In the early days of modern archaeoastronomy, in the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a long and occasionally rancorous argument about whether prehistoric astronomy, as manifested in astronomical alignments at British megalithic sites such as Ballochroy and Kintraw, was scientific or symbolic in nature. This question was intimately bound up with the issue of whether, as proposed by Alexander Thom, prehistoric people created deliberate sightlines on the rising and setting points of the sun, moon, and stars, making use of features on distant horizons as “foresights” to achieve pinpoint precision in their astronomical observations. The interpretation favored by many archaeologists was that the high-precision alignments picked out by Thom were fortuitous and that the people who built large stone monuments were aware only of rougher alignments, such as the famous midwinter sunrise alignment at the Irish passage tomb of Newgrange. They argued that these lower-precision alignments were more likely to be related to rituals and symbolism associated with seasonal activities, death, renewal, ancestor worship, and so on rather than used as precise “scientific” measuring instruments.
There are two ironies here. One is that “high precision” should not necessarily be equated with “scientific” and “low precision” with “symbolic.” Many historical and modern instances demonstrate that human communities perform remarkably painstaking and exact astronomical measurements for what, ultimately, are “merely” (as we might mistakenly see it) ceremonial purposes. (A much-cited example is the traditional calendar of the Hopi in the southwestern United States.) Furthermore, the fact that prehistoric people went to the bother of encapsulating astronomical alignments, whether rough or more precise, in stone argues that they were more than mere observing instruments—that they had strong symbolic motivation and meaning.
The second irony in that “our” science—the modern Western way of understanding the world—is not likely to be the way that human communities understood the world in prehistory, any more than in indigenous com munities today. One might well see other worldviews as representing alternative forms of “science,” insofar as they explain what people see in the world (the cosmos) around them and often have a predictive capability. (A good example of this is the role of the Caterpillar Jaguar constellation of the Barasana people of the Columbian Amazon in relation to earthly caterpillars.) Such “alternative sciences” often have a strong ceremonial element, since appropriate observances help to keep human actions in tune with the cosmos as it is perceived and understood. Incorporating alignments in architecture to symbolize and reinforce the properties of the world is another. (This is evident, for example, in the design of the earth lodges of the Pawnee, or the hogans of the Navajo, to name but two of many examples.) If we are really interested in understanding more about prehistoric “science,” then we should probably be looking for evidence of the kind of symbolical alignments and ceremonial activities that were seen by many back in the 1970s as its very antithesis.
