Calendars, Symbols and Orientations: Legacies of Astronomy in Culture

This, the proceedings of the 9th annual meeting of SEAC held in Stockholm in 2001, contains twenty-four papers on subjects ranging from Swedish calendar staffs to Ramesside star clocks, and from a possible 32,000-year old calendrical artefact in Germany to folk calendars in twentieth-century Lithuania and Bulgaria. The volume is divided into five main sections: archaeoastronomical theory; calendars in artefacts, folklore and literature; history and iconography of the constellations; astronomy in art, mythology, and literature; and orientations and their interpretations. Even the familiar topic of orientations receives an unusually wide geographical coverage, including megalithic monuments in the Netherlands, Siberia, and Algeria, a Minoan peak sanctuary, and the layout of ancient Carthage.