OCT 31, 2005 - Archaeoastronomy is a timely stop along the Web, this being the season of Samhain and all. (That's pronounced "Sa-win", by the way.) It's a holiday better known as Hallowe'en today of course. But to the ancient Celts it was a harvest festival; a time when the barriers between the worlds and dimensions were lowered, such that the living and the dead could intermingle. Archaeoastronomy very clearly shows how this holiday is one of the so-called "cross-quarter" points in the path of Earth's orbit as seen in the skies of our home planet. Tricks and treats and ghosts and goblins came later: first, the ancients looked to the skies, the solstices, the equinoxes and the half-way stations in between them - the "cross-quarter" points, of which Hallowe'en is a faint though commercially successful remembrance.
