Established: 2021
Renewed:
Contact: J. Nicolas Balbi (nicolasbalbi@outlook.com.ar)
Cesar Gonzalez García (Vicechairman)
Javier Mejuto (Secretary)
Hans Martz de la Vega (Treasurer)
One of the aspects of the relationship between material archaeology and cultural astronomy has been the interconnection between heavenly bodies and humans. By studying the stars and their relationship with ancient constructions, we can learn about the relationships that past human societies had with the celestial bodies and the phenomena. Understanding the sky in this way is just one way to relate human experience to the celestial landscape. Astronomically aligned constructions or topographic features provided the places where the connections between humans and the landscape were created and recreated. The sky, clouds, rain, wind, earth, and the people themselves, form a web of connections that shape their actions in the world. From our point of view, places with celestial connections have generated new assemblages (the term borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari) of objects, human and non-human, revealing various aspects of ancient cultures. Examination of these principles should enable archaeologists and cultural astronomers to understand ancient cultures and address questions about their personality, landscapes and celestial landscapes.
Our proposal is to study landscapes from different perspectives and to give them a cultural meaning.
Adding our conclusions in each of these study areas, we will attempt an ontological understanding of the proposed archaeological context. We will use the different disciplines to try to reach their level of understanding: Archaeology, Anthropology, Astronomy, Geography, Philosophy and History. Each of these areas of study has a role to play in understanding an archaeological context and the relationship between the sky, and the material archaeology. Our investigative questions are:
Is it possible to understand how people lived in their environment by observing and studying the landscape with astronomy or any other aspect of an archaeological site?
What is the relationship between all these elements and the culture of the human beings that inhabit it?
Why does the study of astronomy and the landscape allow us to add new dimensions to our archaeological work?
How does technology and new techniques allow us to understand the known data?
What is the ontological relationship between people and their environment?
Only by examining all the possible areas of the study can we understand how people interacted with their landscape and perhaps allow us to appreciate their culture and rituals to a greater depth. Our goal is to achieve a presentation of archaeological study with multidisciplinary contributions, in which archaeological research is complemented with the contribution of other sciences and study methods in the aforementioned areas.