3 Workshop on Chaco Archaeoastronomy & Living With Mystery
3 Workshop on Chaco Archaeoastronomy & Living With Mystery
Vera
Introduction
This page provides a framework for an interactive workshop on the mysteries surrounding Chaco Canyon as an ancient astronomical site. The project arose out of Vera’s experience growing up in New Mexico, camping at the National Park, gazing at stars and petroglyphs, and never learning about their histories. While Vera grew up hearing that Chaco Canyon was a site where ancient inhabitants practiced astronomy, they found that there is much speculation and a lack of ethnographic evidence to support such a claim. At first, this was a frustrating discovery—Vera had been excited by the prospect of living near a site of ancient astronomy. However, the uncertainty surrounding Chaco Canyon can teach us a valuable lesson on being wary of confirmation bias and coexisting with mystery. The workshop below is heavily influenced by the “Conceptual Workshops” chapter of Jody Valentine’s Experimental Pedagogy (Valentine 2020).
Aims
Introduce participants to the discoveries that led to Chaco Canyon being thought of as an astronomical site, discuss confirmation bias, and consider the frustration and joy of mystery.
Part I: Chaco Canyon archaeoastronomy
Brief introduction to chaco canyon
Chaco Canyon is an archaeological site located in what is known today to be northwestern New Mexico. Between ~850 and 1250 A.D., the canyon served as a center for ancestral Puebloan people. Chaco is comprised of hundreds of house sites, some containing large kivas thought to be constructed for ceremonies. The house sites, together with a system of roads and waterways, formed one of the largest complexes in in the pre 19th-century United States.
TImeline of Archaeoastronomy
In 1964, Gerald Hawkins published a paper proposing that the rocks at Stonehenge were celestially aligned to create an astronomical “computer” to predict eclipses (Hawkins 1964). Archaeologists sought to find other sites in the world displaying similar celestial alignments. According to the National Park Service’s A Brief History of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, the study of archaeoastronomy at Chaco Canyon began when in 1971 Jonathon Raymon proposed that a “corner door at Pueblo Bonito marked the winter solstice.” In the same decade, Ray Williamson suggested that the kiva Casa Rinconada was astronomically aligned. At the summer solstice, sunlight was said to move across an opening in the wall of the kiva. However, the kiva had been reconstructed in the 1930s and it is unknown whether this phenomenon could have been visible previously.
In 1977, Anna Sofaer discovered slabs of rock placed such that sunlight hitting them within two weeks of the summer solstice would appear as a vertical wedge across a spiral petroglyph, and light hitting them on the winter solstice would frame the spiral. In her 1979 paper, Dr. Sofaer concluded that the dagger “shows the times of solstice and equinox in vividly symbolic imagery of light and shadow