Humans and our direct ancestors have been looking at the night sky for millions of years. Our gaze has been from the Earth to the heavens and to the very same face of the Moon, unchanged except for its natural cycles. Humanity has a collective heritage in space through many different perspectives. This heritage ranges from including the Moon as part of indigenous cultural narratives about creation (e.g., the Southern Tutchone of Yukon, Canada, who have a story about how crow stole the Moon and threw it into the sky) to tracking phases and the seasonal setting of the Moon in prehistoric observatories at archaeological sites such as Stonehenge in Great Britain. The Moon serves as a point of reference for community knowledge; it is a place where memories are stored. Space is not a vacuum but is part of humanity’s cultural landscape that only began to acquire material culture, relatively recently, within the last 60 years. How to interpret the human interaction with space, what to...
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O’Leary, B.L. (2020). Tranquility Base on the Moon. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_2683
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