In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ethnographers have the responsibility of recording all aspects of the culture of a particular people. That, of course, is an impossible task, for any human culture is far too complex ever to be captured or understood in toto, even by the people who live in it. Yet most of the available ethnographic information for the societies of the world has been gathered and recorded by individuals who were willing to undertake the impossible task. One of the problems that comes with individual recording, though, is that each ethnography re®ects the knowledge and interests of the ethnographer. This inevitable constraint on understanding the culture of peoples now gone or forever altered means that there are omissions in the presentation. A major omission in most ethnographies is the local understanding of celestial phenomena , or ethnoastronomy. The reason for this is simple—it is fair to say that few ethnographers were particularly interested in astronomy, and without a conscious concern and a certain amount of knowledge, they were unlikely to ask questions that would elicit astronomical information. The result is that most ethnoastronomical lore has been captured only incidentally in the recording of religious beliefs, rituals, and oral traditions. Students of culture in recent years have attempted to collect from informants and recover from the recorded material enough information to permit the reconstruction of the astronomical understanding of particular societies. A number of studies of this nature have been published in the past two decades. As with ethnographies in general, the best approach is to study each society one at a time, because an astronomical system is peculiar to the individual society. In doing this, there has been an emphasis on tribes of the Southwest and West, but a 1 Four Ethnoastronomies number of studies have been made of the ethnoastronomies of people who are part of the focal area for this volume, the Eastern Woodlands and Plains. A few of them will be summarized in this chapter to provide a sense of how various constellations are understood and how they function in the society. This brief introduction will also illustrate the important fact that ethnoastronomies are individualized , differing even from those of close neighbors in various ways. The single best ethnoastronomical study for North America is a study of the beliefs of the most astronomically oriented people known, the Skidi Pawnee. Published in 1982, Chamberlain’s When Stars Came Down to Earth: Cosmology of the Skidi Pawnee Indians of North America is a massive study. Utilizing multiple ethnographic sources, including ritual and mythological records from more than a century of contact, Von Del Chamberlain brought together the lore and usages of the Skidi, then undertook to identify the asterisms referred to in the records. Even with his outstanding detective work, the Pawnee ethnoastronomy is not and can never be complete, because at times Chamberlain simply had to admit defeat or speculate about an identi¤cation. It is an impressive piece of work, and a summary of its conclusions ought to be this book’s ¤rst demonstration of ethnoastronomers at work. It isn’t, however—even a summary of Chamberlain’s book is daunting, and the reader should not be deprived of the excitement of examining the work directly. Instead, a survey of the astronomical lore of the Arikara will be offered. They are close kin of the Skidi Pawnee, but the histories of the two groups have been different for several centuries. In recent years Douglas R. Parks has accomplished a major collecting task, recording myths and tales from modern Arikaras, in some cases descendants of people who were interviewed a century ago (Parks 1991, 1996). Although the astronomical lore is studied piecemeal in later chapters of this book, Parks’s publications contain most of the relevant information, and their ethnoastronomy will be summarized here. That survey will be followed by even shorter summaries of a Crow ethnoastronomy, an older Cherokee study, and an ethnographic entry for the Creeks (respectively, McCleary 1997, Hagar 1906, and Swanton 1928a; see Figure 1.1 for locations of these tribes). Arikara By the beginning of the 20th century the Arikara had reached the nadir of their population size. In 1905 they numbered only 37, a shocking reduction from an estimated 10,000 only two centuries before. Continuing warfare with the Sioux and smallpox epidemics from the whites had taken their toll. It is impossible to assess the degree of the cultural loss the Arikara sustained with their population loss, but it was still possible in...

Share