Native American Astronomy Essay -- Astronomy Seasons Astronomers Essay

intrinsic American AstronomyFor galore(postnominal) years astronomers and people alike have constantly heard well-nigh the observations and records of the Chinese and Europeans. No other culture can provide as much information as that gathered by the Chinese and Europeans, further there are many other cultures that observed and recorded the night sky, one of those being the Native Americans. During the last fifteen to twenty years archaeoastronomers have uncovered much concerning the beliefs and records of Native Americans. Unfortunately, the methods of keeping records of astronomical events were non as straight forward as the Chinese and Europeans. The Native Americans had to determination what they could to record what they observed. Their records were found on rock and cave drawings, stick passinging, beadwork, pictures on animal skins and story telling. One of the few dateable events among the various(a) records of Native Americans was the 1833 appearance of the Leonid meteor shower.The most obvious accounts of the Leonid storm appear among the various bands of the Sioux of the North American plains. The Sioux unbroken records c every last(predicate)ed winter counts, which were a chronological pictographic account of each year painted on animal skin. In 1984 Von Del Chamberlain listed the astronomical references for 50 Sioux, forty five out of fifty referred to an needlelike meteor shower during 1833/1834. He also listed nineteen winter counts kept by other plains Indian tribes, fourteen of which referred to the Leonid storm. The Leonids also appear among the Maricopa, who apply calendar sticks with nonches to represent the passage of a year, with the owner of the stick storage the events. The owner of one stick claimed records had been kept that way since the stars fell. The first notch on the stick represented 1833. A member of the Papago, named Kutox, was born near 1847 or 1848. He claimed that 14 years prior to his birth the stars rained all over the sky. A less obvious Leonid reference was found in a journal kept by Alexander M. Stephen, which detailed his prattle with the Hopi Indians and mentions a talk he had With Old Djasjini on December 11, 1892. That Hopi Indian said, How old am I? Fifty, maybe a hundred years, I cannot tell. When I was a young boy eight or hug drug years there was a great comet in the sky and at night all the above was full of shooting stars. (Stephen 37). During the lifetime o... ...eir records by building structures that would observe the solarize. the Bighorn care for Wheel in Wyoming dates to AD 1400 to 1700. Lines drawn between major markings on the wheel point to the mess of solstice sunrises and sunsets and also toward the rising point of the three brightest stars that rise before the sun in the summer. About fifty medicine wheels have been discovered, several are thousands of years. Many of them have the same alignment as the Bighorn Medicine Wheel. In Chaco Canyon, New Mexico two spirals carved into the rock by the past Anasazi can be used as a calendar. A spikelet of light penetrates the shadow of adjacent rocks. The dagger moves with the sun to different locations on the spiral.the full pattern also reflects the 18.6 year cycle of the moon as well as the yearly cycle of the sun. The ancient Native Americans were not sophisticated astronomers in the sense of coherent theory behind the movements of ethereal objects, their level of understanding of the time cycles of the sun, moon and planets was great. The methods for recording and keeping vestige of the seasonal movements was clever and displays a cultural richness that varies from tribe to tribe.