December 2016
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272 Reads
Landscape archaeology opened up new avenues for archaeologists to understand how the environment that societies inhabit determines their interactions with their surroundings, creating part of an interwoven relationship with the world. The land itself regulates subsistence and economic possibilities and its contours and rivers determine routes and the location of meeting places, festivals and ritual centres. Above the land and its horizon lies the celestial sphere, that great dome of the sky which governs light and darkness, critical to life itself, yet its influence is often neglected in the archaeological narrative. This neglect is, at least partially, because the average westerner today is disengaged from the sky: people notice whether the sun is shining, or whether the days are getting longer or shorter but few will know, for example, what phase the moon is on a given day, or that the sun does not rise due East every day. The scientific field of modern astronomy has helped further disassociate the sky from the common westerner by focusing on the deep sky, which is inaccessible without abstract conceptual frameworks, such as advanced mathematics, and the technological developments of the Space Age. This disengagement with the immediacy of the sky has been projected onto the past cultures that are the purview of the archaeologist. However, as the historical and ethnographic records attest, this ignorance of the sky is a symptom of modern western culture, not a universal. In fact, if one were to reverse the argument and claim that " There is no human society that does not somehow, in some way, relate its fears, concerns, hopes, and wishes to the sky " (Campion 2012, 1) one would be closer to the truth. As Darvill said (2015, 147), " the sky was an important domain that archaeology needs to understand better ". In order to understand the role and importance of the skyscape for the cultures we study, past or present, we first need to re-engage with the sky ourselves. Only through looking at the sky with phenomenological eyes, without any need for conceptual abstractions nor a scientific take on reality, can we realize how simple it would have been for any non-modern to connect with it. Engaging with the skyscape is an embodied, lived, experience and, as such, it is available to everyone. One only has to step outside the urban sprawls and their light pollution and look up to understand this. An even better sense of what pre-modern peoples would have experienced is provided by the Dark Sky reserves that are now protected areas in the western hemisphere. But, even there, the sky is not exactly the same: like the landscape, with its changing vegetation cover over millennia, so too the skyscape changes. However, while it is difficult to reconstruct past landscapes as changes are dictated by the complex interweaving of geography, environment and climate, modern tools can accurately reconstruct, and therefore help the scholar visualize, the palaeo-skies that a pre-modern would have seen. This session will focus on how different cultures have visualized, and therefore engaged with, their skyscapes: whether via artistic or symbolic representations, ritual, mythology, structural alignments or other architectural features. It will also feature modern visualization techniques for skyscape archaeology – such as the use of 3D modelling, non-invasive surveys, Geographical Information Systems and planetarium software – that allow archaeologists to (re-)engage with the sky and, in conjunction with traditional archaeological research, obtain a more complete and nuanced understanding of the societies being studied.