Speaker(s)
Description
Modern society, with its skyscrapers and light pollution has lost touch with the sky, but the historical and ethnographic records attest that all other societies have a deeper relationship to the sky and the celestial objects - sun, moon and stars. This talk will therefore introduce the topic of cultural astronomy and why the skyscapes of past societies cannot be ignored if we are to understand them. In the second half, these ideas will be applied to northwestern Iberia during the Neolithic period (about six thousand years ago) to try to uncover the celestial meaning and symbolism encoded in some of the earliest stone monuments of Europe.
Class syllabus