Australian Aboriginal Astronomy Project
Overview
Australian Aboriginal astronomy
Australian Aboriginal astronomy is a name given to indigenous Australian culture relating to astronomical subjects — such as the Sun and Moon, the stars, planets, and the Milky Way, and their motions on the sky...
. This research in cultural astronomy
Cultural astronomy
Cultural astronomy is a blanket term used to describe interdisciplinary fields that relate to astronomical systems of current or ancient societies and cultures...
covers the disciplines of archaeoastronomy
Archaeoastronomy
Archaeoastronomy is the study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky how they used phenomena in the sky and what role the sky played in their cultures." Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern...
, ethnoastronomy, historical astronomy
Historical astronomy
Historical astronomy is the science of analysing historic astronomical data. The American Astronomical Society , established 1899, states that its Historical Astronomy Division "...shall exist for the purpose of advancing interest in topics relating to the historical nature of astronomy...
, geomythology
Geomythology
Geomythology is the study of alleged references to geological events in mythology. The term was coined in 1968 by Dorothy Vitaliano, a geologist at Indiana University....
, and Indigenous knowledge.
The project is centred within the Department of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University
Macquarie University
Macquarie University is an Australian public teaching and research university located in Sydney, with its main campus situated in Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of Sydney...
in Sydney, Australia.
