Portal:History of science/Article/11
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the study of ancient or traditional astronomies in their cultural context, utilising archaeological and anthropological evidence. It is closely associated with sister disciplines ethnoastronomy, the study of astronomical practice in contemporary societies and historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems. Another similar discipline is history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate prior astronomical traditions.
Archaeoastronomy is almost as old as archaeology itself. Norman Lockyer was arguably the first archaeoastronomer working at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. His studies included an examinations of Egyptian temples in The Dawn of Astronomy in 1894 and of Stonehenge published as Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered in 1906. Some archaeologists followed. Francis Penrose published extensively in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on the astronomical alignment of Greek temples in the Mediterranean in the same period. Archaeoastronomy was, for a while, a respectable subject. The first issue of the archaeological journal Antiquity includes an article on archaeoastronomical research.
