"Bridging the Gap" through Australian Cultural Astronomy

Abstract

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