Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy

by Mark Hollabaugh

Many years ago I read astronomer John Eddy’s National Geographic article about the Wyoming Medicine Wheel. A few years later I visited this archaeological site in the Bighorn Mountains and started on the major preoccupation of my career.

Archaeoastronomy combines astronomy and archaeology. You may be familiar with sites such as Stonehenge or the Mayan ruins of the Yucatán. You may not know that there are many archaeological sites in the United States that demonstrate the remarkable understanding a people, usually known as the Anasazi, had about celestial motions (see Figure 2-1). Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep, and Chimney Rock in the Four Corners area of the Southwest preserve ruins from this ancient Pueblo culture.

Moonrise at Chimney Rock in southern Colorado provides a good example of the Anasazi’s knowledge of the lunar cycles. If you watched the rising of the Moon for many, many years, you would discover that the Moon’s northernmost rising point undergoes an 18.6-year cycle. Dr. McKim Malville of the University of Colorado discovered that the Anasazi who lived there knew of the lunar standstill cycle and watched the northernmost rising of the Moon between the twin rock pillars of Chimney Rock.

My own specialty is the ethnoastronomy of the Lakota, or Teton Sioux, who flourished on the Great Plains of what are now Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Wyoming. Ethnoastronomy combines ethnography with astronomy. As an ethnoastronomer, I am less concerned with physical evidence in the form of ruins and more interested in myths, legends, religious belief, and current practices. In my quest to understand the astronomical thinking and customs of the nineteenth-century Lakota, I have traveled to museums, archives, and libraries in Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota. I frequently visit the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota. The Lakota, and other Plains Indians, had a rich tradition of understanding celestial motions and developed an even richer explanation of why things appear the way they do in the sky.

My first professional contribution to ethnoastronomy was in 1996 at the Fifth Oxford International Conference on Astronomy in Culture held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had noticed that images of eclipses often appeared in Lakota winter counts—their method of making a historic record of events. The great Leonid meteor shower of 1833 appears in almost every Plains Indian winter count. As I looked at the hides or in ledger books recording these winter counts, I wondered why the Sun, the Moon, and the stars are so common among the Lakota of 150 years ago. My curiosity led me to look deeper: What did the Lakota think about eclipses? Why does their central ritual, the Sun Dance, focus on the Sun? Why do so many legends involve the stars?

The Lakota observed lunar and solar eclipses. Perhaps they felt they had the power to restore the eclipsed Sun or Moon. In August 1869, an Indian agency physician in South Dakota told the Lakota there would be an eclipse. When the Sun disappeared from view, the Lakota began firing their guns in the air. In their minds, they were more powerful than the white doctor because the result of their action was to restore the Sun.

The Lakota used a lunar calendar. Their names for the months came from the world around them. October was the moon of falling leaves. In some years, there actually are 13 new moons, and they often called this extra month the “Lost Moon.” The lunar calendar often dictated the timing of their sacred rites. Although the Lakota were never dogmatic about it, they preferred to hold their most important ceremony, the Sun Dance, at the time of the full moon in June, which is when the summer solstice occurs.

Why did the Lakota pay attention to the night sky? Lakota elder Ringing Shield’s statement about Polaris, recorded in the late nineteenth century, provides a clue: “One star never moves and it is wakan. Other stars move in a circle about it. They are dancing in the dance circle.” For the Lakota, a driving force in their culture was a quest to understand the nature of the sacred, or wakan. Anything hard to understand or different from the ordinary was wakan.

Reaching for the stars, as far away as they are, was a means for the Lakota to bring the incomprehensible universe a bit closer to Earth. Their goal was the same as what Dr. Sandra M. Faber says in her essay “Why Astronomy?” at the end of Chapter 1, “a perspective on human existence and its relation to the cosmos.”