By Jon Ghahate, Crow Canyon Educator
I have been associated with Crow Canyon Archaeological Center for
a year, as part of the Education Team. As a math and science educator,
my extensive experience as a classroom educator has fit in well with the
principles of science and technology in our understanding of the diverse
sophisticated, agrarian Indigenous ancestral civilizations of which the
evidence is scattered across the US Southwest.
Our understanding of our Cosmos, planetary physics, celestial matter,
the forces of time and space, and solar fusion, contributes to our own
understanding of who we are as human beings.
As a Pueblo citizen, I often wonder how our ancestors perceived their existence.
The scientific community develops its well-constructed theories of the
how’s and the why’s from collected evidence and extrapolates about our
the Ancestral Puebloan civilizations and their predecessors.
Perhaps you’re wondering, how is this connected to us in the year 2024?
This week that same celestial event, witnessed and predicted by those human
beings millennia ago and by us, is the Winter Solstice. Today, we can explain
why this occurs and is part of curriculum standards as a science construct
for middle and high school students.
However, the celestial phenomenon could have been the basis for the evolution of sustainable agrarian civilizations. For without it, the predictability of this event, could there be an expectation of the longest winter night and each day getting longer and the anticipation for another crop, another source of food, another opportunity to provide for a community, for a family, for oneself.
As descendants of the first farmers of what is now referred to as the U.S. Southwest, this is the legacy of contemporary Pueblo communities. Their cultures, their learned skills, their acquired knowledge, their ceremonies, their clans, their cuisine, their languages, their ‘sense of place’, could perhaps be connected to observing and then thinking ‘scientifically’, there’s that sign that I, we, can ‘plan’ for the next generations. Perhaps, the Winter Solstice assures us of a coming Spring!