Native American Astronomy

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Native American Astronomy

For many years astronomers and people alike have constantly heard about the observations and records of the Chinese and Europeans. No other culture can provide as much information as that gathered by the Chinese and Europeans, but there are many other cultures that observed and recorded the night sky, one of those being the Native Americans. During the last fifteen to twenty years archaeoastronomers have uncovered much concerning the beliefs and records of Native Americans. Unfortunately, the methods of keeping records of astronomical events were not as straight forward as the Chinese and Europeans. The Native Americans had to use what they could to record what they observed. Their records were found on rock and cave drawings, stick notching, beadwork, pictures on animal skins and story telling. One of the few dateable events among the various records of Native Americans was the 1833 appearance of the Leonid meteor shower.
The most obvious accounts of the Leonid storm appear among the various bands
of the Sioux of the North American plains. The Sioux kept records called “winter
counts,” which were a chronological pictographic account of each year painted on animal
skin. In 1984 Von Del Chamberlain listed the astronomical references for 50 Sioux, forty
five out of fifty referred to an intense meteor shower during 1833/1834. He also listed
nineteen winter counts kept by other plains Indian tribes, fourteen of which referred to
the Leonid storm.
The Leonids also appear among the Maricopa, who used calendar sticks with notches to represent the passage of a year, with the owner of the stick remembering the events. The owner of one stick claimed records had been kept that way “since the stars fell.” The first notch on the stick represented 1833. A member of the Papago, named Kutox, was born around 1847 or 1848. He claimed that 14 years prior to his birth “the stars rained all over the sky.”
A less obvious Leonid reference was found in a journal kept by Alexander M. Stephen, which detailed his visit with the Hopi Indians and mentions a talk he had
With Old Djasjini on December 11, 1892. That Hopi Indian said, “How old am I? Fifty,
maybe a hundred years, I cannot tell. When I was a young boy eight or ten years there
was a great comet in the sky and at night all the above was full of shooting stars.
(Stephen 37). During the lifetime of Old Djasini there was never a great comet and a sky
full of meteors in the same year, but h...

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