Good evening everyone and welcome to the 2021 Virtual Grand Canyon Star Party I'm Ranger Rader
Lane the National Park Service coordinator for the event and for 31 years running Grand
Canyon has been celebrating our pristine night skies through the annual Grand Canyon Star Party
now ordinarily we have hundreds of astronomers and thousands upon thousands of visitors coming to the
park to enjoy eight nights of some of the most pristine darkest night skies in the United States
now each evening is typically kicked off with a special guest speaker in our theater
followed by telescope viewing constellation tours night sky photography workshops and much much more
next year's Grand Canyon Star Party is June 18th through the 25th 2022 so mark your calendars and
hopefully we'll be able to celebrate on-site next year and we're doing it virtually again this year
for 2021 and we're really excited we have a whole host of great speakers for the event this year
and before we introduce our special guest speaker tonight
I just have a few entities I'd like to thank from the National Park Service for helping to put on
this event number one Grand Canyon Conservancy now they're the park's official non-profit partner the
International Dark Sky Association they're the entity that certified Grand Canyon National Park
is an International Dark Sky Park back in 2019 The Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association they are
the group that comes up ordinarily and volunteers their time to share the wonders of the night sky
with the visiting public so thank you to them and thank you to the Society for Cultural Astronomy of
American Southwest they are a group that helped us organize many of the speakers for the event this
year so we thank them for that and with that I'd like to introduce tonight's special guest speaker
we are really excited and honored to have with us Brian Bates now when Brian had his Navajo students
research their traditional astronomy rather than the long dead European astronomers the students
refused to turn in their papers because astronomy is sacred knowledge and his Navajo principle
collected and graded the students papers instead and Brian's interest in cultural astronomy began
at an alternative high school Brian had his students take tree trunks from a fire clearing
and build a full-scale model of Stonehenge that became the school's observatory.
Brian has published 10 peer-reviewed research articles,
co-edited four conference proceedings, chaired five conferences and helped start the
Society for Cultural Astronomy of the American Southwest an emeritus science teacher Brian is
a naturalist leading tours and wilderness trips all around the southwest and beyond
today Brian will share some of its cultural astronomy research from the Grand Canyon region
and Brian thanks so much for joining us tonight we're so excited to have you thank you very
much Rader it's an honor to be with you and I want to thank everybody attending here as well as all
of those great organizations that you mentioned there Rader their support is absolutely essential
and it's a we need to really preserve the night skies
not only for ourselves but I would share that for birds and for migrating animals because we're
not the only species that uses the skies to move around with so I'm going to share my screen
and we're going to start at a place called that's down by Stoneman Lake and first of
all I'm a science teacher I'm a naturalist I'm a cultural astronomer and what I want to share with
you this evening is hopefully an understanding of the earth's orbit about the sun and how our orbit
really drives what we're able to see we'll then transition into Hopi sky knowledge and I use that
as a platform to help us understand Ancestral Pueblo and development of science and astronomy
the reason is that the Hopi have maintained a lot of their cultural knowledge where other
Ancestral Puebloan people their traditional knowledge was interrupted by the Spanish and
also the U.S. migration west and then finally we'll try to recognize the use of astronomy
it actually leads to how people survived and how they created their ceremonial calendars
and I want to make sure that folks understand that a lot of this information is sacred so what I will
be sharing with you is fairly common knowledge however what there is other knowledge that we
will not share because it is sacred to the native peoples I want to begin with just recognizing
that we're in the Four Corners Region and this area has the highest concentration of National
Parks and National Monuments and that's largely because of the concentration of Ancestral Cultural
Sites as well as the geology the very nature of the Biota in the region so normally I could take
you through numerous different sites and what I will share with you here is that this is the Grand
Canyon is right here so that's where we're going to be looking at tonight as well we'll go over to
a Wupatki National Monument and then from there I will share a few others the sites at Chaco Canyon
Real quickly the Ancestral people were scattered throughout the southwest so this region has been
occupied for as much as 10,000 years the Ancestral Pueblo People were up here in the
Four Corners region the Sinagua people are just south and we'll look at one Sinagua site
very quickly and then you have the Hohokam down in the Phoenix southern Arizona region the battalion
over in the Great Basin region the Mogolion and what's important to know here is that these
are different cultural regions but they are also trade routes that go through they're sharing
information they're learning from one another so this is a large region that is culturally diverse
and yet has similar lifestyles now we're going to take a quick view at what we see in the sky
and so here is our night sky of observer or daytime and the observer can look to the east
perhaps see the sun rise and as the sun rises it transits across the sky comes around and
then sets well if it's the sun depending upon where we are in our annual cycle about the
sun itself then what ends up happening is that you're going to have a change in position of
where the sun rises and where the sun sets but you the same thing happens with stars but we'll see
that different times of years you're going to see different constellations
if we now step out and we're in a spaceship looking back at the earth you can see that the
sun is in the center this is the earth and the earth's pathway about the sun is this blue line
now this blue line of course takes us from the Winter Solstice we go past the cross quarter date
that's halfway between a solstice and an equinox past the cross quarter date of Groundhog's day
this is Spring Equinox Mayday is the most recent of the cross quarter dates we've passed and we're
coming up very quickly on the Summer Solstice then we come around to August 6th another cross quarter
day the Autumn Equinox and will you come back to the Halloween which is the fall or the fall cross
quarter date now this is important because this will tie into the Hopi calendar if we go one more
step further out we find that here is the sun the sun is right here and this is the Earth's
orbit about the sun and so as we orbit about the sun what happens is we're going to see different
constellations at different points in time now when the sun is up those stars are still in the
sky we can't see them because the sun is so bright but the whole idea here is to understand that our
movement around the sun and our annual orbit is what determines which part of the sky we see
Now this is the Hopi calendar is put together by Dr. Robert Breunig and many Hopi people
and it basically gives us a perspective of time on what is called the Katcinas season
and the Non-Katcinas season so i want to be very clear that Katcinas are essentially the essence of
people who have lived a Hopi life have passed away but continue to live in a different form and
Non-Katcinas season is when those assets of those people have gone back underground and
then they return well during this time there are different activities different ceremonies
different events that occur throughout the year and it's all driven by the moon so the
Hopi calendar is based upon the moon now this is a Hopi calendar that was created by my friend
Phil Kiwinyama and Phil is an exceptional artist this is the Hopi Sun God right here
and right above it is two Katcinas that have been put together the [???] and the [???] and
those are the two Katcinas that are largely responsible for helping the sun and the
moon and the planets migrate in their orbits about the sun we look over here this is [???] and [???}
is the Chief Katcinas he's the one that helps guide all of the other cutscenes we have the Ogre
lady here who helps instruct women in how to prepare food how to take care of their families
and we come down there's the dark man who is part of the social winter dances the blue woman
she honors all of the animals we have the San Francisco Peaks here
and this rainbow is the pathway that the Katcinas follow to go from their homes in the
Hopi villages back to the San Francisco Peaks or to another high point a high topographical point
down here we begin the bean dance and the bean dance is the transition from the
Winter into the Spring and we'll talk more about this later what I do want to mention here is that
if we look at this line that's the Winter Solstice this is the Spring Equinox this line
coming down here is Summer Solstice and the blue line going off to the left is the Fall
Equinox continuing on what ends up happening is that you have uh the you honor the Eagle because
the Eagle is very sacred amongst the Hopi you have the Katcinas that are fertilizing or giving
blessings to the corn we see [???] here you [???] again moves with the Katcinas we have a young
woman down here who is dressed as in her wedding robe and as we come across this is the kiva
this is the ladder that goes down into the kiva we know that it is very likely that the native
people would have looked through the opening in the kiva and watch the stars move across the sky
and that would help them determine what aspect of a ceremony to conduct at what times
as we come across this is the snake dance here it alternates with the antelope dance featured over
here we have the snake woman who is sprinkling cornmeal on the dancers from the snake dance
we come on up and we will go through the [???] which is the men's rite of passage
and this is the [???] that's happening here the this is the women's ceremony the [???] or the moon
and so the women have their own ceremonies and that was not recorded in the original ethnography
when men coming from the University of Chicago or University of Arizona were originally describing
Hopi and other Pueblo people's histories finally we come back
here and we have the then the beginning of a New Year so I'm hoping that this gives you a
sense of the Hopi calendar system because the astronomy is tied directly to their calendar
now I'm going to start at the Grand Canyon this is a site that I visited in September of 1982
and the site is this circle of stones right here and that circle of stones is a sky observation
place and it was independently identified by two different Park Service archaeologists
when I was on a trip I worked as a VIP a Volunteer In the Park and we were on a river trip stopping
at different archaeological sites this is the only site that i know of in the Grand Canyon
that has uh astronomical probable cultural meaning so we're here at the Cardenas
the Cardenas River Camp is just below us this is the Hilltop Ruin here this was
likely built by folks that were living at the Unkar Delta and this site is up here on this ridge
and this is where my transit is so I'm up there taking measurements from
this solar observation station trying to determine whether or not indeed it is a observation station
well it so happens that the sun will rise on the summer solstice right over the thumb
the northern thumb of Comanche Peak and so that is a probable intentional marker
for the Winter Solstice the sun will stay there for about four days and then it will begin to move
back along the horizon and this is uh the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon and along in one of these
divots if you will one of the low points in the horizon you will have the
August 6th cross quarter date as we come along you hit the equinox and then as we move along
you can't see it but uh we get to the um may first cross quarters date but then right in this section
here and this of course is the Circle of Stone right inside there is a large rock that has either
fallen or there is a an opening through which the sun will come on the Winter Solstice
and so what's happening now is that this alignment is likely very culturally significant according to
Barton Wright who was the curator of archaeology at the Museum of Northern Arizona for many years
and what we find is that this alignment was likely observed by the Sun Forehead Clan and the Bear
Strap Clan and if my ethnography is accurate these are two of the clans that were involved
in anticipating and then perhaps facilitating the ceremonies related to the Winter Solstice
I'm going to shift now and go to Wupatki Wupatki is to the northeast of Flagstaff
and this is the Crack-In-Rock site it is on the far north region of the park and you have to be
with a Park Service Ranger to go to these sites if you look closely you can see that this is a wall
and that there is a small window right here that's the middle window you can see a north window there
but and there is a south window that's over here but the these windows are all at different
angles so that they are going to pick up the sun at different rise points throughout the year now
this is standing behind the wall looking to the east and you'll notice how flat the horizon is
that's important because there's no way that someone could tell how quickly the
sun is moving along that horizon without a reference point and thus
the wall provides three very significant reference points what ends up happening is that each of
these windows are about three to five inches wide but then 25 to 35 inches in length so it
actually funnels your vision to a specific point the second picture shows a light shadow line
coming across the window on a date that's not significant to the native peoples to the Hopi
and this light shadow line is going to change position as the sun moves along the horizon so
that one can anticipate when the sun will come into the window when it will be in the center
and when it will leave photo down here was taken the morning that i had camped out there
in anticipation of sunrise and what happens is that the sun will come through the
southernmost window I'm going to start with the February cross quarter date so that's groundhog's
day and the sun is right in the center of that window and this is important because it's a marker
of when to anticipate the beginning of new ceremonies as well as new survival activities
this middle window the sun rises right through the center on the May 1st and the October 6th
cross quarter dates and if those two pictures look similar it's because they were taken with the
same camera different points in time but they're actually different windows and then the sunrise
here it's real hard to see here but there's the sun and that is the sunrise on the what on the
Summer Solstice so this is the northernmost or the summer side of sunrise this is the winter side
now what is it that makes this important here is the
I got to be on the right picture here this is the sunrise of the
Halloween time or the fall winter the fall cross quarter date it is also the same time
as the February second date and what ends up happening is that with the February sunrise you
have the anticipation of of the [guamoya???] ceremony that is the Earth renewal ceremony
and as we come across we'll come to this window here oops I went too far we'll come to this window
which is the May 1st window and that's a time at which you would anticipate
people planning planting preparing to plant that is taking care of the soils finding the seeds
not necessarily planting but it's a time at which you prepare to plant
this is the Summer Solstice and this solstice is part of the [pneumonia???] ceremony and that's the
time at which the Katcinas will return to you can see here in the background the San Francisco Peaks
if we follow the sun back this becomes August 6th now there's no
currently known cultural activity that happens at this cross quarter date but Barton Wright
the museum archaeologist that I spoke of thinks that there may have been one but that that has
been lost through time and then finally we come back to this south side again and that's the
October 31st cross quarter date and that's the beginning of the [woo???] which to my understanding
is the time in which the men begin their how shall I say this their rights of passage but rights of passage and Hopi is not just about getting a driver's license or graduating
from high school or college the rights of passage are actually something that happened every year
as all of the inducted Hopi men learn different activities different skills different
things about their culture during the year that they then each year improve upon
I've now transited to the east end of this mesa and there is a zomorph here
and this caught my attention so I took this picture and shared it with numerous Hopi
who all told me that it was a the Water Clan well I do a presentation at the Oxford International
Conference on cultural astronomy and a fellow there says Brian that's not the Water Clan
he sends me a reference to an 1892 article by Jesse Fuch saying it's the Sand Clan so I go
back to my source that I was using which is the Hopi Journals by Alexander Steffen and Alexander
Steffen says in his book that the Water Clan and the Sand Clan actually merged well we were both
right and what ends up happening is that this Sand Slan Water Sand Clan symbol here is not in sunrise
let me restate this what ends up happening is that this Water Sand Clan symbol
is has a rock that comes directly out on the south side and beginning in October late October
you begin to get this light shadow line at sunrise then right at the Winter Solstice the
shadow line comes exactly along the side of it but never completely crosses it
and so this is thought to be an indicator that the Water Sand Clan was likely the people that
were living in this region and that the Water Sand Clan were participating in the activities
related to the wall that I shared with you just a couple of minutes ago but it's interesting
that this is the Winter Solstice and the Water Sand Clan is not marking the Winter Solstice
so in talking with Hopi what I have learned and if this is accurate
is that Hopi have their religious social political power move through the different plans
move through their different societies during the year so they don't have a leader for four
years like we do as a president instead they have different people taking different roles
on a seasonal basis such that they distribute the power throughout their community more equitably
immediately adjacent to this sun calendar site is a kiva that was excavated by Harold Colton from
who was the founder of the Museum of Northern Arizona and kivas now are underground structures
or embedded in the ground in some way such that the Hopi are down in the Earth and Harold Colton
said that based upon the artifacts found in this site that he thought it was a kiva and
it's right next to this sun calendar wall so it gives some association between what's happening
physically at the wall to what's happening in the social and religious aspect of the Hopi people
we're going to transition now over to Chaco Canyon which is in the northwest corner of New Mexico
and a lot of work has been done here I will go through it very quickly but I think the place to
start is we always see pictures of Pueblo Bonito that's the big site everybody goes to and when
you see it it is so incredible and this folks this picture down here is how it looked in 1896.
this was the Hyde expedition from the American museum of Natural History
they excavated over a hundred rooms and this was the beginning of archaeology at Chaco Canyon
but all of this now has been rebuilt but you have to look at how much has been rebuilt
to get some idea of where it was that the walls and the windows were placed because some of these
may not be as accurate as we thought they were as we go there if we go there today
this is a photograph taken by Charles Lindbergh after the reconstruction the excavation and
reconstruction an interesting point this wall right here is directly on a north south line
but keep in mind that Pueblo Bonito was built in the 900s and 1000s so a thousand years ago
and at that time there was no star in the position of the north star so these people had determined
the north-south line likely based on shadow cast the same is true of this line down here
this wall down here in that that is directly east west so what is likely to have happened
is that the native Chacoan people set a post and they used the shadow casting of that post
like an hourglass or a sundial and then determined true north and through east west this d-shaped
structure by the way is very common throughout the southwest and we anticipate that some sites
in the southwest may have been related to the d-shaped structure some of the archaeological
cultural astronomy sites this is Fajada Butte and Fajada Butte is a remnant of what used to be
a rock layer all the way across here so this is an erosional remnant now we always send the ranger
and this is why we have Rader here we send the ranger up here first for two reasons
number one there's a resident rattlesnake that lives down here
and I've been up on top three or four times and that snake has consistently been there secondly
this site has been closed off so that the public can't have access so the ranger has
the key to get up the clip so now we're on top of Fajada Butte and this is where the
Sundagger site exists here are the three rocks that create the Sundagger site so if you squeeze
them together lift them up with your mind put them back into this crack and then let them
fall down you'll see that they can split apart and in splitting apart they create channel one
and channel two here on the right you can see through channel two that there is a spiral
petroglyph that's been etched into the rock wall behind the three rocks that are leaning
up against the wall there that photo was taken by Dr. Robert Mark from the U.S Geological Survey
this is a picture taken from the National Geographic in the late 1970s
it shows that it is the position of the sun in the sky is going to cause different light
shadow events on this petroglyph and so what we'll see in a couple of minutes is that there
is the Spring Equinox here is the Summer Solstice with the light dagger going through the center
this yellow line right here is the same all the way down so now we go to the fall equinox
the difference is there's a small petroglyph that's going to have a little marking
and then at the Winter Solstice this petroglyph is exactly bracketed by two daggers of light
now this is a picture taken by these the solstice project with Dr. Ralph Sinclair
and others the point is that they took a picture laying
on the ground looking up so that you can see the channels that the light comes through
and this alignment right here happens to be related to the moon we're not going to get
to the moon today because we're looking at sun knowledge of the Ancestral People
this is the Summer Solstice Lightdagger site these photos were taken by Dr. Andy O'dell
and we were up there uh on June 19th, 20th and 21st these were taken on June 20th
and you can see this light dagger coming right down through the center of the
spiral petroglyph now these photos are about three to four minutes apart from one another
and we have a set of about 20 photographs so you can see that this is a very precise marker
and down here you'll see that i'm holding a nickel to give you a size indication of the width of that
light and so basically what's happening is that this site is marking as I'm showing you here
the Summer Solstice with a great deal of accuracy I do want to mention that what ends up happening
is that the middle rock has slipped out of place so if you were to go up there
today you would still see the light patterns but the band of light would be much broader
if we look off at the left hand side of the spiral petroglyph you can see the spiral here and then
there is another small spiral there at the end that I showed you with the National Geographic
photos and if you were there at this site on September 20th there would not be any light
interaction with this spiral petroglyph but you go to September 21st and boom there's this light
dagger that comes through the smaller petroglyph off to the side this is obviously marking equinox
and if we follow this light band down through the year as well as the spot
the light band that caused the Summer Solstice then this is the equinox light band this was a
Summer Solstice light band and you notice how they exactly mark out the spiral petroglyph
there at the top of Fajada Butte we anticipate that this was a solar watching station that
these people the Chacoan people were marking the change in the sun's position through the year
adjusting their survival activities as to when they do farming when they do
plant collecting or seed collecting when they go hunting and so forth so what ends up happening
is that these cultural astronomy sites become part of their socio-religious calendar system
I'd like to conclude by just reviewing part of what I've shared this evening in that
Ancestral cultures develop their own science and their own information classification systems
they observe nature they see patterns and then they use that information
to help them both survive and conduct their ceremonial seasons
and so the sky is what's enabling it's actually the Earth's orbit about the sun is enabling
people to understand how they need to proceed in their culture
to ensure their survival and to ensure that they are in touch with the natural world the
Ancestral Puebloans observe the sun the moon and the stars their calendar is directly based
on the moon and in fact for the Hopi to my knowledge all of their activities begin
all of their religious activities begin with the crescent of a new moon now as I've shared before
some knowledge is sacred and it is not spoken of it's not talked about and in cultural astronomy
our objective is to understand and respect that traditional knowledge so that it is available not
only to the culture that created the knowledge but also to others so that we can better understand
how humans have adapted to live on planet earth so thank you very much and have a wonderful evening
all right well Brian thank you so much that was a an excellent talk fascinating
stuff discussed there just have a couple of follow-up questions for you if you don't mind
you the the sites that you talked about in your in your Powerpoint
here were some of the sites that you worked on specifically and just could you give us a
could you plug those into a broader context of as to how prevalent some of these sites when it
comes to building alignments are when it comes to solar petroglyphs and things like that
how how prevalent or non-prevalent are these in the american southwest
so I've been very fortunate to visit numerous different sites I've been doing this work for 25-30 years and in the process I will tell you
that maybe one out of 10 one out of 20 of the sites I visit actually has demonstrable
cultural meaning so I see a lot of sites and I'll see a spiral petroglyph and yeah light
goes across it but the light's going across it year round so it doesn't give us any indication
of that site being important from an astronomical or a seasonal time perspective
there are a lot of sites in the southwest we don't know how many we never will because
you that are actually providing cultural astronomical information to that society
and the reason we won't know is that a lot of this knowledge as I said is sacred but also we
don't have the cultural ethnography we don't have the background to really understand the context
I would tell my classes at Coconino Community College I'd consistently tell them it's easy
to find the physical alignment but what's essential is understanding the cultural
perspective that allows for that site to function with meaning to the people who created it
right so can you go out and find a site like this yes but be prepared to do more work in the library
learning about the culture to go out and talk with the people who were the who are the
progeny of those ancestors because without the context we really don't have any way to verify
the site's purpose and that's a tricky thing in in this field of cultural astronomy I think
it's a fascinating field but oftentimes a lot of it you know you you get into this realm
of making connections simply for connection's sake it's almost like we're falling
victim to our own psychology of us liking to make connections I mean that's one of the reasons why
constellations exist in the first place is we like making patterns we like making
connections so it's a very fine line we have to walk in this field to not only find that
alignment like you're saying but then plug it into a cultural context that makes sense
for those peoples and that's where you say that the really tricky work comes in
and I would say work that needs to be done with a great deal of respect
so what you're sharing Rader is right on and I will I have numerous different
Native American friends Hopi, Navajo, Paiute and so forth and I go to them I share what I've learned
sometimes they go yeah well that's possible which tells me maybe this isn't any of my business
and in fact I've had people tell me I ask a Hopi colleague wants to share about their
constellations and he says well that's not for you to know and I have to I accept that right because
it is not for me to know it is their knowledge and we need to respect those cultural boundaries
well that's that's a great way to end it and I really appreciate that sentiment there and I
appreciate you and everything you're doing in this field and I really hope more
people start to think about this not only in the southwest but wherever they are because wherever
you live or wherever you're from ancestrally there is cultural astronomy and that's the
beautiful thing about it is that wherever you go and who whatever you know peoples you relate to
there is fascinating cultural astronomy that is a testament to our
continued need and universal appreciation of the of the night sky and astronomy in general
so thank you for all you do everybody please tune in to the virtual telescope
viewing sessions that are going to be premiering right after this talk and again Grand Canyon Star Party
2022 is June 18th through the 25th so we hope to be able to see you on site next year and
hopefully in the future visitors out there will be able to meet Brian
in person perhaps in a future Star Party and discuss some of the wonders of cultural
Astronomy of the American Southwest so Brian thanks again so much and we hope to see you
see you in the future thank you Rader I look forward to working with you takecare