UCI Course to Explore Indians’ Heavenly Lore : New Field of Archeoastronomy Studies Native Californians’ Awareness of Celestial Phenomena

A Stonehenge in Southern California?

Not quite. But research into archeological ruins left behind by native California Indians suggests that they were every bit the astronomers their ancient counterparts were in the Old World.

One afternoon toward the end of December, the sun will creep along a ridge in the San Rafael Mountains and pierce a single window in a rock wall.

The ray of light will shoot like an arrow through a sun symbol etched on the ceiling and wall of the small, womblike Indian shelter.

It is further evidence that the first Californians monitored the sun, moon and stars and built shrines in line with astronomical events, much like the builders of better-known astronomical shrines such as Stonehenge.

Orange County residents will have a chance to learn about the coming field of New World archeoastronomy in a course being given by the noted author and lecturer Edwin C. Krupp, the director of the Griffith Observatory.

Titled “Ancient Astronomy of California Indians,” the two-day seminar is being offered for the first time at UC Irvine this weekend.

Through lectures about anthropological findings and slides of archeological remains, the course will explore the possibility that the people who roamed the Southland long ago developed a rich lore about the heavens centuries before European settlers.

“The area was inhabited by native peoples for thousands of years,” explained Krupp, “and we know from several sources that their lives were intriguing and complex and included the use of the sky.”

Native Californians’ awareness of celestial phenomena has surprised even anthropologists and astronomers, who up until the early 1970s believed that hunters and gatherers did not keep track of astronomical events. Only farmers were thought to have sufficient need and sophistication to align their traditions with the heavens.

New interpretations of turn-of-the-century research done by pioneer ethnographers, who were not trained in astronomy, give ample evidence that the first Californians did indeed keep track of the heavenly bodies, maintained calendars and even based rituals on astronomical phenomena.

Now, Krupp believes, local examples of astronomically aligned shrines may even shed light on their better known prehistoric counterparts.

“Because some of the Indians’ traditions were preserved until ethnographers could catalogue them around the turn of the century, there fortunately still were some people who could provide us with some, albeit incomplete, information (about how those traditions relate to the shrines),” he said.

By contrast, no written explanations exist for the 5,000-year-old Stonehenge. “All you have is the architecture and whatever you find in the dirt,” Krupp said. “There is no owner’s manual.”

Painted Rock, the shrine on the Sierra Madre Ridge in the San Rafael Mountains, may provide some clues, however.

From an interview with a living member of the Chumash Indians, early 20th-Century ethnographer John P. Harrington learned that the Southern California tribe believed that the winter solstice represented a period of crisis.

The Chumash thought that the shortest day of the year was the climax of a sort of celestial gambling game, with the sun--a powerful male force--pitted against “Sky Coyote,” or the north pole of the heavens, which appeared to be the sky’s single stable point because celestial bodies seemed to revolve around it.

“If the sun were to win, the season’s game would take its toll in human lives,” Krupp said. “If Sky Coyote won, he would take his winnings in terms of the Earth’s bounty, which he would push through a hole in the sky.”

Later, when contemporary anthropologists found the Chumash structure, they put two and two together.

“If (the effect) was genuinely incorporated into the shrine by a shaman, it probably reflects the concern for the winter solstice as a period of crisis,” Krupp said.

The San Rafael site is by no means unique. Rock art with astronomical references has been found in about two dozen locations statewide, Krupp said, with the bulk in undeveloped spots such as the desert or, in one case, a heavily guarded rocket-testing facility near Chatsworth.

But even urban areas containremnants of the past. For instance, Krupp said Indian rock art can be found in a populated section of Riverside County, but he declined to reveal the location. “It’s already got graffiti all over it,” he said.

There is other evidence that California Indians were astronomers.

Ritualistic Implements

Cave etchings, twig bundles, notched sticks and knotted cords may have been used by various tribes as calendars, archeoastronomers have concluded.

Such ritualistic implements as “sunsticks,” simple twigs whose shadows apparently were used to “pull” the sun toward the Earth when it seemed most likely to slip below the horizon during the winter solstice, point to ceremonial practices based on astronomical events.

Some research even indicates that native Californians developed their own pantheon of astrological characters to rival those of the ancient Greeks.

Krupp said he became interested in the marriage of astronomy and archeology through a series of coincidences.

He had been working as curator at the observatory for a year when he received a catalogue in 1972 from a British bookstore, advertising a title that piqued his interest--”Megalithic Lunar Observatories” by Oxford mathematician Alexander Thom.

Visit to Sites

“Astounded” by its suggestion that a number of prehistoric structures in the British Isles had been astronomically aligned, Krupp was pleased when a long-awaited African safari unexpectedly fell through shortly thereafter. He traveled instead to England and Scotland with the hopes of seeing some of the sites Thom had described. As he visited those sites, he actually ran into the author himself on an airplane to some remote Scottish islands.

They struck up a friendship that resulted in Krupp’s publication, “In Search of Ancient Astronomies” (MacMillan, 1978).

That, in turn, attracted the attention of Travis Hudson, who as curator of the Santa Barbara Museum of Anthropology is credited with first documenting sky-watching among California Indians.

Inspired by Hudson, Krupp went on to write “Echoes of Ancient Skies” (Harper & Row, 1983) and “Archaeoastronomy and the Roots of Science” (Westview Press, 1984), both of which include sections on astronomy among California Indians.

Archeoastronomy, an interdisciplinary field that has captured the imagination of astronomers, archeologists, anthropologists and even engineers, is relatively new.

Birth of New Field of Study

“This is an area of study that did not exist prior to 1970,” Krupp said. “Now a major conference occurs every three or four years, and there are two (scholarly) journals of archeoastronomy.”

Krupp believes that the discipline’s birth can be traced to the publication in 1963 of “Stonehenge Decoded.” Written by Boston University astronomer Gerald Hawkins, the book popularized the discoveries of J. Lockyer, the English astronomer who was the first to find an astronomical connection to such megaliths as Stonehenge.

The application of archeoastronomy to Native Americans dates back to the early 1970s, when William Miller, a photographer for the Palomar Observatory, first drew attention to Indian paintings in Arizona that he believed represented the explosion of a supernova observed by the Chinese in AD 1054.

The first California application dates back to 1978, and the publication of Hudson’s “Crystals in the Sky: An Intellectual Odyssey Involving Chumash Astronomy, Cosmology and Rock Art.”

But it has been the thrill of the hunt that has kept researchers on the trail.

“It’s like a detective story,” Krupp said. “You pick up clues here and there.”

Krupp began teaching at UCLA, where he completed graduate studies in astronomy and continues to offer extension courses. It was at the university in 1980 that he first offered a course on astronomy among the Indians of California.

No stranger to UCI, Krupp has conducted several seminars on the campus since 1972, when he offered his first course there, “In Search of Ancient Astronomies,” which focused on sky-watching in the Old World.

He has also taught a seminar titled “Myths, Marvels and Mysteries of Science: Evaluating the Unexplained.” But it was a seminar last year on the history and lore of Halley’s comet that was the most popular, according to UCI officials.

This year’s class, being held in time for the winter solstice on Dec. 21, meets Friday from 7 to 10 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Nelson Research Building. The fee is $65 or $75, depending on whether college credit is sought.

If learning about beams of sunlight playing off cryptic drawings in caves sounds esoteric, Krupp insists otherwise.

“When you take modern, 20th-Century Californians out of their world of all-night markets and televisions and put them in (touch with) their natural environment, there is a renewing effect,” he said. “It’s powerful. It’s beautiful. It’s inspiring.”