Opportunities Beyond Landscapes
Geospatial analysis of archaeological sites has the potential to add value to research from several other domains. We demonstrate this potential for interdisciplinary research through several examples.
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Opportunities Beyond Landscapes
Preamble This book has focused on geospatial analysis of archaeological landscapes, but such analyses can have implications for researchers in other disciplines as well. In this final chapter, we discuss three examples of such research linkages. In Sects. 7.1–7.3, we present three examples from our own research experience. Finally, in Sect. 7.4, we present an example where we see immense potential for research that can positively impact the protection of built heritage.
7.1 History of Astronomy Astronomy has been closely intertwined with religion through much of history, and the construction of sacred structures was sometimes based on astronomical principles. For instance, the Egyptians may have aligned the Great Pyramid at Giza to cardinal directions using the circumpolar stars Kochab (Beta Ursae Minoris) and Mizar (Zeta Ursae Majoris) (Spence 2000). Hindu temples in India were also aligned to the cardinal directions, using other methods including Indian Circle (first described before 200 BCE in a treatise on mathematics and geometry called Katyayana Sulbasutra) (Sen and Bag 1983). The mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta (born in 598 CE) noted that the Indian Circle method produced at most 0.5° of error in alignment) and Sripati, another mathematician and astronomer, suggested a correction for this error in 1039 CE or 1056 CE (Mollerup 2012). Some contemporary Buddhist sacred structures such as the main stupas at Ratnagiri and Udayagiri (located 7 km apart in Orissa) are also aligned to the cardinal directions, but when we conducted a geospatial analysis, we noted that all the temples at Nalanda as well as other Buddhist temples within the same cultural milieu—the
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 M. B. Rajani, Patterns in Past Settlements: Geospatial Analysis of Imprints of Cultural Heritage on Landscapes, Springer Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7466-5_7
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7 Opportunities Beyond Landscapes
Mahabodhi at Bodhgaya and central structures in Vikramasila, both in Bihar, India, Somapura in Bangladesh and Samye in Tibet—were oriented more than 4° south of true east. While some sacred structures are aligned to the rising sun, this hypothesis did not explain our observations. On consulting literature from the history of astronomy, we found that several ancient structures are believed to have been oriented towards the rising or setting of certain bright stars including Sirius (the Horus temple on the summit of Djebel Thoth in Western Thebes and the Isis temple at Dendera in Egypt) (Shaltout and Belmonte 2005; Belmonte et al. 2010), Antares (the temple of the Hurlers in Liskeard in England and the Older Erechtheum in Athen, Greece) (Brown 2000; Lockyer 18941 ), and Spica (the temple of Min in Egypt, and several temples in Greece) (Olcott 1911). Relying on this scholarship, we hypothesized that the nine Buddhist temples under consideration were oriented towar
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