Exploring Archaeoastronomy by Liz Henty;

Author:Liz Henty;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789257878
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Debates and divides

Through all these activities, New World archaeoastronomy therefore obtained a legitimacy that was never realised in Britain before or since, but this is not to say that it did not come under the same kind of scrutiny as British megalithic science experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. Again the relationship between archaeology and archaeoastronomy was called into account because, as Reyman (1979, 11) concluded, archaeoastronomers and archaeologists have ‘blind spots’ with regard to the other’s work. This evidently was still a problem in the 1990s when Dearborn (1991), in an article entitled ‘Bridging disciplines & falling in cracks’, felt that the ‘artificial partitioning of Knowledge into disciplines affects our perceptions and limits our actions’. Throughout, archaeoastronomers had to overcome derogatory descriptions, such as ‘transit jockeys’, similar to those levelled at them in Britain, so to overcome this they had to display a lot more knowledge of the related disciplines. American archaeologist Keith Kintigh (1992) weighed into the debate by explaining his thoughts, which he said were shared by other archaeologists, on what he called the chasm or void between the disciplines. In an argument which could also have been directed at the similar circumstances in Britain, he suggested that archaeologists simply ignored archaeoastronomers because their claims added nothing to the current interpretive questions, so they were therefore ‘pretty marginal to mainstream archaeology’. He claimed that archaeological collaborations with, for example, geology, botany and zoology, worked because the relevant disciplines had shared goals. Though Kintigh regarded most of archaeoastronomy as ‘celestial butterfly collecting’ he did see its potential for adding another layer to understanding cultures, given the fact that astronomical alignments were artefacts. Kintigh’s comments as an outsider to archaeoastronomy were completely at variance with how American archaeoastronomers perceived themselves as part of the mainstream. For example, Aveni (1992) promptly replied to Kintigh and while he agreed that the research agendas of physical and social scientists were not the same, nevertheless he felt that the discipline of archaeoastronomy was making progress away from the simple documenting of alignments. Certainly emotions ran high as evidenced by Farrer’s cutting response:

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