Ethnoastronomy in South America

ETHNOASTRONOMY Gary Urton Encyclopedia of Religion, ETHNOASTRONOMY, (2016) Vol.5, p.177 - 8 ETHNOASTRONOMY. [This entry is limited to discussion of the ethnoastronomies of native South America because of their primary importance in the development of this area of study.] Patterns. In the ethnographic literature on indigenous South American Indian populations, there is a considerable body of evidence attesting to the importance of ethnoastronomical beliefs. These beliefs, expressed with varying degrees of emphasis in mythology and ritual, bear witness to long-standing traditions of astronomical observations undertaken for a variety of purposes, ranging from the construction of precise calendar systems to the production of symbols and metaphors for expressing enduring relationships that characterize interactions between men and women, social groups, humans and animals, and so forth. While there are no universally shared astronomical symbols, several recurrent thematic patterns emerge from a comparative study of the ways in which different groupings of celestial bodies are interrelated in the mythology and ritualism of the Andean and Tropical Forest (Amazonian and Orinocoan) religious traditions. Sun and Moon. A clear expression of the notion of the thematic patterning of relations in an astronomical mode is found in a number of origin myths, especially those in which the origin of humans is thought to have occurred virtually simultaneously with their separation into different—but complementary—kinship or social categories (e.g., siblings, spouses, clans, or moieties). The Apinagé of the Araguaya River of Brazil hold that Sun created the two moieties and localized one (the Kolti moiety) in his own northern half of the circular villages while leaving the other (the Kolre) with his sister, Moon, in the south. The Apinagé held ceremonies directed to Sun during the planting and harvesting periods, while they invoked Moon to help the crops mature (Nimuendajú, 1967, p. 164). The pairing of Sun and Moon as, respectively, brother and sister is also found among the Tapirapé (Wagley, 1940, p. 256) and the Conibo (Handbook of South American Indians, 1948, p. 595; hereafter referred to as H. S. A. I.). Among the Chiriguano (H. S. A. I., 1948, pp. 483-484), the Kogi (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1982, p. 178), and the Inca, Sun and Moon are simultaneously brother and sister and husband and wife. For the Xerente, who once occupied several villages southeast of the Apinagé along the Tocantins River, Sun and Moon are "companions" (i. e., neither siblings nor spouses), although each is associated with one of the two moieties. Sun, who is referred to by all Xerente regardless of their moiety affiliation as "Our Creator," communicated with the Siptato moiety through a group of intermediaries, including Venus, Jupiter, the Belt of Orion, and k Orionis; the intermediaries between Moon and the people of the Sdakra moiety are Mars, Carrion Vultures, and Seven Stars (probably the Pleiades; Nimuendajú, 1942, pp. 84-85). Through the association of Sun and Moon with linked pairs of complementary, yet often asymmetric and hierarchical, social categories (e.g., husband and wife, brother and sister, and the moieties), astronomical phenomena are made to participate in the process of classifying human society on the basis of fundamental dichotomies and processes (e.g., alliance and reproduction) that occur throughout the natural world. The relations between Sun and Moon serve as the "charter" for cosmic and social order throughout the succession of the generations. Yet just as inevitably as social order is established and maintained within each society by rules governing relations among different groups of people, the rules are forever being broken and the right order of things momentarily threatened. The inevitability of disorder arising from the violation of rules and prohibitions has its celestial reminder in the spots besmirching the face of the full moon. Throughout the mythological traditions of the tropical forest, the spots on the moon are commonly associated with incestuous relations, especially between brothers and sisters. In a typical example of this theme, the Záparoan-speaking tribes of the Marañón, Napo, and Pastaza rivers say that Moon was formerly a man who, in the dark of night, had sexual intercourse with his sister. In order to identify her lover, the girl one night smeared his face with genipa (a blue-black vegetable dye). Out of shame, the man went away to the sky and became the moon, his genipa-covered face being reexposed to the Záparo every month (H. S. A. I., 1948, p. 649; cf. Roth, 1908-1909, p. 255; Wagley, 1940, p. 256). Asocial (incestuous) sexual relations may generally be compared with unproductive sexual encounters, which are everywhere signaled by menstruation. Among the contemporary Quechua of the Peruvian highlands, Sun (Inti) is male and Moon (Killa) is female; menses is referred to as killa chayamushan ("moon coming, or arriving"). Sun and Moon are also often associated with brightly colored birds or with the plumage of such birds. For example, the Trumai and the Paresí (H. S. A. I., 1948, pp. 348, 360) say that Sun is a ball or headdress of red parrot feathers, while they identify Moon as a collection of yellow feathers. In the Záparo myth discussed above, the wife of the incestuous man who became the moon was herself simultaneously transformed into a night bird. And in a congeries of these various bird images and relations, the Tapirapé of central Brazil, west of the Araguaya River, say that Moon was the sister of Sun and that the latter wears a headdress of red parrot feathers. Sun is said to have slapped Moon's face with his genipa-covered hand because of her sexual misbehavior. Moon was married to a culture hero who divided all birds into two groups. Among the Tapirapé, the two men's moities are subdivided into three age grades, each of which carries the name of a bird (Wagley, 1940, p. 256). The Milky Way. Aside from the sun and the moon, one other celestial phenomenon is important throughout the ethnoastronomies of South America: the Milky Way. The Milky Way serves as a means for organizing and orienting the celestial sphere in the spatial, temporal, and mythological dimensions. The Quechua-speakers of the Peruvian Andes refer to the Milky Way as a river (mayu) composed of two branches. The branches originate in the north within the cosmic sea that encircles the earth. Water is taken into the Milky Way, and the two branches separate, flowing away from each other toward the south, where they collide in the heavens near the Southern Cross. The foam (posuqu) stirred up by their collision is seen in the bright clouds of the southern Milky Way from the Southern Triangle to the False Cross in Carina. The two branches of the celestial river alternately rise, pass through the zenith, and set; one branch, when it stands in the zenith, passes from the northeast to the southwest, while the other branch passes from the northwest through the zenith to the southeast (Urton, 1981, pp. 54-63). The Barasana, a Tucanoan-speaking group on the Vaupés River in Colombia, conceive of the Milky Way as divided into two "star paths"; one, called New Path, is oriented southeast-northwest, while the other, Old Path, is oriented northeast-southwest. New Path and Old Path are the sites of most of the constellations recognized by the Barasana (Hugh-Jones, 1982, p. 182). For the Desána, another Tucanoan-speaking group of the Vaupés region, the Milky Way, as a single construct, is likened to a river, a trail in the forest, an immense cortege of people, a cast-off snake skin, and a fertilizing stream of semen. In a dualistic image focusing on its cyclical, alternating axes, the Milky Way is imagined as two huge snakes: the starry, luminous part is a rainbow boa, a male principle; the dark part is an anaconda, a female principle. The shifting of the Milky Way, seen as a swinging motion made by the two snakes, punctuates the cycle of fertilizing forces emanating from the sky (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1982, pp. 170-171). Using metaphors of human sexuality that recall the menstrual cycle of the moon, the Barasana, like the Desána, conceive of the Milky Way as participating in a cycle of fertilizing forces. The connection between the principle of fertility, the Milky Way, and the flow of menses is occasioned by the comparison of the menstrual and seasonal cycles. The rainy season is the menstrual period of the sky, which is personified by Woman Shaman, a creator who has a gourd of wax identified with the Pleiades, which are called Star Thing and are the principal aspect of the New Path of the Milky Way. The gourd is Woman Shaman's vagina; the wax, her menstrual blood; and the melting of the wax, her menstrual period, which is compared, as an internal, rejuvenating "skin change," to the rainy season, which begins in the Vaupés in April, as the stars of the Pleiades set. In Barasana cosmology, the internal skin change of Woman Shaman, associated with Star Thing (the gourd of melting wax), is contrasted with the external skin change of the constellation called Caterpillar Jaguar (Scorpius), which stands opposed to, and alternates with, Star Thing (Hugh-Jones, 1982, pp. 196-197). Bright-star and dark-cloud constellations. Data from the Barasana and Desána introduce a final and far more complex recurrent theme, one that forms perhaps the core of ethnoastronomical symbolism among South American Indian societies. This theme concerns groups of interrelated metaphorical images built up out of animals, anthropomorphic beings, and constellations stretched along the bright path or paths of the Milky Way. The theme of animals and humans as constellations concerns a group of celestial phenomena located principally along, or within, the path of the Milky Way. In order to understand many of the references discussed below, it is necessary to see the Milky Way as visually composed of two distinct but interconnected elements: first, it appears in its overall form as a wide, bright band of stars; and second, it contains several dark spots and streaks formed by fixed clouds of interstellar dust that cut through the central path. Both of these galactic phenomena, the bright band of stars against the dark background of the night sky and the dark clouds cutting through the bright path of stars, are recognized as named celestial constructs in South American ethnoastronomical traditions. When viewed as a path, the Milky Way is often considered to be a road along which animals, humans, and spirits move. The Indians of Guiana refer to the Milky Way as both the "path of the tapir" and the path that is walked upon by a group of people bearing white clay, the type used for making pottery (Roth, 1908-1909, p. 260). The Chiriguano (H. S. A. I., 1948, p. 483) know the Milky Way as the "path of the rhea"; they identify the head of the rhea either with the Southern Cross or with the Coalsack, the dark spot at the foot of the Southern Cross. The Amahuaca say that the Milky Way is the trail or path of the sun, formed when a jaguar dragged a manatee across the sky. For the Trumai, the Milky Way is like a drum containing animals; it is the road to the afterworld and the abode of jaguars (H. S. A. I., 1948, p. 348). Finally, the Tapirapé see in the Milky Way the "path of the shamans," by which shamans travel to the sky to visit celestial bodies (Wagley, 1940, p. 257). That many of the characters who move along the celestial path (or river) are animals reinforces the observation that the most common identifications of the dark clouds that cut through the Milky Way are with animals, birds, or fish. As mentioned earlier, among the Quechua of the central Andes, the Milky Way is seen as two interconnected branches of a river. Within the river, in the southern skies, are several animals, each identified as one of the dark clouds (yana phuyu); these include a snake, a toad, a tinamou, a mother llama with her baby, and a fox that pursues the llamas (Urton, 1981, p. 170). The pursuit of a herbivore by a carnivore, as in the pursuit of the llamas by the fox, is a common element in the South American ethnoastronomical symbolism of the dark spots. Within the tropical forest, however, the carnivore is most often a jaguar rather than a fox. For instance, the Paresí and Conibo see a jaguar pursuing a deer in some dark spots in the southern Milky Way (H. S. A. I., 1948, pp. 360, 595). Certain tribes of Guiana see, in the same general area, a tapir being chased by a dog, which in turn is pursued by a jaguar (Roth, 1908-1909, p. 260). The Tukuna locate the bodies of a jaguar and an anteater in dark clouds in the southern skies near the constellation of Centaurus; the two animals are locked in a nightly struggle, although in a Tukuna myth that describes a similar fight the anteater defeats the jaguar, rips open his stomach, and sucks out his liver (Nimuendajú, 1952, p. 143). The Campa say that a dark streak near Antares (in the constellation of Scorpius) is a digging stick and that the Coalsack below the Southern Cross is a bees' nest (Weiss, 1972, p. 160). The Múra, however, see in the Coalsack a manatee carrying a fisherman on its back (H. S. A. I., 1948, p. 265). As is clear from the illustrations above, the identification of the dark clouds of the Milky Way with animals is a widely shared feature in South American Indian ethnoastronomies. Although the specific animals vary from tradition to tradition (as one would expect, given that the various ethnoastronomical data derive from societies in widely differing environmental settings), it is reasonable to suppose that the animals may be identified and interrelated according to similar classificatory principles and symbolic interests as one moves from one society to the next. That this may be so, in at least one respect, is suggested by the fact that the ethnographic literature contains several references to the belief that there is a conceived (if not perceived) relationship between an animal's reproductive cycle and the first appearance of that animal's celestial counterpart in the early morning skies (Urton, 1981, pp. 176-189). In addition, there are suggestions that the rising of the celestial representation of an animal or bird serves as an indication that the season to hunt the terrestrial version of that same animal or bird has arrived (Roth, 1908-1909, p. 261). These data suggest that in the process of establishing local calendar systems there is considered to be a temporal correlation between the appearance of a particular dark-cloud animal and the biological periodicity of, or the cycles of human activity in the exploitation of, its terrestrial counterpart. Classification and Symbolism. Such a purely calendrically oriented interpretation of the significance of the animals located in the dark spots of the Milky Way should be augmented by two other considerations, one classificatory, the other symbolic. In relation to the former, the animals of the Milky Way may represent those forms considered to be classificatorily "prototypical," the most representative members of particular classes of animals. Alternatively, they may represent "marked" animals, ones that do not fit comfortably into a single class but that rather bridge two or more classes. That one or the other of these considerations may be significant in Quechua astronomy is suggested by the fact that the sequence of animals that stretches along, and within, the Milky Way includes a reptile (snake), an amphibian (toad), a bird (tinamou), a herbivorous mammal (llama), and a carnivorous mammal (fox). The classificatory significance of these life forms would therefore rest not only on the particular characteristics of each individual animal in turn but also on the relations between and among the various types as they are projected into the sky in a particular sequence (i. e., from a reptile to a mammal). Another classificatory factor that may be important throughout the various ethnoastronomical traditions is a consideration of the color of the animals in question. That is, many of the animals have either a dull, dark coloring (e.g., fox, deer, anteater), or else they are spotted or mottled (e.g., tinamou, toad, anaconda, rainbow boa, jaguar). The dark spots along the "body" of the Milky Way recall the dark or mottled coloring of the terrestrial animals. In this regard, there may also be a conceptual similarity between the dark spots of the Milky Way and the spots on the moon. The latter, as mentioned earlier, are typically associated with asocial (e.g., incestuous) relationships. Mythic oppositions. The symbolic significance of the dark-cloud animals will vary considerably from one ethnoastronomical tradition to another and can be understood only on the basis of a careful consideration of the particular characteristics of the celestial animals as they are portrayed in the mythology of each culture. In considering the mythological descriptions of celestial phenomena, however, it is essential first to turn to the material referring to those constellations that are composed of clusters or groupings of stars, since the mythological data for stellar constellations are more abundant, and explicit, than those for the dark spots of the Milky Way. The principal stellar constellations recognized in South American ethnoastronomies are, for the most part, also located near or within the Milky Way; these include the Pleiades, the Hyades, the Belt (and Sword) of Orion, Scorpius, the Southern Cross, and a and b Centauri. By far the richest ethnoastronomical material concerns the Pleiades, a small cluster of some six to ten stars (visible with the naked eye) in the constellation of Taurus. The Pleiades are referred to in a variety of ways, many of which emphasize the visual appearance of this cluster of stars as a group or "bunch" of things. In the tropical forest, the Pleiades are variously referred to as bees, wasps, a handful of flour spilled on the ground, parrots, white down, a bunch of flowers, and so forth (Lévi-Strauss, 1969, p. 222). Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out an important principle in Tropical Forest ethnoastronomies when he argued that the Pleiades are typically classed together with, while at the same time opposed to, the nearby constellation of the Belt and Sword of Orion. The latter is referred to as a tortoise shell, a bird, a stick, and a leg (or a one-legged man; Lévi-Strauss, 1969, pp. 222-223; cf. Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1982, pp. 173-174). Lévi-Strauss's argument is that the Pleiades and Orion are diachronically associated, since they rise within a few days of each other, but that they are synchronically opposed, since the Pleiades represent, or are in the category of, the continuous, whereas Orion is in that of the discontinuous. For the Pleiades and Orion, respectively, he notes that "we have names that boil down to collective terms describing a chance distribution of . . . related elements: and on the other, analytical terms describing a systematic arrangement of clearly individualized elements" (Lévi-Strauss, 1969, pp. 222-223; cf. 1973, pp. 268-270). Throughout South America, it can be shown that the Pleiades are contrasted in various ways with other nearby star groupings (e.g., Orion and the Hyades), whereas, on another level, they are grouped together with these same nearby stars and contrasted with other constellations (e.g., Coma Berenices, Corvus, Scorpius, the Southern Cross, and a and b Centauri). These two groupings of stars are contrasted or deemed complementary in terms of their symbolic characteristics, and they are coincidental or alternating in terms of the phasing of the dates of their rising and setting (cf. Hugh-Jones, 1982; Zuidema, 1982; Wilbert, 1975). The questions to be addressed with regard to these observations are "On what bases are the Pleiades contrasted with other, nearby constellations?" and "On what bases are the Pleiades grouped together with these nearby constellations and contrasted with another, more distant group of constellations?" I suggest that the first question may be approached primarily through a consideration of the mythological data referring to social relations and social organization, whereas the second question can best be addressed on the basis of data referring to meteorological, seasonal, and, ultimately, economic concerns. As for the contrast between the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion, there are several myths that mention these three constellations in related mythological contexts. For instance, among certain Carib-speaking tribes there are myths of a woman (the Pleiades) who cuts off her husband's leg (Orion's Belt and Sword) and runs away with a tapir (the Hyades; Jara and Magaña, 1983, p. 125; cf. Roth, 1908-1909, p. 262). The Amahuaca of eastern Peru say that the V-shaped Hyades represent the jaw of a caiman that bit off the leg of a man who mistook it for a canoe; the leg is seen in the Pleiades, while Orion's Belt and Sword represent the man's brother holding the lance with which he killed the caiman (cf. Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1982, pp. 173-174). The Campa see in the Pleiades a Campa man and his family; the man's brother-in-law is the Belt and Sword of Orion. They also say that Orion is a Campa man who is being pursued by a warrior wasp and has received an arrow in his leg (Weiss, 1972, p. 160). The various myths that deal with the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion are centered on animals and people (or their body parts) who are related by ties of blood or, more commonly, marriage. In many cases, there are also characters present who are implicated in the violation of these kinship and marriage ties (e.g., the tapir who seduces and runs away with a man's wife). In this regard, it should be recalled that among the Xerente, who practice moiety exogamy, the belt of Orion and k Orionis are related to one moiety, while Seven Stars (the Pleiades?) are related to the other (Nimuendajú, 1942, pp. 25, 85). In addition to the "local" contrast between the Pleiades and the neighboring constellations of the Hyades and Orion, there are several references to the contrast between the Pleiades and constellations farther removed. In Barasana cosmology, the Pleiades (Star Thing) are associated with the dry season and opposed to Scorpius (Caterpillar Jaguar), which is associated with the wet season (Hugh-Jones, 1982, p. 197). The Pleiades and Scorpius are similarly opposed, and each is related to either the dry or the wet season, or to planting or harvest, in the cosmology of the Quechua (Urton, 1981, pp. 122-125) and the Chiriguano (H. S. A. I., 1948, p. 483). Similar examples of the opposition of the Pleiades to other constellations (e.g., Corvus and Coma Berenices) appear in the timing of fishing cycles (Lévi-Strauss, 1978, pp. 36-40), honey availability (Lévi-Strauss, 1973, pp. 57-58, 268-272, 282-285), or both fishing cycles and honey availability (Lévi-Strauss, 1973, p. 114). The evening rising and setting of the Pleiades (which occur at different times of the year) are associated by the Barasana and the Desána with the fruiting periods of trees (Hugh-Jones, 1982, p. 190; Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1982, p. 173). R. Tom Zuidema has shown that the critical dates in the Inca calendar system, a system that coordinated political, ritual, and agricultural events throughout the year, were determined by the times of the rising, setting, and the upper and lower culminations of the Pleiades in opposition to the Southern Cross and a and b Centauri. In Inca and contemporary Quechua astronomy, the Pleiades represent (among other things) a storehouse; the Southern Cross is important, as it stands just above the dark-cloud constellation of the tinamou; and a and b Centauri are the eyes of the dark-cloud constellation of the llama (Zuidema, 1982, pp. 221-224; Urton, 1981, pp. 181-188). Mythic similarities. While particular contrasts between (1) the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion and (2) the Southern Cross, a and b Centauri, Corvus, Coma Berenices, and Scorpius vary over different parts of South America, the temporal relations between the two groups of constellations represent essentially similar seasonal oppositions regardless of which particular members of the two sets are contrasted. In terms of their celestial locations, the constellations in group 1 are located between right ascension three to six hours, while those of group 2 are between right ascension twelve to sixteen hours. Therefore, the members of one group will rise as the members of the other set. This temporal opposition, and its attendant symbolic and mythological associations, is one other important feature shared by the ethnoastronomies of South American Indians. Encyclopedia of Religion, ETHNOASTRONOMY, Vol.5, p.181 Although the various Indian tribes of South America are situated in extremely diverse environmental regions, from the dense tropical forests of the Amazon and Orinoco basins to the high Andean mountains along the western side of the continent, there are a number of similarities in the ethnoastronomical traditions of these various groups. One source of similarities may lie in the fact that these cultures are all located within the tropics (see Aveni, 1981): the Amazon River is roughly coincident with the line of the equator. But beyond the similarities that are encountered in the observational phenomena viewed by these cultures, there are perhaps more fundamental similarities in the way in which the celestial bodies are described and interrelated in their mythological and religious traditions. There are fundamental principles that give meaning and coherence to ethnoastronomical beliefs concerning the sun and the moon, the Milky Way, and the two types of constellations. These are the same conceptual foundations that ground the various religious traditions. These basic premises revolve around relations between and among men and women, humans and animals, and beings on earth and those in the sky. BIBLIOGRAPHY For excellent discussions of naked-eye observational astronomy in the Americas, see Anthony F. Aveni's Skywatchers (Austin, 2001), and Stephen M. Fabian’s Patterns in the Sky: An Introduction to Ethnoastronomy ((Prospect Heights, Illinois, 2001). Separate ethnographic descriptions, many of which include ethnoastronomical material for a variety of Tropical Forest tribes, can be found in The Tropical Forest Tribes, vol. 3 of the Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian H. Steward (Washington, D. C., 1948). Collections of Tropical Forest Indian myths are included in the following three books by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Raw and the Cooked (New York, 1969), From Honey to Ashes (New York, 1973), and The Origin of Table Manners (New York, 1978), all translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. An excellent resource for Amazonian and Andean mythological and cosmological traditions is Lawrence E. Sullivan’s, Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York and London, 1988). The ethnoastronomies of various tribes in northeastern South America are described in Fabiola Jara and Edmundo Magaña's "Astronomy of the Coastal Caribs of Surinam," L'homme 23 (1983): 111-133; Walter E. Roth's "An Inquiry into the Animism and Folklore of the Guiana Indians," in the Thirtieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, D. C., 1908-1909); and Johannes Wilbert's "Eschatology in a Participatory Universe: Destinies of the Soul among the Warao Indians of Venezuela," in Death and the Afterlife in Pre-Columbian America, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson (Washington, D. C., 1975). Ethnoastronomies of the Indians of the Colombian rain forest are discussed in Stephen Hugh-Jones's "The Pleiades and Scorpius in Barasana Cosmology" and in Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff's "Astronomical Models of Social Behavior among Some Indians of Colombia," both of which can be found in Ethnoastronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the American Tropics, edited by Anthony F. Aveni and Gary Urton (New York, 1982). The ethnoastronomies of Tropical Forest tribes in eastern Peru are discussed in Gerald Weiss's "Campa Cosmology," Ethnology 11 (April 1972): 157-172 and in Peter Roe’s The Cosmic Zygote: Cosmology in the Amazon Basin (New Brunswick, N.J., 1982).. Some of the best descriptions of the astronomy and cosmology of the tribes of the southern Amazon basin are to be found in three works by Curt Nimuendajú: The Sherente, translated by Robert H. Lowie (Los Angeles, 1942); The Tukuna, translated by William D. Hohenthal, edited by Robert H. Lowie (Berkeley, 1952); and The Apinayé, translated by Robert H. Lowie, edited by John M. Cooper and Robert H. Lowie (Oosterhout, The Netherlands, 1967). Additional valuable discussions of southern Amazonian ethnoastronomy are to be found in Charles Wagley`s "World View of the Tapirape Indians," Journal of American Folklore 53 (1940): 252-260 and Stephen M. Fabian, Space-Time of the Bororo of Brazil (Gainesville, 1992). For descriptions and analyses of Inca and contemporary Quechua ethnoastronomy, see R. Tom Zuidema's article "Catachillay: The Role of the Pleiades and of the Southern Cross and a and b Centauri in the Calendar of the Incas,"in Ethnoastronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the American Tropics, mentioned above; and my book, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (Austin, 1981). For an example of astronomic configurations in the religious life of hunters, see Otto Zerries's "Sternbilder als Audruck Jägerischer Geisteshaltung in Südamerika," Paideuma 5 (1952): 220-235. GARY URTON PAGE 3