Exploring Archaeoastronomy: A History of its Relationship with Archaeology and Esotericism

Archaeoastronomy and archaeology are two distinct fields of study that examine the cultural aspect of societies, but from different perspectives. Archaeoastronomy seeks to discover how the impact of the skyscape is materialised in culture, while archaeology examines all aspects of culture but rarely considers the sky. Archaeoastronomy has been marginalised due to its history, esoteric thought, and pseudoscientific theories, but it has an unbroken lineage from the late 19th century to the present. Archaeoastronomy has not been consistently titled, and its academic status has always been unclear. This volume examines how these different variants came about and considers archaeoastronomy's relationship with archaeology and its appropriation by esotericism.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 15 February 2022
Publisher: Oxbow Books

Archaeoastronomy and archaeology are two distinct fields of study that examine the cultural aspect of societies from different perspectives. Archaeoastronomy seeks to discover how the impact of the skyscape is materialized in culture, by alignments to celestial events or sky-based symbolism. However, archaeology's approach examines all aspects of culture, but rarely considers the sky. Despite this omission, archaeology is the dominant discipline while archaeoastronomy is relegated to the sidelines. The reasons for archaeoastronomys marginalized status may be found by assessing its history. For such an exploration to be useful, archaeoastronomy cannot just be investigated in a vacuum but must be contextualized by exploring other contemporaneous developments, particularly in archaeology. On the periphery of both, there are various strands of esoteric thought and pseudoscientific theories which paint an alternative view of monumental remains and these also play a part in the background. The discipline of archaeology has had an unbroken lineage from the late 19th-century to the present. On the other hand, archaeoastronomy has not been consistently titled, having adopted various different names such as alignment studies, orientation theory, astro-archaeology, megalithic science, archaeotopography, archaeoastronomy and cultural astronomy: names which depict variants of its methods and theory, sometimes in tandem with those of archaeology and sometimes in opposition. Similarly, its academic status has always been unclear, so to bring it closer to archaeology there was a proposal in 2015 to integrate archaeoastronomy research with that of archaeology and call it skyscape archaeology. This volume examines how all these different variants came about and consider archaeoas.

Dimension: 240 x 170 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781789257861