Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest: Revisited Collaborations in Cultural Astronomy - Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers

For millennia humans around the world have observed and interacted with the sky, watching and marking the seasonal movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Several historic and contemporary Native American groups in the Southwest employ astronomical observations to guide their ceremonial and subsistence calendars, and over the past several decades it has become clear that such practices extend well into the past. This volume contains selected papers from the 2011 Conference on Archaeoastronomy in the American Southwest, held at the University of New Mexico. These papers have as their focus cultural astronomy - the archeological investigation of past astronomical practices as well as the study of oral history and tradition of recent and continuing astronomical practices - within the region. The volume contains chapters that discuss the history of cultural astronomy in the Southwest; prehistoric cultural astronomical systems expressed by relationships between architecture, landscape features, artifacts, and imagery in the northern Southwest; and methodology for examining possible contemporary and prehistoric astronomical features.