| Abstract from DBPedia | Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures". Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures. It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice. Archaeoastronomy uses a variety of methods to uncover evidence of past practices including archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, statistics and probability, and history. Because these methods are diverse and use data from such different sources, integrating them into a coherent argument has been a long-term difficulty for archaeoastronomers. Archaeoastronomy fills complementary niches in landscape archaeology and cognitive archaeology. Material evidence and its connection to the sky can reveal how a wider landscape can be integrated into beliefs about the cycles of nature, such as Mayan astronomy and its relationship with agriculture. Other examples which have brought together ideas of cognition and landscape include studies of the cosmic order embedded in the roads of settlements. Archaeoastronomy can be applied to all cultures and all time periods. The meanings of the sky vary from culture to culture; nevertheless there are scientific methods which can be applied across cultures when examining ancient beliefs. It is perhaps the need to balance the social and scientific aspects of archaeoastronomy which led Clive Ruggles to describe it as "a field with academic work of high quality at one end but uncontrolled speculation bordering on lunacy at the other".天文考古学（てんもんこうこがく、英語：archaeoastronomy）とは、考古資料に残る天体現象の記録を、天文学の知識を用いて検証する考古学の分野。 また、天文学の立場から斉藤国治が命名した、先史時代・歴史時代の両方の天文現象の記録を扱う「古天文の学問」すなわち古天文学（こてんもんがく、英語：palaeoastronomy）と言う呼称も用いられている。 これにより、たとえば日食や彗星の記録から歴史的事件の日時を割り出すことや、古代の建造物の設計に特定の方角が関連付けられていることなどを明らかにできる。 近年のコンピューターの進歩や天文シミュレーションソフトの充実は、天文考古学を後押ししている。一方で、天文考古学は時として超古代文明論やオカルトなどに悪用されることも多い。 (Source: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Archaeoastronomy) |
