Resumo
The Sahrawis (original inhabitants of Western Sahara) are a traditional bedouin society descendant of the Arab tribe Beni Hassan, that migrated from Yemen and expanded throughout the Western Sahara desert in the early Middle Ages (Norris, 1963). The starting of Spanish presence in the area of Western Sahara reorganized the territory and introduced appreciable changes in land use, mobility and production that had a strong impact in the traditional nomadic ways of life. Decades later, these were terribly affected by the starting of the conflict and war with Morocco in 1975, that forced thousands of people to settle in refugee camps in Algeria, where they still resist (Figure 1). Great part of the memory of these peoples is embedded in their relation to the sky -what they observed, when, who, with which purpose and, since this wisdom was mostly transmitted orally, it is seriously threatened by the forced abandonment of their land and practices. The preservation of all this wisdom about the sky is one of the main aims of project ‘Amanar: Under the same sky’, a science education initiative of Galileo Mobile (Benítez Herrera and Rivero González, 2020). In addition to educational activities, Amanar has two further aims: to collect and record the oral tradition of ancestral astronomical knowledge of the Sahrawi people, and to preserve this knowledge for future generations. From the first visit to the camps in 2019, several persons were interviewed (Figure 2) and, fortunately, this labour could continue during the Covid-19 pandemic by the creation of an Amanar team of Sahrawi researchers living in the camps.The information obtained at the moment is very interesting since it suggests the presence of a reminiscence of the Arab origin of the Sahrawis in their relation with the sky, in their astronomy (Forcada Noges, 1993). In this work we present an overview of the project in the last years, the future perspectives and the main results of a research that has involved the local population in the collection and preservation of their own memory in the sky.
Palabras chave
Cultural astronomy. Archaeoastronomy. Ethnoastronomy.