Solstices, equinoxes, and directions in Hopi astronomy

Since Clive Ruggles’s “Whose Equinox?” (1997), the importance of the equinoxes in cultural astronomies has been robustly questioned, particularly in archaeological contexts. This study draws on the extensive ethnographic and linguistic evidence from the Hopi to examine the role of the solstices and equinoxes in a culture whose astronomy has a well demonstrated concern with the motions of the Sun. The striking contrast between the abundant evidence in the Hopi language that is related to the Sun and the solstices and the scarcity of such evidence related to the equinoxes illustrates the importance of the solstices in, what we can call the Hopi sunwatchers’ “conceptual toolkit,” providing a new perspective on an astronomy which is manifestly concerned with the Sun but demonstrates little concern with the equinoxes. The evidence reveals that the Hopi consciously used sequences of anticipatory observations to determine the days of the solstices, thereby establishing the framework of their cosmology and guiding further astronomical observations.