Taken out of context, as this example shows, the complexity of the connections between the content of rock art, its location, and the sky would be quite unfathomable to an archaeologist without an informant to interpret them.
Can more direct links between rock art and the sky sometimes be evident, even where we lack “the big picture”? A number of rock art sites contain inexplicable groupings of round holes or cup marks, which have not, it seems, arisen naturally; and some of these, it has been suggested, could represent constellations. However, it is disconcertingly easy to fit random collections of cup marks with patterns of stars in the sky if one is prepared to be sufficiently flexible in one’s selection criteria, so the case remains unproven. There is little other evidence of direct relationships between rock art motifs and the appearance of celestial objects, although it has been suggested that the stylized forms of emu on some panels reflect the shape of the emu in the sky, a conglomeration of dark clouds in the Milky Way recognized as such in a number of places across Australia. John Morieson, an Australian archaeoastronomer, has suggested that a number of stone configurations in northwestern Victoria related directly to the rising or setting sun and incorporated deliberate alignments toward sunrise or sunset in particular seasons in the year.
There is certainly evidence that a number of different Aboriginal groups took note of the annual changes in the position of certain stars or constellations as indicators of seasonal events that affected their food supply. Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the sky. For the Boorong people of northern Victoria, this star was Marpeankurrk, the ancestor who discovered bittur, or termite larvae, a delicious and valuable source of protein available at a time of year (August and September) when other food sources were scarce. Every year Marpeankurrk taught the living people when to find the bittur by appearing in the north during the evening. But night by night she appeared for a shorter and shorter time until she disappeared completely— and so did the bittur.
Although this is one of many similar examples, there is no evidence of any Aboriginal group having reckoned time using a calendar based, for example, on the phase cycle of the moon. Another curious feature of Aboriginal astronomy—at least, as far as we can tell from the available evidence— is that, despite living in wide open landscapes and having an intimate knowledge of the skies, Aboriginal peoples do not seem to have used the stars to navigate at night. Their astronomical knowledge, and their knowledge of the world in general, was qualitative rather than quantitative. It consisted of a rich network of associations confirmed in myth and tied to places and pathways both in the land and in the sky. Their worldview integrated land, sky, and social structure and kept human action intimately in tune with the cosmos.
Despite our fragmentary knowledge of Aboriginal astronomy, it is of great importance in showing how sky knowledge among hunter-gatherers can be rich and complex, despite leaving little or no trace in the material record. This fact has implications for how we interpret what extremely fragmentary archaeological evidence we have pertaining to astronomical knowledge in Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic times.
See also:
Constellation Maps on the Ground; Emu in the Sky; Landscape; Magellanic Clouds; Navigation.
References and further reading
Cairns, Hugh, and Bill Yidumduma Harney. Dark Sparklers: Yidumduma’s Wardaman Aboriginal Astronomy. Merimbula, NSW: H.C. Cairns, 2003. Chamberlain, Von Del, John Carlson, and Jane Young, eds. Songs from the Sky: Indigenous Astronomical and Cosmological Traditions of the World,
358–379. Bognor Regis, UK: Ocarina Books and College Park, MD: Cen
ter for Archaeoastronomy, 2005. Flood, Josephine. Rock Art of the Dreamtime. Sydney: HarperCollins, 1997. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment, 52–58. New York and
London: Routledge, 2000. Johnson, Dianne. Night Skies of Aboriginal Australia: A Noctuary. Sydney: Oceania Publications/University of Sydney, 1998. Morieson, John. The Night Sky of the Boorong. Melbourne: Unpublished MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1996. Mountford, Charles P. Nomads of the Australian Desert, 449–483. Adelaide: Rigby, 1976. Ruggles, Clive, ed. Archaeoastronomy in the 1990s, 136–152. Loughborough, UK: Group D Publications, 1993. Selin, Helaine, ed. Astronomy across Cultures, 53–90. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 2000.
Abri Blanchard Bone
The earliest indications of the use of a symbolic notation to represent or visualize an astronomical cycle come from the Upper Palaeolithic period. At this time, in addition to striking cave art, engravings were made on small portable objects such as stones and pieces of bone and antler. Thousands of examples are known. A number of these are in the form of series of marks, and several were subjected to meticulous microscopic analysis by the American researcher Alexander Marshack. He concluded that the marks were not a simple decoration but carefully accumulated, often using different tools and techniques, over a period of time.
One famous example is part of an eagle’s wing discovered in a cave at Abri Blanchard in the Dordogne valley, France. Dated to around 30,000 B.C.E., it contains a series of notched marks in a serpentine pattern. Mar-shack proposed that these represent a tally of days. The assumption is that the earliest marks are those in the center of the pattern, and that marks were accumulated around existing ones. By following the line outwards and back and forth, we discover that there are about fifteen marks in each sweep before the direction changes.
The most prominent astronomical cycle is the phase cycle of the moon. In addition to being readily observable, it coincides with the female menstrual cycle. The moon’s phase cycle is certainly recognized among modern hunter-gatherer groups, although not necessarily universally (an apparent exception being Australian Aboriginals). The period of the lunar phase cycle (synodic month) is between twenty-nine and thirty days, so one interpretation of the Abri Blanchard bone is that it represents a tally in which the days of the waxing moon are marked off in one direction and those of the waning moon in the other; in other words it forms a rudimentary lunar calendar, maintained for about two months. Marshack suggested a similar lunar-calendar interpretation for patterns on a number of other Upper Palaeolithic portable artifacts.
Several criticisms can be made of the interpretation of the Abri Blanchard bone as a lunar calendar. Two assumptions upon which it rests are that the number of marks between each “turn” in the line was significant and, second, that this represented the period between successive new or full moons. How easy might it be to fit other explanations? How can we judge a particular interpretation against the alternatives? At least one of the turns is not sharp, which gives greater flexibility in interpretation. Two of the lines could easily be interpreted as separate straight lines rather than part of the serpentine pattern. And there is the question of what exactly we mean by “new moon”: there is a one- or two-day period each month when the moon is not visible at all (astronomical new moon occurs in the middle of this), but it is the first reappearance of the crescent moon in the evening sky (the popular concept of “new moon”) that is the most significant event in visual terms, widely recognized even in the today’s world, from small indigenous groups to major religious calendars. Finally, although some of the marks appear round and others crescent-shaped, there is no apparent correlation between the shape of the marks themselves and the lunar phases.