page_title: Archaeoastronomy
section_title: Newgrange
hierarchical_section_title: Archaeoastronomy / Major sites of archaeoastronomical interest / Newgrange
caption_attribution_description: Newgrange, Stein am Eingang
context_page_description: Archaeoastronomy is the interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures". Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures. It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.
  Archaeoastronomy uses a variety of methods to uncover evidence of past practices including archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, statistics and probability, and history. Because these methods are diverse and use data from such different sources, integrating them into a coherent argument has been a long-term difficulty for archaeoastronomers.
context_section_description: Newgrange is a passage tomb in the Republic of Ireland dating from around 3,300 to 2,900 BC For a few days around the Winter Solstice light shines along the central passageway into the heart of the tomb. What makes this notable is not that light shines in the passageway, but that it does not do so through the main entrance. Instead it enters via a hollow box above the main doorway discovered by Michael O'Kelly. It is this roofbox which strongly indicates that the tomb was built with an astronomical aspect in mind.  In their discussion of the credibility of archaeoastronomical sites, Cotte and Ruggles gave Newgrange as an example of a Generally accepted site, the highest of their four levels of credibility. Clive Ruggles notes:
  ...[F]ew people—archaeologists or astronomers—have doubted that a powerful astronomical symbolism was deliberately incorporated into the monument, demonstrating that a connection between astronomy and funerary ritual, at the very least, merits further investigation.
caption: The sunlight enters the tomb at Newgrange via the roofbox built above the door.
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