial patterns in archaeological data too keenly and taking interpretations far too far without heeding the constraint of cultural evidence. We do not need to go to such lengths to acknowledge that astronomical and cosmological symbolism was deeply engrained in this extraordinary group of monuments.
See also:
Cardinal Directions; Constellation Maps on the Ground; Methodology.
Pawnee Star Chart; Pyramids of Giza. Star Names.
References and further reading
Coe, Michael D.
Higham, Charles.
Krupp, Edwin C.
Wheatley, Paul.
Antas are a distinctive type of dolmen concentrated in the Alentejo region of central Portugal and the bordering provinces of western Spain.
A remarkable feature of the antas is their pattern of orientation. Michael Hoskin, a British historian of astronomy, surveyed 177 of them in the 1990s, using a compass and clinometer to determine their axial orientation (the direction along the axis of symmetry toward the entrance) and their astronomical potential in terms of the declination of the indicated horizon point. According to Hoskin, not a single orientation falls outside that part of the horizon on which the sun rises at some date in the year. Many different groups of later prehistoric monuments within western Europe show distinctive
haps the day on which construction commenced.
If so, then we must add a qualification. The spread of orientations does not correspond to what one would expect if these dolmens were constructed at random times in the year. If that were the case, we would expect more orientations to fall toward the two ends of the solar range (where its rising position changes less from day to day, and so it spends more days) than in the middle. The actual anta orientations, on the other hand, fall mainly toward the middle of the range. This could be explained in one of two ways. The first possibility is that they were merely oriented roughly eastwards. In this case, the fact that the most extreme orientations happen to fall close to the edges of the solar range, that is, in the solstitial directions, would be seen as purely fortuitous. The other possibility is that tombs were constructed preferentially at certain times of the year, namely spring and/or autumn. Hoskin suggests the latter, arguing that in the spring and summer the needs of agriculture or animal herding would take precedence, but if work on dolmen construction commenced in the fall, it could reliably be completed during the ensuing winter.
See also:
Solstitial Directions. Prehistoric Tombs and Temples in Europe. Declination; Solstices.
References and further reading
Belmonte, Juan Antonio, and Michael Hoskin.
Chapman, Robert.
Hoskin, Michael.
Just as the sun passes through the zenith, that is, directly overhead, twice a year as viewed from any location within the tropics, so it also passes twice a year through the point directly beneath the observer. This point is known as the antizenith or nadir. The dates of solar antizenith passage occur six months away from those of zenith passage so that, for example, the anti-zenith passage dates at a location a little way south of the Tropic of Cancer will be shortly before and after the December solstice.
The antizenith passage of the sun may seem a totally esoteric event since, unlike zenith passage, it is not directly observable. Yet some human cultures do seem to have had an interest in identifying the dates of solar antizenith passages and marking them with appropriate observances. It has been suggested, for example, that some of the pillars erected on the western horizon at the Inca capital city of Cusco were aligned upon sunset on the day of antizenith passage.
See also:
Cusco Sun Pillars. Zenith Passage of the Sun.
References and further reading
Aveni, Anthony F.
———.
Archaeoastronomy is best defined as the study of beliefs and practices concerning the sky in the past, and especially in prehistory, and the uses to which people’s knowledge of the skies were put. It can be misleading to think of archaeoastronomy as the study of ancient astronomy, since people in the past might have related to the sky in very different ways from people in the modern Western world. For this reason many people prefer to avoid the word
There have been scientific investigations of the possible astronomical significance of spectacular ancient monuments ever since the later nineteenth century—in the work of Sir Norman Lockyer and Alexander Thom, for example. However, the term
By that time, archaeoastronomy had already expanded beyond the mere study of monumental alignments. This development was led from the Americas in the 1970s, particularly by studies of astronomy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. These studies leaned heavily upon ethnohistorical evidence—the writings of chroniclers in the early years after European contact and conquest—and also, at least in the case of the Maya, upon written evidence in the form of native “books,” most notably the Dresden Codex. Alignment studies formed an important part of the new integrated approach to studying Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy but did not drive it. On the other hand, European and especially British archaeoastronomers in the 1970s were largely obsessed with archaeological and statistical reappraisals of Alexander Thom’s work and were busy developing formal fieldwork procedures and quantitative techniques for resolving the huge controversy surrounding Thom’s conclusions. The American archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni would later come to characterize these two contrasting approaches within archaeoastronomy as “brown” and “green,” after the colors of the covers of the two volumes (
Archaeoastronomers, then, are prepared to consider a range of types of evidence—not simply archaeological—and they certainly do not restrict themselves to alignments of monuments. In this sense the word
Why was archaeoastronomy so controversial in its formative days in the 1960s and 1970s? Partly because Thom’s own interpretations, though based upon high-quality surveys of many hundreds of British megalithic sites and supported by rigorous statistical analysis, struck most archaeologists as clear examples of ethnocentrism. In seeing prehistoric Britain as populated by “megalithic man” whom he described as “a competent engineer with an extensive knowledge of practical geometry,” Thom was merely seeing his own reflection in the past, the skeptics claimed. In like manner, they pointed out, several prominent astronomers were seeing their own reflections when they described Stonehenge as a sophisticated observatory and eclipse predictor. But there was also a deeper reason. In the 1970s, most archaeologists in the forefront of theoretical developments were trying to describe the actions of human communities in prehistory and the processes of social change in terms of human responses to ecological or environmental constraints. These “processual archaeologists” saw no reason why prehistoric people would have bothered incorporating astronomical alignments into communal monuments.
In the decades that followed, both archaeoastronomy and theoretical archaeology moved forward. Archaeoastronomy ceased to be dominated by astronomers and began to incorporate more archaeologists and anthropologists. This would, at the very least, help to avoid naive pitfalls such as ethnocentrism. As a result, archaeoastronomy began to lose its cavalier attitude toward the body of theory that had been developed (and was continuing to develop) within archaeology and anthropology for interpreting the actions of any past community from what we can find in their material remains. At the same time, the so-called “post-processual” revolution was taking place in theoretical archaeology. A new generation of archaeologists was beginning to confront issues such as cognition. What was going on in people’s minds, claimed these interpretative archaeologists, was just as vital in determining people’s actions in the past as any environmental constraints. Put another way, how a group of people viewed the world— their cosmology—was just as important in determining their actions as what a modern archaeologist might consider “rational” considerations. This conclusion was supported by numerous case studies from modern indigenous communities such as the Hopi and Pawnee in North America. To speak of “rational” behavior is itself ethnocentric, since what we consider rational is a product of our own worldview.
Why are archaeoastronomy (and ethnoastronomy) worth doing? If we want to understand more about why certain human communities did what they did in the past, then we need to try to understand aspects of their cosmologies—the ways in which they perceived the world. Astronomy is an essential part of nearly every cosmology, because all human communities have a sky, and the sky and the objects in it form an integral part of the perceived world. The objects in the night sky are immutable, regular, reliable, predictable; for communities who did not live inside brightly lit buildings and whose skies were not polluted by modern city lights, they were there for people to watch and contemplate night after night, season after season. They become imbued with meaning.
But what different groups of people perceive as important in the sky, and what significance they ascribe to it, is highly culture-dependent. Two good examples that illustrate this in different ways are the calendar of the Borana of Ethiopia, and the emu “dark cloud constellation” recognized by certain Aboriginal groups in Australia. Nevertheless, people generally try to keep their actions in harmony with the cosmos as they perceive it, which may be the reason many prehistoric monuments were deliberately aligned with objects in the wider landscape, including objects in the sky. Recognizing associations that certain human communities considered important can help us understand something of the worldviews that gave rise to them.
The advantage that the sky holds for us in trying to spot such associations is that it forms a part of the ancient environment that is directly accessible to us, unlike the terrestrial landscape, which is often transitory. We can use modern astronomy to reconstruct, with considerable accuracy, the appearance of the night sky at any place and time, including the motions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets. And this capability offers a considerable advantage, whether we are concerned with myths and beliefs relating to the sky, monumental alignments upon celestial objects, or other kinds of evidence.
See also:
Astro-Archaeology; “Brown” Archaeoastronomy; Cosmology; Ethnoastronomy; Ethnocentrism; “Green” Archaeoastronomy; Lockyer, Sir Norman (1836–1920); Methodology; Thom, Alexander (1894–1985).
Borana Calendar; Dresden Codex; Emu in the Sky; Hopi Calendar and Worldview; Misminay; Pawnee Cosmology; Stonehenge.
References and further reading
One of the criticisms of archaeoastronomy is that archaeoastronomers who investigate the reasons why ancient buildings and monuments were situated and oriented as they are often seem concerned only with the possibility that the main influencing factors were astronomical. But many different considerations, some quite unrelated to astronomy, can determine the orientation of a monument. One possibility is alignment based on prominent topographic features in the surrounding landscape. Accordingly, the term
See also:
Поделиться книгой: