Word: sainte
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...placement during sunset could be used to tell the seasons and that the Chumash people also revered this astronomical relationship in their language and cosmology. "It's the third largest constellation in the sky and they saw it every single night for tens of thousands of years," says Saint Onge. "It was like the TV being stuck on the same channel playing the same show nonstop." It became increasingly obvious to Saint Onge that the arborglyph and related cave paintings weren't just the work of wild-eyed, drug-induced shamans - which has been a leading theory for decades...
...Saint Onge isn't the first to speculate that Chumash paintings might have astronomical implications. The anthropologist Travis Hudson did so back in the 1970s with his book Crystals in the Sky, which combined his observations of rock art with the cultural data recorded nearly a century earlier by legendary ethnographer John P. Harrington. But when others went into the field to check out Hudson's claims, "much of it was pretty unconvincing," explains anthropologist John Johnson of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. "That's what caused people to get skeptical about archaeoastronomical connections." (Garry Wills on three...
That reluctance ruled for three decades until Saint Onge presented his findings to Johnson, a bookish researcher who isn't one to rock the academic boat with unsubstantiated suggestions. But Johnson was so impressed that he co-authored the journal article and is now quite open to the idea that the rock art he's studied his whole adult life might have something to say about the stars. "Whether we're right or not, I don't know, but we keep finding things that strengthen the idea," says Johnson. "And if we keep finding ethnographic support for it, I feel...
...knows how long ago the tree was carved - though they speculate that a Chumash family that lived on a nearby hillside until they all died in the 1918 flu epidemic may have tended to the arborglyph as the bark and lichen grew back - but they're just relieved that Saint Onge was able to find it at all. "The upkeep of the motif itself has gone by the wayside and it's not long for the world," says Saint Onge, explaining that carpenter ants are attacking the limbs, "so I think it was a good thing that we came across...
Johnson and Saint Onge are most satisfied that the arborglyph is confirming what they've long known: that, despite centuries of being classified by historians as merely hunter-gatherers, the Chumash lived in a very complex and sophisticated society. Those sentiments are echoed loudly by Joe Talaugon, a 79-year-old Chumash elder who visited the site early on with Saint Onge and is also a co-author of the study. Although he says that the Chumash people's traditions were "stripped" by the Spanish mission system that ruled California 200 years ago, Talaugon believes that the arborglyph...