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“The lights in the sky are stars,” proclaimed the title of a wonderful science¤ction novel I read when I was young.1 As the years went by and my perspective became more dominated by the study of folklore and anthropology, I realized this assertion was only one option. From a human viewpoint, the lights in the sky are whatever we humans say they are. Through the centuries we have produced a wide variety of explanations and images to make sense of the lights in the sky. This book is about those lights in the sky. The focus is on ancient Native Americans and the ways they identi¤ed and used the lights in the sky. It is not about their scienti¤c understandings, although their empiricism is worth studying . Some years ago, sparked by an abiding interest in how Native Americans interpret the skies, I attended a conference on the subdiscipline termed “archaeoastronomy .” Although I had read a number of books and articles by the scholars in the ¤eld, many of whom were present, I had not realized that our interests were not quite the same until I listened to the papers. Their primary interest seemed to focus on the ways in which ancient people were early scientists. The scholars noted their early observations of the celestial world and the applications of their insights to human life. Such issues as the ways in which the annual movement of the sun along the eastern horizon produced solar calendars and the different alignments of human architecture to replicate stellar patterns were popular topics for discussion and exploration. The fascination was with ancient humans as early scientists, a worthy area of investigation and one deserving the portmanteau word archaeoastronomy. But it is not my interest. What I want to know is how many astronomical “systems” exist in native Introduction North America. At that conference I asked several scholars the question “How many astronomies are there in North America?” This question is on a par with “How many types of creation myths exist in North America?” (There are eight; Rooth 1957.) My simple question brought conversation to a halt. The answer, it turned out, is that no one has ever tried to produce a comprehensive listing of Native American beliefs about the stars and separate them into coherent groups. Several scholars speculated that the task is probably too complex to produce anything more than ambiguity. This book is the test of that skeptical view. The problem probed is my simple question: How many astronomies are there in Native America of the Eastern Woodlands and Plains? The approach is by constellations. The lights in the sky are stars, but those lights also make pictures. The pictures are not self-explanatory, though. They are in the mind’s eye of the beholder and his or her society. Where one society sees a human with a belt and sword, another may see a hand. One group’s bear can be another group’s stretcher. Constellation identi¤cations have the additional virtue of longevity. They probably began as story, but a society may remember the identi¤cation of a given constellation—a name—long after the story is no longer told or has even been forgotten. How many modern Americans can tell the story of Orion? Surely far fewer than can identify the constellation of Orion. Approaching the identi¤cation of prehistoric groupings of tribes by constellation similarities also has the virtue of simplicity. Attempting to compare Native American societies on the basis of complete astronomical knowledge is a hopeless endeavor for several reasons. Few ethnographers collected the astronomical wisdom of their informants, usually for the simple reason that they did not deem that information as important as the other topics they asked about. Then, too, few informants were likely to volunteer that information freely, whether as stories or as beliefs, after they perceived that their views were considered incorrect in the Western worldview. Every so often a researcher is able to present an unexpected body of astronomical knowledge, even from an almost extinct tribal group, by reconstructing the knowledge on the basis of a few comments, memories, and linguistic relics, as in the recent case of an Ofo astronomical calendrical system (King and Ventura 1999). But such cases are rare—too few to offer much hope of comparative analysis, especially if they do not offer information about constellations . Thinking about the Cosmos The issue of multiple astronomies is a complex problem. Two important areas of study...

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