Traveling Between Natural and Human Sciences: A Professional Voyage Toward Cultural Astronomy

The present chapter presents a professional voyage from pure astrophysical work to that of cultural astronomer. As a result, it is demonstrated how a number of mindsets and cognitive frames of the pure natural scientist had to be modified to formulate questions pertinent to the human sciences. Cultural astronomy attempts to comprehend the role of the sky in everyday life of the people. In other words, it is about the relationship between human societies and the sky under which they dwell. This field thus tries to understand how such societies produced, processed, and used their astronomical lore. Examined, relating to an astrophysicist, are which heavenly bodies such societies looked on. However, from the view of a cultural astronomer, understanding how such astronomical lore was generated in ancient or traditional societies is discussed. What was the value it had, what it was used for, how it related to other areas of social life, how it was transmitted, and what the social processes of production, transfer, and diffusion of such astronomical lore were. Explored are ways that such societies thought about the sky, how it was connected to the symbolic world and perhaps their rituals, and how that was reflected in their material culture. Particularly important for this is the research in archaeoastronomy, understood as the study of cultural astronomy from the remains of the built and designed environment.

Cultural astronomy. Temporal cognition. Calendars. Orientation. Astrophysics. Archaeoastronomy.