Presenter(s): Caryssa Dieni—Anthropology (Archaeology)
Faculty Mentor(s): Michelle Scalise Sugiyama
Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation
Ethnoastronomical research indicates that early agricultural societies used regular changes in the positions of asterisms to predict seasonal change and determine when to plant crops, and that this knowledge was encoded, in part, in myth . Our project investigates whether hunting-and-gathering peoples used the stars to predict seasonal availability of wild resources and, if so, whether narrative was used to transmit this knowledge . If so, we would expect star narratives to identify key stars/ asterisms, associate them with seasonal change, and reference important seasonal resources (or environmental cues associated with their availability) . To test this, we surveyed a cross-cultural sample of forager story collections for etiological star narratives: we found story collections for 74 different forager culture regions, 44 (59 .5%) of which contained star narratives . These narratives were then coded for the presence of the predicted information . Results indicate that star narratives consistently (1) provide information that facilitates identification of targeted asterisms, and (2) associate these asterisms with seasonal change and key resources . However, the information that asterisms can be used to predict seasonal change and/or resource availability tends to be implicit; thus, for each region we checked the ethnographic record to ascertain whether asterisms were indeed used for these purposes . These complementary lines of evidence strongly suggest that star myths performed an ecological function in hunter-gatherer societies.