“IT’S NOW OR NEVER”: CHANGING CULTURES AND THE INVESTIGATION OF INDIGENOUS ASTRONOMICAL SYSTEMS

Wayne Orchiston1 and Darunee Lingling Orchiston2

1 Centre for Astrophysics, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

2 Independent scholar, Ban Cholae, Thailand

In a world witnessing ever-increasing cultural change, the challenge for ethnoastronomers is to document the dynamics of indigenous astronomical systems before the last custodians of this information die without passing on their knowledge to younger generations. This is a major global issue for astronomy.

In this talk we will present case studies from India, SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand that display the close linkages between human ecology and indigenous astronomical systems (e.g. see Halkare et al., 2019; Orchiston and Orchiston, 2017), and we will then outline our attempts to use a multidisciplinary approach in order to delineate changes that have taken place in astronomical systems within the past 20,000 years in response to environmental, demographic and religious changes (see Fatima, et al., 2021; Orchiston et al., 2021).

References

Fatima, S., Orchiston, W., and Hidayat, T., 2021. Ethnoastronomy in Madura, Indonesia: observations of the night sky and eclipses. In Orchiston, W., and Vahia, M. (eds.), Exploring the History of Southeast Asian Astronomy: A Review of Current Projects and Future Prospects and Possibilities. Cham (Switzerland), Springer. Pp. 565–587.

Halkare, G., Purushottam, D., Orchiston, W., and Vahia, M., 2019. Astronomy of the Pardhi Tribe of Central India. Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 22, 179–194.

Orchiston, W., and Orchiston, D.L., 2017. The Māori calendar of New Zealand: a chronological perspective. In Nha, I.-S., Orchiston, W., and Stephenson, F.R. (eds.), The History of World Calendars and Calendar-making. Proceedings of the International Conference in Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Kim Dam. Seoul, Yonsei University Press. Pp. 57–78.

Orchiston, W., Guido, R., Bautista, R.A., Dela Cruz, R.A., Torres, J., and Orchiston, D.L., 2021. Exploring the history of Philippine astronomy: Catholics, comets, eclipses and ethnoastronomy. In Orchiston, W., and Vahia, M. (eds.), Exploring the History of Southeast Asian Astronomy: A Review of Current Projects and Future Prospects and Possibilities. Cham (Switzerland), Springer. Pp. 37–115.