Holiday Spirit - Part Two

We extend this festive outlook now to the rest of the coming year…

Holiday Spirit - Part One

    As we celebrate this period of good will towards man, let us all take a moment to reflect on the similarity of the different holidays and realise we aren't as different as the evening news tries to tell us we are.  Each holiday is based in the hope for a better future - just the sentiment of the Winter Solstice.

The Christmas season

All,
    Please be so kind as to forgive me the coming weeks as life is asking a bit more than I can deliver.

Thanks!

Time and Patience: the Most Powerful Warriors. Part Three

    The nexus of astronomy and architecture is called archaeoastronomy and in Chaco Canyon, NM it is manifested in three predominant ways.  One of these is in front-facing South/Southeast (S/SE) orientated structures - we will discuss the other ways in future instalments of this topic.

Pueblo Pintado a S/SE orientated structure (~160 degrees)
(Author's collection. Copyright 2019)

    Buildings with S/SE orientation are well documented back to Basketmaker III pit houses (400-700AD) - well before the earliest great houses - and continued to be built through the middle of the Pueblo I Period (700-850AD).  Archaeological surveys find that the orientation azimuths range from 151 to 161degrees and this S/SE orientation was consistently applied to Chacoan architecture for 700 years (450-1140AD).  The fact that this orientation doesn’t deviate with latitudinal change suggests that it wasn’t based on direct regional celestial observation.  Additionally, the area where this S/SE orientation dominates is too large for a common-to-all terrain feature which could insinuate this azimuth on the Chacoan psyche. 

    With this in mind, I should surmise this orientation was culturally important to  Chacoans for reasons that are not readily clear and the consistent application of this azimuth over centuries also indicates the employment of some physical means.  

    There exists an ethno-archaeological basis for this cultural importance amongst the telling of Hopi migration stories about the Snake Clan which migrated from the Navajo Mountain region to the Black Mesa region of today’s Arizona - a heading of approximately 165 degrees.  A version of this migration story seems to be recounted by Cosmos Mindeleff in 1891.  

    ”…A brilliant star arose in the southeast, which would shine for a while and then disappear.  The old men said, ‘Beneath that star there must be people’, so they determined to travel towards it.  They cut a staff and set it in the ground and watched until the star reached its top, then they started and traveled as long as the star shone; when it disappeared they halted…sometimes many years elapsed before it appeared again.  When this occurred, our people built houses during their halt; they built both round and square houses…They waited until the star came to the top of the staff again, then they moved on.”

Mesoamerican religious staff from Teotihuacan, Mexico (circa 70AD)
(Author's collection. Copyright 2019)

The veracity of this statement is borne through the statement concerning housing - “they built both round and square houses”.  Archaeological proof exists all over the southwest today of pit houses like this from the Basketmaker periods.  Today we have no reason to believe that this doesn’t extend to the means of navigation employed as well.  They speak of a simple cut staff - NOT a cross-member or cross-staff as posited by JM Malville in his excellent 2011 paper.  To date there have been found multitudes of staffs and religious sceptres in Chacoan tombs throughout the region (as well as across Mesoamerica) and these staffs could easily be symbolic of the Gnomon navigational device described in Part two. 

    The ease of reproducing this bearing with a gnomon used as a carpenter’s square fulfils our hypothesis for a construction device used to reproduce this S/SE orientation.  Simultaneously, the employment of this simple tool, in this configuration, would negate the archaeological “smoking gun” that scholars are looking for to corroborate this theory.  The answer is hiding in plain sight, we just don’t know what we are looking at.

    All native American tribes extant demonstrate great reverence for their ancestors and there is no conflicting evidence in the case of Ancestral Puebloans.  If we couple that with the verifiable evidence from their migration myths, it isn’t unrealistic to extrapolate our hypothesis here that the south/southeast manifestation in archaeoastronomy in and around the Chacoan world was based on ancestral veneration.  In a further extrapolation, I posit the use of a simple astronomical tool - in use around the world for centuries prior - as a means of building those structures and the proof is in museums throughout the American Southwest labeled “Chacoan religious staff”.

Pueblo Bonito from the inside.  Originally S/SE orientated (~160degrees), later altered to North/South.
(Author's collection. Copyright 2019) 

Time and Patience, the Most Powerful Warriors. Part Two

    While writing notes on southeast orientation and Cardinal points, I realised that I must address some basic facts and ideas as a precursor to understanding the Chacoan astronomy/architecture nexus.  
    Time in our world is created by two activities; the spinning of the Earth and the Earth’s rotation around the Sun.  Due to the former we have sunrise and sunset (the time of day) and from the latter we enjoy the change of seasons (the time of year).  Through these two types of time, the sun weaves its way across our skies in specific, observable patterns and it was these patterns and conditions which were closely observed by the ancestral Puebloans and became intrinsic to their very existence.

    Through the migration vignette from part one we see that these ancients understood the concept of direction, even if they didn’t have a word for azimuth, declination or Altitude.  As proof today, we have their repeated use of specific directions in their architecture over centuries of building.  This could have been easily accomplished through the use of a gnomon.  The gnomon is a simple tool for determining direction/time through observation of the sun’s movement and was first developed in Babylon though examples exist in the ancient world from China to Peru.

    A gnomon is built by placing a straight stick vertically in level ground and marking the location of the stick’s shadow on the ground through the course of the day.  This will quickly reveal the Cardinal directions and the device is eerily similar to the star tracking “compass” stick described in our migration myth from part one.  With a little ingenuity, this device can be a mobile compass as well.  To employ it one has to first determine the desired direction of travel.  Runners are then sent towards that direction and in the opposite.  These runners merely determine a straight line path through the gnomon itself and begin movement in the desired direction - always traveling in three parties and always re-evaluating their direction using the previous two points and terrain references prior to advancing.  If the party becomes lost or unsure, they merely stop for a day, set up the gnomon, verify the directions and begin again.

North wall of Aztec West great house which is aligned with summer solstice sunrise
(Author's collection. copyright 2019)

    Through close observation over time, a gnomon can also determine the azimuth of the equinoxes and the solstices.  When this began to happen, our ancestral Puebloans were determining annual calendars through the sun’s predictable nature.  Every March and September 21, the Sun rises and sets on the East-West meridian and its declination (distance from the Equator to the Poles measured in degrees) is 0 out of a possible 90 degrees.  Additionally, the gnomon can track the sun’s behaviour through its Winter and Summer Solstice declinations which are a positive or negative 23.5 degrees depending on the time of year.   The gnomon can also determine the altitude of the sun, track the Moon's activity through the full moon cycle and is a carpenter's square.  When this level of expertise is reached, the gnomon is a formidable weapon for nation building.  Horizon calendars can be created and future plans can be made on a grand scale.  Those grand scale plans can be employed to serve specific purposes which can, ultimately, manipulate public opinion and ideals.  

    When utilised in this fashion, our gnomon ceases to be a simple stick in the ground and becomes a sceptre of national power.  In this simple devise lies the power to legitimise rulers by “commanding the heavens” and thus, compel subjects to build organised cosmic cities which create an infrastructure based on that cyclic nature.   Their hard work is rewarded by security, well-planned festivals and markets centred around these cosmic events which stabilise lifestyles, build a vibrant economy and, ultimately, come to define them as a culture.

Specific events tied to an horizon calendar providing anticipatory warning for festival preparation.   (Author's composition)