Related papers: Stories from the Sky: Astronomy in Indigenous Know…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Cultural Astronomy sits at the intersection of our study of the universe and the human experience, exploring how we observe the stars, interpret their motions, and incorporate them into our perspectives of the nature of reality. "Astronomy…
From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a "path of progress" in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many "indigenous cosmologies" that still exist…
Australian Indigenous astronomical traditions hint at a relationship between animals in the skyworld and the behaviour patterns of their terrestrial counterparts. In our continued study of Aboriginal astronomical traditions from the Great…
Recent observations of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) at radio frequencies have proved to be a powerful tool for probing the solar environment from the ground. But how far back does this tradition really extend? Our survey of the…
Cultural Astronomy is interdisciplinary connecting the arts, humanities, social & physical sciences. Data collection methods and theories are used from many disciplines and meld with methods and theories within cultural astronomy. The…
Astronomy is at a turning point in its history and in its relations with the Indigenous peoples who are the generational stewards of land where several of our main observatories are located. The controversy regarding the further development…
In D(L)akota star knowledge, the Sun is known as Wi and the Moon is Han-Wi. They have an important relationship, husband and wife. The pattern of their ever-changing relationship is mirrored in the motions of Sun and Moon as seen from our…
We show that many ancient Indian mythological legends are really allegorical depictions of astronomical and other physical phenomena of which the composers had a good idea. This detail enables us to also use techniques of astronomical…
Astrobiology or exobiology is a relatively new area of science that investigates the possibilities of finding life in other places in the universe. This not only includes the exploration of planets near or distant to Earth, but also the…
The work is divided into three sections: the first one describes the historical evolution of the main arguments presented about the plurality of inhabited worlds, from the presocratics to the birth of modern science. The second section…
Astronomy began as a visual science, first through careful observations of the sky using either an eyepiece or the naked eye, then on to the preservation of those images with photographic media and finally the digital encoding of that…
Whilst camped at Ooldea, South Australia, between 1919 and 1935, the amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates CBE (1859-1951) recorded the daily lives, lore, and oral traditions of the Aboriginal people of the Great Victoria Desert region…
Early ethnographers and missionaries recorded Aboriginal languages and oral traditions across Australia. Their general lack of astronomical training resulted in misidentifications, transcription errors, and omissions in these records.…
Astrobiology is the field of science devoted to searching for life elsewhere in the Universe. It is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating results from multiple fields of science, and in this respect has strong synergies with 'big…
Astrobiology, the study of life as a planetary phenomenon, aims to understand the fundamental nature of life on earth and the possibility of life elsewhere. To achieve this goal, astrobiologists have initiated unprecedented communication…
Song and dance are a traditional means of strengthening culture and passing knowledge to successive generations in the Torres Strait of northeastern Australia. Dances incorporate a range of apparatuses to enhance the performance, such as…
Of the hundreds of distinct Aboriginal cultures of Australia, many have oral traditions rich in descriptions and explanations of comets, meteors, meteorites, airbursts, impact events, and impact craters. These views generally attribute…
The Mayan culture collected exquisite astronomical data for over a millennium. However, it failed to come up with the breakthrough ideas of modern astronomy because the data was analyzed within a mythological culture of astrology that…
Light pollution is actively destroying our ability to see the stars. Many Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems around the world are based on the stars, and the peoples' ability to observe and interpret stellar positions and…