Calendars, Symbols and Orientations: Legacies of Astronomy in Culture : Proceedings of the 9th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC), The Old Observatory, Stockholm, 27-30 August 2001This, the proceedings of the 9th annual meeting of SEAC held in Stockholm in 2001, contains twenty-four papers on subjects ranging from Swedish calendar staffs to Ramesside star clocks, and from a possible 32,000-year old calendrical artefact in Germany to folk calendars in twentieth-century Lithuania and Bulgaria. The volume is divided into five main sections: archaeoastronomical theory; calendars in artefacts, folklore and literature; history and iconography of the constellations; astronomy in art, mythology, and literature; and orientations and their interpretations. Even the familiar topic of orientations receives an unusually wide geographical coverage, including megalithic monuments in the Netherlands, Siberia, and Algeria, a Minoan peak sanctuary, and the layout of ancient Carthage. |
Contents
Stanislaw Iwaniszewski The erratic ways of studying astronomy in culture | 7 |
Göran Henriksson The pagan Great Midwinter Sacrifice and the royal mounds at Old Uppsala | 15 |
Jonas Vaiškūnas Some aspects of Lithuanian folk observations of the sun during the summer | 33 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
according alignments ancient Aratus Archaeoastronomy archaeological Arcturus astronomical axis azimuth Belmonte birds Blomberg Boötes Bronze Age Carpathian Basin Carthage celestial Chrétien circumpolar comput computus constellation Crete cult culture Dacians décan direction Disting Dumuzi eclipse Egyptian eight-year cycle equinox Esteban excavators festival full moon Gilgameš goulets Greek Heel Stone heliacal setting Henriksson horizon hunebedden interpretation Ištar kouros kurgans kurgans with moustaches Lithuanian lunar lunisolar calendar major standstill means Midwinter Sacrifice Minoan mnit monuments mound myths Neolithic observations Observatory Old Uppsala orientation Orion Orphic Palaikastro passage passage graves peak sanctuaries period Petsophas phenomena Punic Pyrgos Ramesside rising and setting ritual Roman ropes runes runic staffs sb3 n sb3 sb3w sb3wy scholars SEAC siècle slabs solar spdt star clocks Stonehenge summer solstice sunrise sunset Sweden Swedish Swty nt symbols temples tradition Traostalos Ursa Major Venus winter solstice