Society for Cultural Astronomy in the American Southwest

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SCAAS Four Corners Lecture Series

August 23, 2023 4:00 - 5:00 PM MST

Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum

Dolores, CO

The Four Corners Lecture Series and Canyons of the Ancients National Monument is hosting our Society for a discussion of our Cultural Landscapes Survey Program. The event is at the Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum on August 23, 2023, near Dolores, CO. The presentation will be from 4:00 – 5:00 PM in the museum auditorium. The event will also be broadcast on Zoom for participants that cannot attend the in-person event. Links to register for the event are located below. SCAAS has a strong and enduring interest in developing and deploying guidance on the use of new technologies to add standardized landscape orientation, feature detail and horizon data to archaeological site documentation form packages and reports. Our documentation process investigates placement of sites on the landscape, their spatial relationships and building feature orientation to horizon features and events. It combines traditional architectural documentation with photogrammetry, LiDAR terrain modeling, calibrated horizon profiles and Google Earth and Stellarium astronomy software. Escalante Pueblo at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument was our first Cultural Landscapes Survey Project. The results will be presented here along with preliminary information on this year’s fieldwork at Wallace Great House Pueblo.

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SCAAS launches Journal Club!

Journal Club Webpage

The Society launched its Journal Club in July 2021. The Journal Club is a member's resource and a forum to discuss two papers or articles of interest, normally one from a SCAAS member and one from a qualified researcher on related topics. The event is held via Zoom and the sessions are being recorded for later posting on our You Tube Channel - SCAAS.Connects2U. You must be a member to access downloadable copies of the papers and articles to be discussed at the Journal Club meetings. The public is welcome to attend the meetings.

The purpose of the Society for Cultural Astronomy in the American Southwest (SCAAS) is to advance the study and practice of cultural astronomy in the American Southwest. The Society is committed to recognizing significant contributions to knowledge and the importance of research, professional standards and excellence in the study of cultural astronomy, effective dissemination and presentation of cultural astronomy knowledge, and innovation and originality of approach.

CAASW 2009 Book Cover The American Southwest was one of the early and fruitful areas of cultural astronomy study, and remains so to this day. However, the opportunity for professional and avocational cultural astronomers to share their research has been limited. The first biennial Conference on Archaeoastronomy in the American Southwest was held from June 11-13, 2009 to mark the International Year of Astronomy 2009 and to provide a forum to promote research and a better understanding of the cultural significance of astronomical knowledge among American Southwest cultures, past and present. The theme of the conference, held in Camp Verde, Arizona, was "Creating Sustainability in American Southwest Archaeoastronomy Research."

The proceedings from the 2009 Conference have been published as Volume 23 of the Journal of Astronomy in Culture by the University of Texas Press.

This volume is now out of print. Please search your favorite on-line used book retailer for available copies.

The success of this conference was followed by the Archaeoastronomy in the Field Workshop, held at the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park in Phoenix Arizona on March 11-12, 2010. The workshop presented an intense and hands-on series of presentations and discussions to further the standardization of archaeoastronomy documentation and recording.

UNM Press The next event held was the 2011 Conference on Archaeoastronomy of the American Southwest, at the University of New Mexico, site of the historic 1983 conference “Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest” [Papers of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology #2]. An outreach lecture was given on the evening of June 16 by Dr .E.C. Krupp, Director of the Griffith Observatory and acclaimed author of several books on archaeoastronomy. The proceedings of this conference have been published by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.