Posted on 11/03/2009 12:13:27 PM PST by BGHater
Jim Krehbiel was up past midnight making a piece of art by layering maps and field notes onto photos he had taken of an ancient ritual site high on a cliff ledge in the desert Southwest.
He looked at the image of the kiva and remembered how the ruins were nearly inaccessible. Krehbiel had to lower himself on a rope to reach them.
Why, he wondered that night in the fall of 2007, would anyone build something so important in such a remote spot among the canyons and mesas?
It was then that the chairman of Ohio Wesleyan University's art department found himself at the conjunction of archaeology and astronomy.
Perhaps, he thought, the site was an observatory; a place to help religious leaders keep track of the solstices, time rituals and plantings.
"Their world around them is absolute, total chaos," Krehbiel said. "They were really at the mercy of the elements.
"So where do they go for something that's predictable, that remains the same, that you can count on: The sky and the relationship of those things on the horizon."
A discussion with Barbara Andereck, a professor of astronomy and physics at Ohio Wesleyan, put Krehbiel on a path that would help him test his ideas about the remote kivas he visited each summer.
Krehbiel was stepping into archeo-astronomy, the study of the ways ancient cultures tracked the sky's movements. The science has been gaining acceptance as a branch of archaeology since the 1970s.
England's Stonehenge, for example, is well known for its alignments with astronomical phenomena. In Ohio, archaeologists agree that ancient mound builders lined up some works with the movements of the sun and the moon.
In the Southwest, the most famous site is the Chaco Sun Dagger. The sun and moon shine through the spaces between slabs of rock to make slashes of light on a spiral carving in conjunction with the solstices and the movements of the moon.
But no one had identified such alignments at hundreds of remote ruins that dot the canyons of southeastern Utah.
One of Andereck's students, Natalie Cunningham, was looking for a senior project in 2008 and agreed to help Krehbiel.
"I had to do a lot of math to go back into the past and see where the sun and moon were," said Cunningham, who was studying English and astrophysics.
In the summer of 2008, Krehbiel took Cunningham to Utah to take readings.
Back at the kiva he'd pondered on that fall night, Krehbiel set up his transit and sighted in on a gap in the opposite canyon rim where he thought the winter solstice sun might rise.
Instead, he found that the moon rises there during an event called the major lunar standstill, which occurs every 18.6 years.
The major standstill occurs when the moon rises and sets in its longest arc across the horizon -- the lunar version of the annual summer solstice when the sun makes its longest arc across the sky.
But they also found that the calculations Cunningham made in relatively flat Ohio only went so far in the canyons of Utah.
The cliff-top kiva is on a relatively flat plane with the features on the opposite canyon rim and with the horizon, so the calculations were close enough to work there. But they didn't work for kivas deep inside a canyon.Because the canyon rim is high above, the sun and moon don't appear to observers at those sites until they're far above the true horizon. Since they cross the sky in an arc, the sun and moon appeared in a different spot than Cunningham had calculated.
"I said 'Oh, crap, it's not nearly good enough,' " said Cunningham, who is now at the University of Arizona pursuing a graduate degree in nonfiction writing.
She found a better model that summer in a book published in 1942 by the U.S. Navy: Spherical Trigonometry with Naval and Military Applications.
Now she could derive an equation that took the arc of the sky into consideration.
"We went back out in October of 2008 and re-examined the sites," Krehbiel said. "We had the spherical trig charts in hand, and everything just fell into place."
They have found alignments for solstices, equinoxes and major and minor lunar standstills at 29 sites so far.
Krehbiel takes sightings only from spots where the cliff-dwellers left a sign, such as a spiral carving or a basin chipped out of the rock.
He doesn't always find alignments with distinct features on the horizon. About 30 percent of the sites he's checked showed none, he said.
Jeff Dean, a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has spent decades using tree-ring data to fix when archaeological sites throughout the Southwest were built. He took a look at Krehbiel's work recently and said it makes sense to him.
"I don't know of anybody that actually measured these things to the extent that he and his colleagues are doing," Dean said.
"He picks plausible places to set up the equipment, they're making calculations based on certain techniques and they're also concerned about any variation put in place by the date."
Noreen Fritz, an archaeologist with the National Park Service, has asked Krehbiel to write reports on his findings on seven sites in the parks she oversees in southeastern Utah.
"He's looking at these sites with fresh eyes," she said. "One was a site we work at regularly. You always walk by these upright stones, but it turns out they're sighting stones."
In June, Cunningham hiked up to a kiva with Krehbiel to watch the sun set on the summer solstice. She calculated that they'd see it set through a rock window if they set up near a handprint marking.
They arrived about a half an hour early, but the position of the sun worried them.
"It was pretty far to the left," Cunningham said. "We kept saying 'It's not going to hit that window.' We were in a bit of a panic."
Still, they set up the camera and the tripod. Then, just at the right time, the sun blazed through the rock window, shining onto the shrine.
Krehbiel will deliver an illustrated lecture about his work from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Slater Hall Auditorium on the campus of Denison University in Granville.
bump
“... But, cannibalism was widespread across the Americas, as a whole.”
Give the progressives time. Cannibalism will be making a come back to the Americas.
It seems to have existed in the extreme famine in the Ukraine under Stalin.
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All you need is the Starry Night software package, for example. You can go anywhere, anytime, on the earth and beyond, and see the sky from that vantage point. I used it to ascertain what star it was that Shackleton saw from the rail of his ship the evening he died, and what star Thoreau saw through the fabric of his tent camping "near Penichook Brook, on the confines of Nashville" the night of Sept. 2, 1839. I also checked up on some of Ptolemy's observations recorded in the Almagest ... yes, the software accounts for precession!
As a matter of fact, something like this article was posted a year or so ago, and I used it to look into that, as well.
I think you mean S. America. The Aztecs, Mayans and Incas all understood mathematics, they had agriculture and trade specializations, and astrology. They had a written language and understood the concept of domesticated animals and farming.
There is no evidence that this is true for the North American Indian.
He’s talking about the Anasazi - quite a bit different than the Native American Indian. These were the types of guys that built the cave dwellings and adobe buildings in the SW.
But yes - I’ve always wondered about the Native American Indian that they did not figure out the wheel. Either their “traditions” and communal nature stifled them - or their surroundings (soft dirt?). Of course that soil didn’t stop the settlers on the Oregon Trail.
Monks Mound
"Monks Mound is bigger than any of the three great pyramids at Giza outside Cairo. “This is the third or fourth biggest pyramid in the world, in terms of volume,” says archaeologist Tim Pauketat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."
This is something I have never understood. Now, I can understand the Polynesians not progressing technologically, I mean it’s warm, food is abundant - heck, they live in paradise. No predators (ok, sharks); no harsh seasons, freezing temperatures - no real reason, other than warfare, to develop technologically.
However, the American Indians typically had harsh winters, they were basically in a state of perpetural war with skirmishes with other tribes. One would think that advances in weaponry, let alone food storage and a means of passing the information down through the generations would have emerged in some fashion.
There are limited ‘I wonder why ...’ exhibits that were made by the Native American Indian - but the development of working ores, the wheel, lever, mathematics, agriculture, trade specialization, agriculture, astronomy, animal husbandry, irrigation, trade routes or even shipping was virtually unknown. One would think that the harsher the enviroment, the more necessity would drive innovation. But, it just didn’t happen here.
So, when I see an article that attributes an appreciation of science that is unsupported by any other fact; I’m inclined to call it simply a coincidence. There simply isn’t any evidence to support this claim.
BTW, I have an authentic DVD of Hawiatha hunting Do-do birds - it is in this box along with my deeds to the London Bridge, just saw it the other day ...
Cannibal: Old Indian word for bad hunter too lazy to farm.
It is nothing to do with Science, as we know it. It is simply noticing cycles of daily, seasonal, yearly existence that are of life and death importance; then marking them, usually cloaked in religion.
We need to use the math as a shortcut to get back to their time period and observational vantage, and not spend the same umpteen years of the same trial and error that they did, just in order to find the correlations.
Also, the Anasazi (the people this article is about) had very large and complex irrigation systems for their farming. They also built Casa Grande, quite possibly as an observatory.
As for other Native Americans, some had writing and farming and domesticated (or semi domesticated); some built rather sophisticated dwellings and public buildings; others ran around naked, eating lizards and bugs, and sleeping under handy logs or rocks. Others fell anywhere in between.
“So, when I see an article that attributes an appreciation of science that is unsupported by any other fact; I’m inclined to call it simply a coincidence. There simply isn’t any evidence to support this claim.”
Like I said - this guy is studying remains of the Anasazi. They were more like the Mayans. Large communities, agricultural (so the seasons/astronomy were important), traded with others, etc. Several other smaller-scale measuring devices for the solstice, etc. can be found in the SW.
They were NOT like the Plains Indians. You bring up good points about why didn’t the indians develop more technology.
They definitely did have agriculture—corn, beans, squash probably chile peppers, and were settled for fairly long periods in the places where kivas were built. When they moved it was probably due to drought conditions and consequent warfare.
Remember how an indian taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn with a fish in the hole for fertilizer? In addition to the southwestern settled tribes, consider the Iriquois Confederation, they definitely gardened and traded.
As to astronomy, while there may not have been written language, many groups have detailed oral traditions which are passed on to their trainees. It is quite possible that our southwestern indians had some remnant knowledge from the Mayans and Toltecs which was very detailed.
The Aztecs and Mayans were in North America (Mexico) the last time I looked. They were preceeded by the Toltecs of Central Mexico, the Olmecs of Caribbean coastal Mexico, and included the Zapotecs and Michtecs near Oaxaca. I have seen many of the impressive structures built by these various peoples. If by North America, you only mean the US, then consider the 50 foot high mound built at St. Louis roughly 1,000 years ago by the Mississippean culture. While perhaps the most famous and highest, there were quite a lot of others. That is why they are also known as the Mound Builders.
So, no understanding of mathematics, agriculture, domestication of animals, the wheel, the lever - their great accomplishment is that they could pile dirt.
And yes, I have been down to Mexico and have seen some Mayan ruins. The question I keep asking is 'Why did the American Indian fail so miserably to progress?' No idea of how to navigate, mine ore, build permanent dwellings, notice the stars, invent the wheel, even the most basic skills were undiscovered. No written language, no permanent dwellings; they were nomads because they had no choice but to follow the herds like any other predator.
Perhaps these huge piles were a hunting vantage point to shoot the herds from, or they ran the herds up the embankment hoping that some would fall and be able to be killed.
Why did the overwhelming majority of the American Indian fail to advance past the stone age? They had every reason to develop, harsh climate, short growing season, warfare with their neighbors. Yet, for thousands of years they did not progress; unlike the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Toltecs and the others. I ask a simple question ... 'Why'?
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