4,069 research outputs found
Meteoritics and cosmology among the Aboriginal cultures of Central Australia
The night sky played an important role in the social structure, oral
traditions, and cosmology of the Arrernte and Luritja Aboriginal cultures of
Central Australia. A component of this cosmology relates to meteors,
meteorites, and impact craters. This paper discusses the role of meteoritic
phenomena in Arrernte and Luritja cosmology, showing not only that these groups
incorporated this phenomenon in their cultural traditions, but that their oral
traditions regarding the relationship between meteors, meteorites and impact
structures suggests the Arrernte and Luritja understood that they are directly
related.Comment: Journal of Cosmology, Volume 13, pp. 3743-3753 (2011
Identifying seasonal stars in Kaurna astronomical traditions
Early ethnographers and missionaries recorded Aboriginal languages and oral
traditions across Australia. Their general lack of astronomical training
resulted in misidentifications, transcription errors, and omissions in these
records. Additionally, many of these early records are fragmented. In western
Victoria and southeast South Australia, many astronomical traditions were
recorded, but curiously, some of the brightest stars in the sky were omitted.
Scholars claimed these stars did not feature in Aboriginal traditions. This
under-representation continues to be repeated in the literature, but current
research shows that some of these stars may in fact feature in Aboriginal
traditions and could be seasonal calendar markers. This paper uses established
techniques in cultural astronomy to identify seasonal stars in the traditions
of the Kaurna Aboriginal people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia.Comment: Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, Vol. 18(1), Preprin
The Discovery and History of the Dalgaranga Meteorite Crater, Western Australia
The Dalgaranga meteorite crater, 100 km northeast of Yalgoo, Western
Australia, was one of the first impact structures identified in Australia, the
smallest isolated crater found in Australia, and the only confirmed crater in
the world associated with a mesosiderite projectile. 17 years passed before the
Dalgaranga meteorites were described in the scientific literature and nearly 40
years passed before a survey of the structure was published. The reasons for
the time-gap were never explained and a number of factual errors about the
discovery and early history remain uncorrected in the scientific literature.
Using historical and archival documents, and discussions with people involved
in Dalgaranga research, the reasons for this time gap are explained by a series
of minor misidentifications and coincidences. The age of the crater has yet to
be determined, but using published data, we estimate the projectile mass to be
500-1000 kg.Comment: Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, accepte
"Bridging the Gap" through Australian Cultural Astronomy
For more than 50,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated
celestial events into their oral traditions and used the motions of celestial
bodies for navigation, time-keeping, food economics, and social structure. In
this paper, we explore the ways in which Aboriginal people made careful
observations of the sky, measurements of celestial bodies, and incorporated
astronomical events into complex oral traditions by searching for written
records of time-keeping using celestial bodies, the use of rising and setting
stars as indicators of special events, recorded observations of variable stars,
the solar cycle, and lunar phases (including ocean tides and eclipses) in oral
tradition, as well as astronomical measurements of the equinox, solstice, and
cardinal points.Comment: Proceedings of IAU Symposium 278, Oxford IX International Symposium
on Archaeoastronomy, International Society for Archaeoastronomy & Astronomy
in Culture (ISAAC), held in Lima, Peru, 5-9 January 2011. 9 pages, 4 images,
1 table (Accepted
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