FORUM 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 pollu- tion 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). © 2020 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD 90 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 audi- ence 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 © 2020 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD Archaeoastronomy within Astronomy at UK Universities 91 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 © 2020 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD 92 Daniel Brown 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