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Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures."〔Sinclair 2006:13〕 Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.〔Ruggles 2005:19〕〔Ruggles 1999:155〕 It is often twinned with ''ethnoastronomy'', the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice. Archaeoastronomy uses a variety of methods to uncover evidence of past practices including archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, statistics and probability, and history. Because these methods are diverse and use data from such different sources, integrating them into a coherent argument has been a long-term difficulty for archaeoastronomers.〔Iwaniszewski 2003, 7-10〕 Archaeoastronomy fills complementary niches in landscape archaeology and cognitive archaeology. Material evidence and its connection to the sky can reveal how a wider landscape can be integrated into beliefs about the cycles of nature, such as Mayan astronomy and its relationship with agriculture.〔Aveni 1980〕 Other examples which have brought together ideas of cognition and landscape include studies of the cosmic order embedded in the roads of settlements.〔Chiu & Morrison 1980〕〔Magli 2008〕 Archaeoastronomy can be applied to all cultures and all time periods. The meanings of the sky vary from culture to culture; nevertheless there are scientific methods which can be applied across cultures when examining ancient beliefs.〔McCluskey 2005〕 It is perhaps the need to balance the social and scientific aspects of archaeoastronomy which led Clive Ruggles to describe it as: ''"...() field with academic work of high quality at one end but uncontrolled speculation bordering on lunacy at the other."''〔Carlson 1999〕 == History of archaeoastronomy == Two hundred years before Michell wrote the above, there were no archaeoastronomers and there were no professional archaeologists, but there were astronomers and antiquarians. Some of their works are considered precursors of archaeoastronomy; antiquarians interpreted the astronomical orientation of the ruins that dotted the English countryside as William Stukeley did of Stonehenge in 1740,〔Michell, 2001:9-10〕 while John Aubrey in 1678〔Johnson, 1912:225〕 and Henry Chauncy in 1700 sought similar astronomical principles underlying the orientation of churches.〔Hoskin, 2001:7〕 Late in the nineteenth century astronomers such as Richard Proctor and Charles Piazzi Smyth investigated the astronomical orientations of the pyramids.〔Michell, 2001:17-18〕 The term ''archaeoastronomy'' was first used by Elizabeth Chesley Baity (at the suggestion of Euan MacKie) in 1973,〔Sinclair 2006:17〕 but as a topic of study it may be much older, depending on how archaeoastronomy is defined. Clive Ruggles〔Ruggles 2005:312-3〕 says that Heinrich Nissen, working in the mid-nineteenth century was arguably the first archaeoastronomer. Rolf Sinclair〔Sinclair 2006:8〕 says that Norman Lockyer, working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, could be called the 'father of archaeoastronomy.' Euan MacKie〔Mackie 2006:243〕 would place the origin even later, stating: "...the genesis and modern flowering of archaeoastronomy must surely lie in the work of Alexander Thom in Britain between the 1930s and the 1970s." In the 1960s the work of the engineer Alexander Thom and that of the astronomer Gerald Hawkins, who proposed that Stonehenge was a Neolithic computer,〔Hawkins 1976〕 inspired new interest in the astronomical features of ancient sites. The claims of Hawkins were largely dismissed,〔Atkinson 1966〕 but this was not the case for Alexander Thom's work, whose survey results of megalithic sites hypothesized widespread practice of accurate astronomy in the British Isles.〔Thom 1988:9-10〕 Euan MacKie, recognizing that Thom's theories needed to be tested, excavated at the Kintraw standing stone site in Argyllshire in 1970 and 1971 to check whether the latter's prediction of an observation platform on the hill slope above the stone was correct. There was an artificial platform there and this apparent verification of Thom's long alignment hypothesis (Kintraw was diagnosed as an accurate winter solstice site) led him to check Thom's geometrical theories at the Cultoon stone circle in Islay, also with a positive result. MacKie therefore broadly accepted Thom's conclusions and published new prehistories of Britain.〔MacKie 1977〕 In contrast a re-evaluation of Thom's fieldwork by Clive Ruggles argued that Thom's claims of high accuracy astronomy were not fully supported by the evidence.〔Gingerich 2000〕 Nevertheless Thom's legacy remains strong, Krupp〔Krupp 1979:18〕 wrote in 1979, "Almost singlehandedly he has established the standards for archaeo-astronomical fieldwork and interpretation, and his amazing results have stirred controversy during the last three decades." His influence endures and practice of statistical testing of data remains one of the methods of archaeoastronomy.〔Hicks 1993〕〔Iwaniszewski 1995〕 The approach in the New World, where anthropologists began to consider more fully the role of astronomy in Amerindian civilizations, was markedly different. They had access to sources that the prehistory of Europe lacks such as ethnographies〔Zeilik 1985〕〔Zeilik 1986〕 and the historical records of the early colonizers. Following the pioneering example of Anthony Aveni,〔Milbraith 1999:8〕〔Broda 2000:233〕 this allowed New World archaeoastronomers to make claims for motives which in the Old World would have been mere speculation. The concentration on historical data led to some claims of high accuracy that were comparatively weak when compared to the statistically led investigations in Europe.〔Hoskin 1996〕 This came to a head at a meeting sponsored by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Oxford in 1981.〔Ruggles 1993:ix〕 The methodologies and research questions of the participants were considered so different that the conference proceedings were published as two volumes.〔Aveni 1982〕〔Heggie 1982〕 Nevertheless the conference was considered a success in bringing researchers together and Oxford conferences have continued every four or five years at locations around the world. The subsequent conferences have resulted in a move to more interdisciplinary approaches with researchers aiming to combine the contextuality of archaeological research,〔Aveni, 1989a:xi–xiii〕 which broadly describes the state of archaeoastronomy today, rather than merely establishing the existence of ancient astronomies, archaeoastronomers seek to explain why people would have an interest in the night sky. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Archaeoastronomy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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