"Brown" Archaeoastronomy

This term denotes an approach in archaeoastronomy that is not primarily focused upon alignment studies but is concerned with a much broader range of types of evidence, such as written documents or ethnohistorical accounts. This approach emerged in North America during the 1970s, particularly in the context of studies of astronomy in native North America and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. It involved attempts to integrate approaches from a range of humanities and social science disciplines such as history, cultural anthropology, art history, ethnography, folklore studies, history of religions, and many more. This broad, multidisciplinary approach contrasted starkly with the pursuit of statistical rigor that absorbed most Old World archaeoastronomers at the time.