FEATURE All images © Steve Mulligan
PREHISTORIC SUNS An obsession with prehistoric astronomy – or archaeoastronomy – led Steve Mulligan on an epic journey in search of observatories that resulted in his latest book, Prehistoric Suns: Ancient Observations in the American Southwest.
24 B+W
P
rehistoric people were mesmerised by the sky, by the changing of the seasons and by the movement of the stars. Knowing when to plant crops, when to harvest, when summer was turning to fall, and winter to spring, these were life-affirming times. Realising that the long winter nights had begun to shorten would have been joyous knowledge, offering the promise of spring. Figuring out when these events happened took a serious sophistication,
‘The owner of the company that hired me, hearing I was a photographer, told me of an 18ft snake petroglyph that lit up on the summer solstice.’ as well as a strong scientific method. Creating a marker – using natural landforms – that would only light up on the day of the summer solstice, finding a location to carve it, and then placing the
petroglyph in the exact spot to mark the event, all of this was a formidable intellectual and physical task. The ancients created observatories that exactly marked the summer and winter solstice, the equinox, the cross-quarters (those days dividing the solstices and the equinoxes), even making an observatory to mark the lunar stand-still (where the moon rises at its northern most point in the eastern sky). These observatories still exist around the world, with some spectacular sites in the American West.
›
