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Register a new userReconstructing the Star Knowledge of Aboriginal Tasmanians
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The canopy of stars is a central presence in the daily and spiritual lives of Aboriginal Tasmanians. With the arrival of European colonists, Tasmanian astronomical knowledge and traditions were interrupted and dispersed. Fragments can be found scattered in the ethnographic and historical record throughout the nineteenth century. We draw from ethnohistorical documents to analyse and reconstruct Aboriginal astronomical knowledge in Tasmania. This analysis demonstrates that stars, the Milky Way, constellations, dark nebula, the Sun, Moon, meteors, and aurorae held cultural, spiritual, and subsistence significance within the Aboriginal cultures of Tasmania. We move beyond a monolithic view of Aboriginal astronomical knowledge in Tasmania, commonly portrayed in previous research, to lay the groundwork for future ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork with Aboriginal elders and communities.
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The oral traditions of Aboriginal cultures across Australia contain references to the presence of multiple Suns in the sky at the same time. Explanations of this have been largely regarded as symbolic or mythological, rather than observations of natural phenomena. In this paper, we examine oral traditions describing multiple Suns and analyse interpretations that could explain them. Our analysis of the oral traditions concludes that descriptions of multiple Suns fall into two main categories: one describing the changes in the path of the Sun throughout the year, and the other describing observations of parhelia, an atmospheric phenomenon known as Sun dogs that creates an optical illusion of multiple Suns in the sky at once. This analysis shows how Aboriginal people pay close attention to natural phenomena, assign them social meaning, and incorporate them into oral tradition.
Aboriginal Australians carefully observe the properties and positions of stars, including both overt and subtle changes in their brightness, for subsistence and social application. These observations are encoded in oral tradition. I examine two Aboriginal oral traditions from South Australia that describe the periodic changing brightness in three pulsating, red-giant variable stars: Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis), Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri), and Antares (Alpha Scorpii). The Australian Aboriginal accounts stand as the only known descriptions of pulsating variable stars in any Indigenous oral tradition in the world. Researchers examining these oral traditions over the last century, including anthropologists and astronomers, missed the description of these stars as being variable in nature as the ethnographic record contained several misidentifications of stars and celestial objects. Arguably, ethnographers working on Indigenous Knowledge Systems should have academic training in both the natural and social sciences.
Australian Indigenous astronomical traditions hint at a relationship between animals in the skyworld and the behaviour patterns of their terrestrial counterparts. In our continued study of Aboriginal astronomical traditions from the Great Victoria Desert, South Australia, we investigate the relationship between animal behaviour and stellar positions. We develop a methodology to test the hypothesis that the behaviour of these animals is predicted by the positions of their celestial counterparts at particular times of the day. Of the twelve animals identified in the Ooldean sky, the nine stellar (i.e. non-planet or non-galactic) associations were analysed and each demonstrated a close connection between animal behaviour and stellar positions. We suggest that this may be a recurring theme in Aboriginal astronomical traditions, requiring further development of the methodology.
A major focus of the archaeoastronomical research conducted around the world focuses on understanding how ancient cultures observed sunrise and sunset points along the horizon, particularly at the solstices and equinoxes. Scholars argue that observations of these solar points are useful for developing calendars, informing ritual/ceremonial practices, and predicting seasonal change. This is the foundation of the Eurocentric four-season Julian (and later Gregorian) calendar. Famous examples include Stonehenge, Newgrange, Chichen Itza, and Chankillo. Studies at these and other sites tend to focus on solar point observations through alignments in stone arrangements, and the orientations of monuments. Despite the ongoing study of Indigenous Knowledge in Australia revealing a wealth of information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander observations and interpretations of solar, lunar, and stellar properties and motions, very little has been published about the importance and use of solar point observations. The authors examine this topic through four case studies, based on methodological frameworks and approaches in ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology, and statistics. Our findings show that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people observe the solstices and other significant sunrise/sunset points along the horizon for timekeeping and indicating seasonal change - but in ways that are rather different to the four-season model developed in Western Europe.
There are (at least) four ways that an agent can acquire information concerning the state of the universe: via observation, control, prediction, or via retrodiction, i.e., memory. Each of these four ways of acquiring information seems to rely on a different kind of physical device (resp., an observation device, a control device, etc.). However it turns out that certain mathematical structure is common to those four types of device. Any device that possesses a certain subset of that structure is known as an inference device (ID). Here I review some of the properties of IDs, including their relation with Turing machines, and (more loosely) quantum mechanics. I also review the bounds of the joint abilities of any set of IDs to know facts about the physical universe that contains them. These bounds constrain the possible properties of any universe that contains agents who can acquire information concerning that universe. I then extend this previous work on IDs, by adding to the definition of IDs some of the other mathematical structure that is common to the four ways of acquiring information about the universe but is not captured in the (minimal) definition of IDs. I discuss these extensions of IDs in the context of epistemic logic (especially possible worlds formalisms like Kripke structures and Aumann structures). In particular, I show that these extensions of IDs are not subject to the problem of logical omniscience that plagues many previously studied forms of epistemic logic.
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