Native American Astronomy Essay -- Astronomy Seasons Astronomers Essay

Native American AstronomyFor many years astronomers and mickle alike nominate constantly heard about the observations and records of the Chinese and Europeans. No otherwise culture can provide as much instruction as that ga in that respectd by the Chinese and Europeans, but there are many other cultures that prised and recorded the night sky, angiotensin-converting enzyme of those existence the Native Americans. During the last fifteen to twenty years archaeoastronomers have reveal much concerning the beliefs and records of Native Americans. Unfortunately, the methods of keeping records of astronomical events were not as sequent forward as the Chinese and Europeans. The Native Americans had to use what they could to record what they observed. Their records were ground on rock and cave drawings, start out notching, beadwork, pictures on animal skins and trading floor telling. One of the few dateable events among the various records of Native Americans was the 1833 appeara nce of the Leonid shooting star shower st every last(predicate).The most obvious accounts of the Leonid storm appear among the various bands of the Sioux of the North American plains. The Sioux kept records called winter counts, which were a chronological pictographic account of apiece 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 intense 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 used calendar sticks with notches to counterbalance the passage of a year, with the owner of the stick remembering 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 around 1847 or 1848. He claimed that 14 years pr ior to his birth the stars rained all over the sky. A less obvious Leonid reference was found in a daybook kept by Alexander M. Stephen, which detailed his visit with the Hopi Indians and mentions a address 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 ten 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 sun. the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming dates to AD 1400 to 1700. Lines drawn amid major markings on the wheel point to the location of solstice sunrises and sunsets and also toward the wage hike point of the three brightest stars that rise before the sun in the summer. somewhat fifty medicine wheels have been discovered, several are thousands of years. Many of them have the same alignment as the Bighorn Medicine Whe el. In Chaco Canyon, bleak Mexico two spirals carved into the rock by the prehistoric Anasazi can be used as a calendar. A dagger of light penetrates the can of adjacent rocks. The dagger moves with the sun to different locations on the spiral.the full example 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 heavenly objects, their level of intellectual of the time cycles of the sun, moon and planets was great. The methods for recording and keeping track of the seasonal movements was tricksy and displays a cultural richness that varies from tribe to tribe.