Archaeoastronomy Within Astronomy at UK Universities

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Archaeoastronomy within Astronomy at UK Universities

Daniel Brown School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, UK [email protected]

To present my views on archaeoastronomy within the subject area of astronomy, it is vital first to outline my background and educational activities. This will ensure that my personal impressions can be contextualised and better understood, since my views were shaped prior to the in-depth analysis of this issue as recently presented by Liz Henty (2019). I am an Associate Professor in Astronomy and Science Education, running an on-site observatory at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and teaching undergraduates astronomy-related subjects. I also cover astronomy news relating to NTU for the general public via various media. I became an amateur astronomer in my younger years and studied for a physics degree in Germany with a focus on astronomy. This was followed by a PhD on theoretical stellar astrophysics in the UK, then becoming an astronomy outreach and development officer and finally a lecturer in astronomy at NTU. During my early career I started to become involved in archaeoastronomy projects as well as outreach programmes aligned to archaeoastronomy (see Chadha 2006). All of the above developed my experience and skills so that I was able to contribute to the developing field of skyscape archaeology, including running various smaller projects for our students and for the wider UK astronomy community. In recent years light pollution has become recognised as an issue of concern, and very effective networks of people interested in the conservation of dark skies have been established throughout the world. Much of my research has gone into exploring how we can offer a tailored educational experience that allows people to gain an appreciation of the sky (Brown et al. 2013), and specifically the dark sky (Brown 2015a). To achieve this, I proposed and then analysed how historic sites and landscapes that may be archaeoastronomically relevant can inspire a transformative experience of the sky (Brown 2013, 2015b). This showed how vital a direct experience of the sky is for a proper appreciation of it, as well as for better understanding how peoples both now and in the past engaged with it. Consequently, I developed two modules in 2017 in collaboration with the University of Wales Trinity Saint David for a

JSA 6.1 (2020) 88–93 ISSN (print) 2055-348X https://doi.org/10.1558/jsa.42310 ISSN (online) 2055-3498 Archaeoastronomy within Astronomy at UK Universities 89

Global Summer School at NTU, titled “Exploring Astronomy” and “Astronomy in Context”. Both modules embraced direct experiences of the skyscape through naked-eye obser- vation, use of telescopes and relevant fieldtrips. They applied phenomenology to the outdoor classroom and were also designed to introduce students to cultural astronomy. However, these modules had a very low take-up and therefore could not be run. More successful, though, have been short summer interdisciplinary research projects that I have offered for NTU since 2015 and for international students since 2017. These have been very popular, and have attracted funding from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in Germany as well as the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK. The projects have mostly been attended by physics and astronomy students, although some students from very different fields, such as fine art or architecture, have also been involved (Figure 1). By addressing aspects of skyscape experiences, students tapped into a phenom- enological methodology, and several papers have resulted from the work (for example,

FIGURE 1. Two NTU summer undergraduate placement students from the subject areas of physics and fine arts surveying the landscape of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park surrounding James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace in 2016 (photograph by Daniel Brown).

Mukundu et al. 2016; Harty et al. 2019), along with the development of resources that support our current astronomy teaching at NTU (Masters and Turner 2018). These student projects have made contributions to research at several levels, and in one case they have led to the development of an MSc project that was completed successfully by a student. In addition to such institutionally based activities, since 2014 I have also organised and run yearly sessions at the National Astronomy Meetings (NAM) in the UK. The very first session was titled “Modern Archaeoastronomy: From Material Culture to Cosmology”; it provided a generic overview of the field, introduced the idea and relevance of skyscape archaeology and resulted in a short conference proceeding published by the Institute of Physics (Brown 2016). The next session, “Archaeoastronomy in Practice: Methods and Techniques used in Archaeoastronomy”, had a strong workshop element and included presentations based on case studies that illustrated the importance of the tools and methods shown in the workshop. The third session, “Archaeoastronomy and Cultural Astronomy – The Astronomy of Skyscapes”, went a step further and took place within an immersive planetarium environment (Figure 2). Speakers actively used the projection within their talk to create a direct experience with the material they were covering. Several of the talks were related to visualising skyscapes, and these helped to shape the idea of the edited volume of Visualising Skyscapes (Henty and Brown 2019). The following years featured “Astronomical Concepts in Cultural Astronomy: Reviewing Approaches and Offering Experiences”, “Art Space: Using Artistic Media for Outreach, Cultural Astronomy, and Science Communication in Astronomy, Solar Physics and Space Science” and “Cultural and Archaeoastronomical Tools in the Digital Age”, all of which involved illustrating and exploring methods and tools for the astronomy community such as Stellarium. These events were always intended to include at least one young undergraduate speaker who had completed an archaeoastronomy or skyscape archaeology summer project at NTU. Over these six years it became apparent that most participants of these sessions were associated with astronomy outreach and were interested in seeing archaeoastronomy’s potential to enrich astronomy outreach. However, even though we have sought an audience of young researchers, their participation is still quite low. As a result of these past years of archaeoastronomy at NAM, both Steven R. Gullberg – Chair of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture – and I have been planning a new session for NAM 2020 in Bath (now postponed to July 2021 due to Covid-19): “Watching the Sky in a Time of Telescopes – Experiencing the Sky: From Stonehenge, Herschel, Hubble to Starlink”. The session has at its heart how archaeoastronomy can inform astronomy in higher education, in particular addressing the lack of direct experience of the sky in typical astronomy courses. It will also attempt to illustrate how human impacts such as light pollution and the Starlink Project (Starlink 2019) – a mega satellite constellation at low earth orbit – not only hinder astronomy observations carried out by a select group of specialists, but are also destroying for all the people of the world a human heritage that has existed for millennia. We hope through this session to start a conversation about astronomy curricula, to show how an increased interest in archaeoastronomy and its experiential aspect is relevant to students. Here my own experience has indicated that many students enter our astronomy modules

FIGURE 2. Fabio Silva and Bernadette Brady presenting at the National Astronomy Meeting 2018 at the University of Nottingham their skyscape talks within the immersive environment of an inflatable planetarium (photographs by Daniel Brown). having been inspired by striking imagery or by exploring the night sky using their own telescopes, just to find themselves entangled in complex mathematics and detailed physics and never actively looking at the sky as part of their defined curriculum. Having noted this lack of direct sky engagement in astronomy modules, I am also actively pursuing ways in which this can be changed. One example worth pointing out here addresses celestial coordinate systems and their conversions from azimuthal to equatorial. This is an area within archaeoastronomy that it useful to grasp both for interpreting and analysing possible alignments and for a general understanding of the orientations of constellations in the sky. In one of my first-year astronomy labs I approach this topic by way of an experiential problem-based exercise in which students explore basic transformations from one system into another within the contextual environment of our on-site observatory. This not only allows students to work with Stellarium and real telescopes, but also supports basic visualisation of coordinate systems. This topic

is covered only briefly – if at all – in textbooks used for astronomy courses; for example, our core reading for first-year astronomy at NTU is Marc L. Kutner’s Astronomy: A Physical Perspective (2003), which despite being 582 pages long has only one page on coordinate systems, placed within an appendix and not including a single figure. In other textbooks, such as Astronomy Methods by Hale Bradt (2004), coordinate systems are covered in more detail, including figures, but converting one system into another is illustrated only by using mathematical transformation equations, without any visualisation. As a result, we tend to refer students to amateur astronomy literature that covers this area with far more detail (for example, Photinos 2015). Apart from this small lab, I also connect second-year astronomy content to the currently observable sky, linking it to images illustrating our skyscape experience as taken from our developed “Writing Skyscapes” exhibition (Nottingham Trent University 2019) and immersive “Constellations in a Cave” planetarium session (LeftLion 2019). Students can now actively seek out objects of interest and explore current sky phenomena within an astronomy-taught context. This year we are also extending this to include student revision work to explain the astrophysics behind the images included in the Writing Skyscapes exhibition. This again illustrates how we can use and further develop skyscape experiences linked to skyscape archaeology to enrich astronomy content, contextualising the teaching but also building an appreciation and awareness of archaeoastronomy within astronomy and astrophysics. The limited uptake and very selective audience composition at our past NAM sessions may be due to the fact that possible links with archaeoastronomy have in general been less apparent in university astronomy teaching. In conclusion, I cannot see archaeoastronomy or skyscape archaeology successfully being a discipline in its own right at this moment in time. Currently, the higher education landscape is typically focused on employability and is still applying educational princi- ples stemming from the times of the Industrial Revolution (Robinson 2017). However, the sector is slowly changing to become less of an educational production line, and is starting to embrace creativity, problem solving and transferable skills – aspects that I have included in my teaching practice. In my personal experience, I cannot see enough career opportunities for researchers who work in this field alone. As such, archaeoastronomy needs to be associated with a parent discipline, always bearing in mind that the subject area needs to remain fully interdisciplinary. This would mean it would have to be open and accessible to students and researchers from other fields as well. However, I do not feel that astronomy – at least in the UK – can at the moment offer such an appropriate home for archaeoastronomy. As outlined above, it does have a strong potential for many students and researchers as regards developing smaller projects, but there is no appetite or motivation to continue by developing this interest into, for example, Master’s projects or final-year projects primarily used to illustrate the research area and skills the students bring to a new employer, either in industry or academia. This author can only draw these conclusions from his own experience, but it is more than realistic to extend my observations to the wider field of astronomy across the UK. This seems to be different from the field of archaeology, where skyscape archaeology has slowly become more present, as shown for example with the newly developed

Stonehenge Skyscape Website (English Heritage 2019). There seems to be more of an interest in engaging with skyscapes in archaeology and more potential to then apply such knowledge to research in this discipline. Given my current initiatives both at a local university level as well as within the UK astronomy community, I hope that we can start to strengthen the connection of astronomy with skyscapes through fostering direct experience of the sky. This is some- thing close to my heart and current practice, and it is the motivation for a new NAM session proposal. It is an approach to astronomy that, when further embraced, will surely tip the scale towards astronomy as the home for archaeoastronomy within the UK.

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