Tell Me Thursday

Every Thursday I will do this feature about something my readers want to know..

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Today's Tell Me Thursday subject is:

"Please tell me about the mystery of Archaeoastronomy?  What exactly is it?"

What an interesting question! I hardly know anything about Archaeoastronomy. So this is what I could find:

Archaeoastronomy -   

Archaeoastronomy or archeoastronomy is the study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky how they used phenomena in the sky and what role the sky played in their cultures." Sinclair 2006:13 

In my search of what exactly Archaeoastronomy is, I found the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture website:

http://www1.archaeoastronomy.org/

It seems that Archaeoastronomy gives material evidence of how cultures are connected to the sky. We can see how this works in the work that has been done about Mayan astronomy and its relationship with agriculture ("It has been proposed that Maya sites such as Uxmal were built in accordance with astronomical alignments" source). There seems to have been work done on how astronomy relates to the roads of ancient settlements as well.

^Alignment:

^{"A common source of data for archaeoastronomy is the study of alignments. This is based on the assumption that the axis of alignment of an archaeological site is meaningfully oriented towards an astronomical target. Brown archaeoastronomers may justify this assumption through reading historical or ethnographic sources, while Green archaeoastronomers tend to prove that alignments are unlikely to be selected by chance, usually by demonstrating common patterns of
alignment at multiple sites." Source}

Sites: 

"At Stonehenge in England and at Carnac in France, in Egypt and Yucatán, across the whole face of the earth, are found mysterious ruins of ancient monuments, monuments with astronomical significance... They mark the same kind of commitment that transported us to the moon and our spacecraft to the surface of Mars." —Edwin Krupp 1979:1

The Pyramids of Giza is said to have connections to the stars and Stonehenge is said to be connected to midsummer alignment.

Here is a brief introduction to archaeoastronomy:

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaar_as.html

Thanks for asking this question! I have learned a lot by finding this answer. I hope it helps.

Please don't forget to send me more questions!

Sources:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_different_fields_of_archaeology#ixzz1VNxLNZp3
And all the rest I pointed out