Thursday, August 27, 2015

Anasazi Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art in St. George Ivins Utah as Astronomy: A Sky Map from Serpens Cauda to Aquila ca. 1000 B.C. at the Emergence of the Early Basketmaker Era II

This posting presents an astronomical decipherment of Anasazi Ridge Rock Art (Anasazi means "Ancestral Pueblo") in the State of Utah, USA, as located on the Tempi'po'op Trail, Santa Clara River Reserve, St. George, Ivins. See the photograph at that link or the one by the Bureau of Land Management at http://www.blm.gov/style/medialib/blm/ut/st__george_fo/more/cultural/general_rock_art.Par.43712.Image.-1.-1.1.gif or the one at Utah Petroglyphs at http://utahpetroglyphs.org/?p=21.

We decipher that rock art here as a sky map of the heavens reaching from the stars of Serpens Cauda at the far left of the pictographs to the stars of Aquila at the far right, i.e. a full 360° "round" of the starry sky.

The stars are represented as anthropomorphic and other figures of various kinds. If the left and right edges of the sky map are both seen to correspond to the Winter Solstice line (colure), then this sky map would appear to date to ca. 1000 B.C., around the time of the emergence of the Early Basketmaker Era II, the begin of the Post-Archaic Period marked by the introduction of cultivated squash and maize.

Why do we focus on the left and right edges of the pictographs? One must always assume that the ancients had a reason for depicting a specific portion of the sky in a particular manner, and we have found that it generally relates to calendric considerations, especially the marking of Solstices and Equinoxes or similar astronomical parameters in a given era.

Utah St. George Ivins Anasazi Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art
A Sky Map from Serpens Cauda to Aquila ca. 1000 B.C.
at the Emergence of the Early Basketmaker Era II
i.e. one circuit of the stars of the heavens
(click on the graphic to see the image in larger size)


The above decipherment finds support in our next posting which presents our decipherment of rock art from British Columbia, Canada, which has some similar notation as above, and has simplified virtually the entire above sky map into elementary stick figures of the type found above for Gemini.

We are particularly pleased that the enabling source (where we first found the rock art) for the next decipherment was attorney John J. Ensminger at the Dog Law Reporter, Reflections on the Society of Dogs and Men, in Berkeley Anthropological Records and the Dogs of the West Coast Tribes, Thursday, April 12, 2012, who, however, we do not know personally and who may not agree at all with our forthcoming interpretation. In any case, Ensminger is surely right that dogs, especially in their importance to hunting, were viewed as very important by the ancients, and hunting rituals may have found their way into descriptions of the stars.

We need here only to refer to our posting Roosevelt Washington Columbia River Rock Inscriptions Now at Horsethief Lake State Park are a Splendid Sky Map ca. 750 B.C. in the Shape of an Animal's Head, or see our postings at http://ancientworldblog.blogspot.com/2013_12_01_archive.html where we write inter alia:
"As I have previously written at Megalithic World:

"[T]he Arabic Bedouins in Egypt, instead of a dragon, saw a circle of camels at heaven's center that was being attacked by hyenas. We can thus understand why the Arabs have a heavenly “"wolf" Al-Dhib (Thuban) where Ptolemy places Draco the dragon. The Arabs did not originally have either dragon or falcon as symbols for heaven’s poles but rather visualized dog-like animals. Thuban (al-Dhib) did not belong to Draco, but rather marked the Arabic center of heaven as either a dog, wolf, jackal or hyena....

The name Edasich for iota-Draconis comes from the Arabic Al Dhih as well as Al Dikh, the dog-like hyena. It is a word which is easily confused with Al Dibh "Wolf" and also with Hebrew Da’ah "falcon-like bird". In the Bible, the same Hebrew word is translated as dragon, snake or jackal.
"

Those are the main historical representations of heaven's center of stars."
THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 131 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America

Anasazi Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art in St. George Ivins Utah as Astronomy: A Sky Map from Serpens Cauda to Aquila ca. 1000 B.C. at the Emergence of the Early Basketmaker Era II

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Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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