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

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