Archaeological excavations carried out at Turó del Calvari (Tarragona, Spain) have revealed a protohistoric building interpreted as one of the earliest enclosures of power operating during the Early Iron Age in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. The structure is exceptional in several respects: the techniques of construction, the materials used, and the topographic situation. The building is perfectly integrated in the landscape and has an exquisite geometrical design, with measurement units based on the Iberian foot. The intended beauty in having used the golden ratio in its construction and an orientation that is both stellar and solar demonstrates the existence at that time of a complete series of mechanisms of representation and territorial control. This was based on the use of rituals and feasts as elements of political cohesion by an emergent elite within a process that reproduced a scaled-down Mediterranean cultural system in an indigenous space.

Like other features of the surrounding world, objects and events perceived in the sky were used to mediate between humans and specific meanings acquired in relation to them. Celestial bodies were often believed to act like human agents. In this way the skies became part of the social field of human beings—a heterogeneous space in which all important types of relationships could happen. For this reason, the study of the role celestial lore and skywatching played in human populations is a task appropriate to cultural astronomers rather than to astrophysicists or historians of science.

The 2012 Mayan calendar prophecies have attracted considerable popular interest, thought little academic attention. Following the papers presented in the 2012 Session at the conference, I suggest that the ‘2012 phenomenon’ is the latest in a historic series of millenarian movements that form an established part of Christian culture. The 2012 prophecies, while Christian in neither tone nor affiliation, may be contextualised within secularised versions of western millenarianism as a whole. My purpose is to create a framework for analysis, placing the 2012 phenomenon within a wider cultural milieu and analysing its texts. I suggest that Karl Popper's paradoxical theory of historicism and activism, and the model of pre-versus post-millenarianism, may both provide means of analysing competing forms of 2012 prophecy.

Phnom Rung was a Khmer-style Hindu temple complex. It was built in sandstone and laterite on the rim of an extinct volcano between the 10th and 13th centuries. At the beginning, the sanctuary was built as a dedication to Shiva. Following the abandonment of Phnom Rung (which was unrecorded) the sanctuary fell into ruin, and it was not until 1971 that it was restored using anastylosis. Phnom Rung Historical Park, along with the other temples Phimai and Muang Tum, have been on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage since 2004.

Walking from the eastern side (front) to the western side of Phnom Rung takes the visitor through 15 doorways—those of the inner cloisters, the annex, the principal tower, and the inner sanctum. The centers of these doorways are perfectly aligned, with an azimuth of 84.5°. Every year thousands of people from Thailand and around the world travel to Phnom Rung to see the sun rising through its all of its 15 doorways. This event happens only twice a year, at the beginning of April and the beginning of September. Sunsets can also be seen through the doorways, in March and October. Each pair of sunrise-sunset events is separated by one lunar month.

The possible meaning of this event has been investigated by both archaeologists and astronomers. Nothing is recorded about sunrise or sunset among the inscriptions at the site. Another issue is that the many and various structures remain within the complex, showing that constructions in this area spanned several centuries. However, it seems that the overall layout did have a significance, both astronomical and religious.

Speculation about what ancient Maya texts have to say about 2012 is becoming a global phenomenon in popular culture. This speculation, largely apocalyptic, is more often based on acquaintance with historical Western interpretations than on familiarity with the texts themselves and their cultural contexts. This paper approaches the 2012 phenomenon through close readings of Maya texts and images considered within the contexts of historical and contemporary Maya culture and Western scholarship. It focuses on images of mythological events depicted on two Late Classic Maya vessels: the ‘Vase of the Seven Gods’ (Kerr no. 2796) and the ‘Vase of the Eleven Gods’ (Kerr no. 7750). These images are interpreted as representing deities, gathered in ‘cosmogonic conclave’, preparing to re-create the world with their sacrifices at the last completion of a great cycle and the beginning of a new 5,125-year 13-Bakˈtun Maya ‘Long Count’. The rites of passage are presided over by an enigmatic Venus-warrior/sacrificer deity previously known only as God L. God L's principal name and nature had remained undeciphered and his identity obscure until the author's researches resulted in the decipherment and ‘reading’ presented here. This study offers an explication of why God L, whom the author has demonstrated is the Maya god of tobacco among his many aspects, takes the senior role in presiding over these 13-Bakˈtun completion rituals and why it is reasonable to hypothesize that the same entities would be back for the fulfillment of the present cycle in 2012.

The paper deals with the cult of the daughters of the mythical king of Athens, Erechtheus, who lived on the Acropolis. This myth establishes the deceased daughters as goddesses who are owed cult by the Athenians. It further equates them with the Hyades, a prominent star cluster in the constellation of Taurus, which they form after their deaths. We examine here the possibility that this myth not only narrates the placement of the girls after their death in the sky in the form of the Hyades, but also may have bound the constellation to certain festivals held on the Acropolis, which through their aetiological myths were connected to the daughters of Erechtheus and in which the participation of young girls (Arrhephoroi) was important. To explicate this cult, we explore its context on the Acropolis as fully as possible, through the visual arts, the literary myth, the festival calendar, and the natural landscape and night-sky, so as to determine whether the movement of the constellation of the Hyades was indeed visible from the Acropolis during the time when the young maiden cult rites were performed on the hill.

The small community of the Tomárâho, an ethnic group culturally derived from the Zamucos, have become known in the South American and world anthropological scenario in recent times. This group, far from the banks of the Paraguay river, remained concealed from organized modern societies for many years. Like any other groups of people in close contact with nature, the Tomárâho developed a profound and rich world-view which parallels other more widely researched aboriginal cultures as well as showing distinctive features of their own. This is also apparent in their imagery of the sky and of the characters that are closely connected with the celestial sphere.

This paper is based on the lengthy anthropological studies of G. Sequera. We have recently undertaken a project to carry out a detailed analysis of the different astronomical elements present in the imagined sky of the Tomárâho and other Chamacoco ethnic groups. We will briefly review some aspects of this aboriginal culture: places where they live, regions of influence in the past, their linguistic family, their living habits and how the advancement of civilization affected their culture and survival. We will later mention the fieldwork carried out for decades and some of the existing studies and publications. We will also make a brief description of the methodology of this work and special anthropological practices. Last but not least, we will focus on the Tomárâho conception of the sky and describe the research work we have been doing in recent times.

The aim of this work is to review and expand upon the model proposed by Father José Domingo Duquesne de la Madrid (1745–1821) regarding the calendar of the pre-Columbian Muisca culture of central Colombia. This model was dismissed by scholars in the late 19th century when it was called just a simple invention of a clergyman; however, a detailed analysis shows that his interpretation of the calendar was based on genuine ethnographic information. According to Duquesne, this calendar was based on a series of moons whose multiples are 5, 20 and 37. These multiples generate time series that can be comparable to our years (37 moons), centuries (740 moons, or 59.8 years) and millennia (14800 moons or 1196 years). According to the information provided, these long time spans can be tracked up to a period of 74000 moons (5978 years). The work of Duquesne provides us some clues about the state of timekeeping traditions in pre-Columbian societies of the Intermediate Area.

The megalithic monuments of Arles–Fontvieille appear to have been deliberately constructed such that a ray of the setting sun on and around the equinox penetrates the subterranean chamber producing a spectacular light-and-shadow hierophany. Moreover, at one of the sites there is evidence in the form of rock art that observations were also being made of heliacal rising and settings, possibly of both the Pleiades and Orion. The equinox hierophany has been documented at three of the four intact monuments of the group. This phenomenon was probably exploited for sacred ritualistic purposes related to seasonal change and timekeeping by the agricultural people who built the monuments. This evidence has significant importance for understanding these monuments in the context of European megalithism and the wider European Neolithic as well as for understanding their cosmological role within the society that built them.

While celebrating the International Year of Astronomy 2009, some government and private institutions in Bolivia pointed out the need to raise a petition to UNESCO and the IAU aimed at declaring the monument known as ‘La Horca del Inca’ (The Inca's Gallows) to be an astronomical World Heritage Site. The request was made because La Horca del Inca was assumed to be a pre-Columbian astronomical observatory. In this paper we analyze the reliability of that postulate through a twofold approach: 1) by examining the most relevant publications, both archaeological and astronomical, that conclude that the site was indeed a pre-Columbian astronomical observatory; and 2) by independently visiting and surveying the monument and its surrounding area.

This personal perspective on the development of archaeoastronomy over the last thirty years focuses on interpretative and methodological issues, picking up for example from the debate between Schaefer and Aveni at Oxford VII. How far we have actually progressed in the last three decades? Are we at last starting to achieve the correct fusion between the social science questions that our discipline addresses and the ‘hard science’ methods that are often involved in tackling them? In this paper I argue that the need for our hypotheses to be solidly grounded in social theory, which has rightly been recognised by most archaeoastronomers in recent years, is not an excuse for avoiding the need to be scientifically rigorous in assessing them against the actual evidence. I conclude that identifying robust methodologies for weighing together the different types of data with which the cultural astronomer is faced in different sitations, so as to infer the ‘best’ interpretation, remains at once the most challenging and the most pressing issue facing our ‘interdiscipline’ in the future.

This paper focuses on the Ticuna interpretation of the iconography inscribed on ritual artifacts collected by the ethnographer Curt Nimuendaju in the early 1940s. The Ticuna describe certain celestial bodies depicted in the iconography of artifacts that are used in the Ticuna girls' puberty festival as ‘Worecü stars’. They relate these stars to various aspects of indigenous mythology expressed in ritual songs and speeches about worecü, a Ticuna word meaning the girl for whom the initiation is being performed. I hold that by incorporating Ticuna mediations into anthropological analysis we enrich this analysis by associating iconic images with mythical meanings transmitted generation by generation through ritual performances in which mythical thinking has the persuasive force of prescriptive action. In thinking about how the Ticuna read the iconography I avoid seeking a strict correlation between Western scientific explanations and the Ticuna's own knowledge about a special star known by them as the Woramacüri star. However, by postulating an association between the Worecü stars and the planets, we can examine the possibility that the Woramacüri Star is correlated with a particular planet at certain times, in specific circumstances.

This essay introduces the papers from the specially organized session on the theme ‘The 2012 phenomenon: Maya calendar, astronomy, and apocalypticism in the worlds of scholarship and popular culture’. The papers that follow address this topical theme in the contexts of Maya and Western cultures as well as academic and popular cultures.

For more than 50,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated celestial events into their oral traditions and used the motions of celestial bodies for navigation, time-keeping, food economics, and social structure. In this paper, we explore the ways in which Aboriginal people made careful observations of the sky, measurements of celestial bodies, and incorporated astronomical events into complex oral traditions by searching for written records of time-keeping using celestial bodies, the use of rising and setting stars as indicators of special events, recorded observations of variable stars, the solar cycle, and lunar phases (including ocean tides and eclipses) in oral tradition, as well as astronomical measurements of the equinox, solstice, and cardinal points.

In this essay we present a tentative archaeoastronomical analysis of the Moxos' Lagoons, a controversial and huge geographical network in the landscape of the Bolivian Amazon. In the late 1990s, a preliminary analysis of the orientation of a comprehensive and statistically significant number of lagoons showed that only human action could explain the peculiarities of their geometry, and especially their orientation according to a main axis aligned to an azimuth of 50° and its complementary angle. Since then, there has been an open debate on how these orientations could have been determined in practice. The absence of distinctive geographical features on the horizon strongly suggests that this peculiar pattern must have an astronomical justification. This short report presents a first approximation to the problem, suggesting that the lagoons could have been deliberately orientated in accordance with certain stellar positions which may have marked selected moments in the local climatic or economic cycle, a fact that could be corroborated by ethnohistoric references. The implications for new ethnographical research in the region are self-evident.

This article presents three case studies of the role of astronomy within the culture of Late Babylonian Uruk. I argue that in order to fully understand Babylonian astronomy it is necessary to combine technical study of astronomical cuneiform texts with wider cultural study of Babylonian scholarship, archival practice and society.

Among the Western Tobas of the province of Formosa, Argentina, the asterism called Dapi'chi (the Pleiades) is highly important. Traditionally, it is related to the start of the annual cycle and it is also a very significant figure in terms of its symbolic meaning. In fact, this celestial representation offers a range of insights connected to winter frosts, a type of air carnation (Tillandsia spp.–Bromeliaceae) and also to the role of the warrior.

The study of orientations is a key ingredient in most archaeoastronomical research. Typically, a number of synchronistic monuments belonging to a given culture or cultural horizon are measured and studied in order to see if they share a similar orientation. If an astronomical orientation appears, we may apply other archaeoastronomical procedures to justify further conclusions.

On a few occasions we perform studies that compare, for a given site, monuments of different periods. At most two or three periods are usually compared to verify persistence or to check for evolution in customs of orientation. We argue here that it would also be interesting to study orientations from a diachronic point of view, in order to investigate the persistence/evolution of this particular conception of space through time.

Mérida (Extremadura, Spain) and the neighbouring areas present a rich and highly interesting monumental heritage spanning from the Neolithic to the present, with monuments belonging to several different periods and cultures.

In the present study we will review the orientation of the monuments in that area. We will present some conclusions on the evolution/persistence of customs of orientation and value the applicability of this method to other areas.

The towers, plazas, and fortified temple of Chankillo are analyzed within the context of Central Andean culture. Throughout the cultural area, staircases were apparently the scenes of ritual procession, perhaps mimicking shamanic-like movement between the three worlds. The double stairways of the thirteen towers of Chankillo may have been designed for ritual movement. The gradual rotation of the successively higher towers suggests shamanic ascent between the terrestrial and solar realms. The major astronomical feature of Chankillo is its solar axis, oriented to December solstice sunrise and June solstice sunset. Along this axis, to the east and west of the towers, there are prominent plazas in which public ceremonies may have been staged, particularly at the time of June solstice sunset. Celebrants who reached the highest tower on sunset of June solstice would have been silhouetted by the setting sun as viewed by spectators in the eastern plaza just below the tower. In the large plaza west of the towers, a similar public ceremony could have been associated with setting of the June solstice sun over the Temple of the Pillars to the west of the towers. The thirteen towers may have been stations of the moon for public ceremonies during the bright half of the lunar cycle. The presence of Spondylus shells suggests lunar ritual. The duality of private/public ritual, evident at Chavín and elsewhere, may have been present at Chankillo where public ceremonies may been observed from the plazas, while more restricted ceremonies may have occurred behind the walls of the fortified temple. If a horizon calendar had been developed using the profiles of the thirteen towers, it appears to have been an unintended consequence of the initial design of the towers. The monumental size of the towers is incommensurate with the small putative observing stations. The June solstice sun misses the lowest tower by 7 solar diameters, which would have been an unacceptable error if the tower had been built originally to mark June solstice. Another unsatisfactory feature would have been the equal spacing of the towers. If a meaningful calendar had been desired that marked divisions of the year perhaps based upon the moon, it would have involve variable spacing of the towers, with the largest spacing around equinox.

We provide a history and description of the Inca archaeological complex of Choquequirao, located high on a narrow ridge above the Apurimac River in a remote region of the Vilcabamba of Peru. We suggest that Choquequirao was built as a royal estate during the late 15th century by the Inca ruler, Topa Inca Yupanki, modeled after Machu Picchu. It was built in part by workers imported from Cachapoyas in Northern Peru. The site has alignments with the June and December solstices suggesting a strong solar focus and year-round ceremonial activities. A large truncated hill served as a ceremonial platform or ushnu. The platform was accessed through a double-jamb entranceway, indicating that passage was probably limited to those of high status. We suspect Choquequirao functioned as a ceremonial center. It shares with Machu Picchu the remoteness, ‘other worldliness’, and liminality that are found in many pilgrimage centers of the world. Though Choquequirao, high above the Apurimac River, has a location that is equally as dramatic as Machu Picchu, it lacks the formable geological material required to create imperial-style monumental structures and shaped stone huacas. Choquequirao was occupied during the early colonial years by the Neo-Inca, and was abandoned sometime after the death of the last Inca in 1572. It is a fascinating puzzle that Spanish travelers of the time apparently never reached or described this major Inca complex, which was the most impressive in the Vilcabamba. Somehow, the Inca managed to keep it secret although relatives and others journeyed back and forth to colonial Cusco.