Pre-Columbian Astronomy and Latin American

Other great indigenous cities of the Americas also used the pristine order evident in the sky to establish social order on earth. For example, the same general kind of sky symmetry found in Cuzco is apparent at Cahokia, located near where the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers join. Built one thousand years ago, Cahokia was truly a significant economic and political center of great proportions: it controlled the distribution of maize and exotic trade items over a very wide area. Though no chroniclers ever wrote about it and no indigenous writing system survives it, its axis of orientation is cardinal, and mound alignments imply that the sun was a major object of attention. Following and marking out the annual solar path along the horizon, rulers of this economic hub regulated the seasonal flow of goods and services and scheduled the holidays. Their accompanying solar rituals would take place when the local populace and the tributaries of the state turned out in the plaza in front of the great Monks Mound. The same can be said of Ohio's Hopewell, who erected large geometrical earthworks in the first millennium C.E. The axes of these structures, the interior spaces of which, like Great Britain's Stonehenge, were used as places of assembly, are aligned to the solstices and possibly to the stationary points of the moon at the horizon.

North America's Hopi of Arizona were among the many Native American skywatchers. The Hopi marked the solstices, which the elders referred to as "houses" where the sun stops in his travels along the horizon. At these places along the high mesa the priests erected small shrines. There a sun priest in charge of the calendar would deposit prayer sticks as offerings to welcome the sun and to encourage him along on his celestial journey. Some of these shrines have special openings that allow shafts of sunlight to penetrate particular directions, thus serving as another way to mark time. Sometimes the sun priest would gesture to the sun, whirling a shield on which was painted a sun design, to imitate the sun's turning motion, hastening away any malevolent spirits who might impede the great luminary.

Though archaeoastronomers and historians of pre-Columbian astronomy suffer a lack of data relative to their Old World counterparts (the entire corpus of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican texts can easily be accommodated by a coffee table), they are offered some distinct advantages. First, some cultures survive and remain isolated enough from the domination of the West, so that authentic astronomical customs and beliefs can still be retrieved. Second, these living cultures are not so distant in time from their predecessors. Data from these cultures offer inroads into understanding the more complex systems of the past. For example, present-day Quechua-speaking people of South America still chart constellations that date all the way back to Inca times, if not earlier. They still call the Pleiades collca, or "storehouse," as the Inca named them; and alpha and beta Centauri, which are among the few bright stars that may figure in alignments tied to the huacas of Cuzco's ceque system, represent the "Eyes of the Llama." They are part of a parade of dark cloud animal constellations that, along with star-to-star constellations like our own, comprise the Milky Way, which is so much more prominent in the southern than in the northern hemisphere.

What once was a cosmic temple lives on in the early twenty-first century's cosmic house. The Pawnee lodge of the Midwest United States has a smoke-hole through which can be observed certain groups of stars used in storytelling. Likewise, the bell-shaped quarters of the Warao of Venezuela's Orinoco Delta consist of a zenith pole marked out with a yearly calendar calibrated by following the ascension of the solar image at noon. The difference between house and city is but one of size and social complexity. If the home incorporates a design for life and the calendar regulates activity, it is easy to understand why cities such as Cuzco and Tenochtítlan would have been imbued with similar cosmic imagery.

Whether ancient or contemporary, what is striking about pre-Columbian astronomy is that, in stark contrast with the West, all of the sky observations seem to have been acquired with either low technology or no technology. These societies used neither wheel nor gear, and few of them employed metals. Moreover, their mental devices diverge from those of Western astronomy. One hears mention neither of fractions nor of Euclidean geometry. Nor did indigenous Americans raise questions about the rotundity of the earth, or speculate on whether the Sun or any distant celestial body might lie at the center of the universe. This is because the spatial view of the universe—the concept of orbits, maps, deep space—is one of the gifts of the Greeks. Such concepts are culture-bound, and one ought not anticipate that pre-Columbian people would have entertained questions that appear to be common sense to the Westerner. This does not mean that Native Americans did not philosophize or theorize about the world around them. Their speculations were basically human centered. Theirs was not a mechanistic universe that operated as an entity apart from what is thought of as human consciousness.

In sum, studying pre-Columbian skies helps enable a realization of the uniqueness, rather than superiority, of the Western worldview. The sky offered Native Americans a means of solving some of life's basic problems: how to regulate human activity, how to understand and worship the gods, and above all how to know what it means to be a member of society.