North America - Part 4

Besides the 2 people groups mentioned, there were also many other tribes and groups of Native Americans in America.

The Hopi horizon calendar is a luni-solar one based on recording and remembering the places on the horizon where the Sun appears and sets every day. It determines the annual religious cycle as well as the annual agricultural cycle.

Stars were very important to the Navajo, who painted cave ceilings with star panels and drew constellations in their sand paintings. The Milky Way is known to them as Yikáísdáhi, and some of their constellations which are familiar to us are:

náhookos ba'áádi (Cassiopeia)
hastiin skai and Dilyéhé ( The Pleides )
so' hotsii (Aldebaran)
náhookos bikhá'i (Big Dipper)

 

 

 

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 Planting time was marked when the constellation Revolving Male (Ursa Major) lay parallel to the horizon at dusk during late May or early June. Preceding that, during spring, the constellation would be overhead, while in winter it would move eastwards. Dilyehe was also used as an indicator of time, treated as a nightly clock during fall and winter (Williamson, 1984). It appears around the summer solstice near the horizon position of the sun, and also appears as a morning star in the northeast at the end of the Navajo planting season. Besides these 2 specific examples, the Navajos also made use of the many other stars in the night sky as a calendar. The constant predictable movements of the stars told them when to prepare the fields, when to start planting and harvesting and when to stop.

In places like Northwest Mexico and Arizona, the Navajos painted hundreds of stars on cave roofs, today called Star Ceilings. The location of a hundred such sites are known, and interestingly enough, some of them are 50 to 70 feet high above the ground. Sun movement and the shadows cast by the sun were also used by the Navajo to keep time.