Cultural astronomy primarily is the study of the astronomy of ancient and contemporary Indigenous cultures and is sometimes called the anthropology of astronomy. This presentation is meant to acquaint the audience with what is involved with archaeoastronomy, ethnoastronomy, and other aspects of Cultural Astronomy. The many ways that astronomy has been and is being used by cultures are fascinating and many of them exhibit well-developed visual astronomies often used for calendrical purposes. Cultural Astronomy is interdisciplinary and among its researchers are not only astronomers and astrophysicists, but also anthropologists, archaeologists, and Indigenous scholars. It is critical that anthropological context supports the astronomical data collected in order to help establish intentionality. Adding to archaeological research, even more can be learned about cultures through examination of how and why they used the sky. The International Astronomical Union has now established Commission C5 for Cultural Astronomy. The new commission will further advance the field and its research.

The term “cultural astronomy” has served since the 1990s as the name of an interdisciplinary field whose professional roots go back at least to the end of the 19th century. To put it briefly, we could characterize it as an interdisciplinary academic effort to think about the relationships with the sky of different human groups (ethnic groups, social classes, professional groups, etc.), understood as sociocultural products. This, of course, includes considering from the same perspective that tradition that we could call in very general terms “Western academic astronomy.” Despite this, in the context of the history of science and academic astronomy this interdisciplinary field is still not sufficiently known. This leads to its developments not being considered when addressing issues in which they are of great importance, and even to important misunderstandings about what should be understood as “cultural astronomy.” This presentation seeks to be an introduction to this interdisciplinary field. In it we will seek to briefly outline its history, characterize what cultural astronomy is and what it is not, and give an account of its main methodological guidelines.

Typical studies in the history of science and technology focus on reading old texts, interpreting and analyzing their language with the means of philologies, and perhaps reconstructing historical instruments from descriptions or the data given in historical documents. The cultural backgrounds of these very special histories of science are (at best) mentioned in footnotes. However, in particular the history of the constellations and star names is strongly rooted in the cultural environment of their usage: the names typically indicate the purpose of the constellation, while folklore only supports memorizing them. In my talk, I will present the multiple Greek and Babylonian sky cultures that demonstrate an unsystematic shift of different imaginations of the figures in the sky due to the transfer between different climates and the according transformations over time and space.