The Transformation of Time
I'm back on the road now and looking forward to the few hours of sleep I'll get on the plane. I'm weary, but I value these long solitary drives because they give me time to think. Not that this is entirely pleasant. When I am less preoccupied with the immediacies of work and conversation, anxieties that have been submerged by my hectic routine come bubbling up to my attention. I begin to worry about my family, my job, my research. These obligations, for all their rewards, require what my parents readily identified as "sacrifices," a term that I regard with both amusement and curiosity now, given my interest in the structure of religion. I frequently sacrifice sleep.
I often sacrifice the "nowness" of life, too. And this isn't because as an archaeologist I spend a good deal of time thinking about the past. It is easy for me to relate the past to the present; my appreciation of the present is enhanced by my regard for the past. What takes me away from the present is the future. Even now I am engaged, as I so often am, in calcu-
lating how long it will take me to drive somewhere and to do what I need to do when I get there, when I should leave there, how long it will then take to travel to somewhere else, how long to accomplish what is needed at that locale, when I should leave there, and so on into the week, month, year, and years ahead. I have an urge to look at my appointment book, which I can't reach while I am driving, to plan with even more precision—and to see what I am forgetting. I, like so many inhabitants of the modem world, am obsessed by time.
This modern obsession with time has it roots in traditional concerns. The Cheyenne, like all premodern human groups, saw in the cyclical movement of the heavenly bodies reassurance that the world would go on despite the mortality of each human in the world. The path to immortality, predictability; and certainty in what humans can see to be a world replete with unpleasant surprises could only be gained through access to such eternal cycles. Access was through ritual, but in order to most effectively marry, the fate of the individual with the eternal cycles the ritual had to occur at propitious moments in the astronomical calendar. Personal transition was tied to instants of cosmic change, so a great deal of attention was paid to the skies.
Societies everywhere have built devices by which to enhance their understanding of this calendar; these constructions are observatories, in effect. Being nomads, the Cheyenne built observatories that were not large in scale. They were constructed of durable materials, however, and so many remain today. They are called "medicine wheels," and they dot the Plains (see figs. 4 and 5). In plan view they are circles of stones; spokes and other features on the circle align with specific celestial objects as they rise over the horizon. The appearance of these objects, the sun and various stars, mark the summer and winter solstices, the fall and spring equinoxes, and other calendrical events. The sun and stars were associated with various mythological characters and occurrences.
It is not likely that astronomical devices were developed to aid the proper timing of subsistence activities. Traditional peoples are familiar with their environments to a degree that precludes the need for the kind of rigid precision provided by calendrical time. The !Kung of Africa, for example, can recall the location of a particular edible root or a place where they cached water from year to year as they travel their nomadic rounds. Also, the optimal time for hunting, gathering, planting, harvesting, and other subsistence activities varies a bit each year according to the weather, so it is not productive to begin such activities at the same calendrical date each year. Finally, in the case of nomads like the Cheyenne, the territo-
Figure 4.
Plan view of a medicine wheel. (Illustration by Steven Patricia after
map of cairn alignments by D. Grey; reported in John A. Eddy, "Astronomical
Alignment of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel," Science 184, no. 414 [I974]:
1040; courtesy Science .)
ries within which they range are exceedingly large. The Cheyenne typically traded as far east as the Great Lakes and as far west as the Rocky Mountains. Since their observational devices were generally not portable, they could not be used as these nomads ranged over their broad territories.
What is more certain is that the astronomical observatories were used to schedule ritual. Ritual is the preeminent social mechanism, marshalling and organizing human energies in many ways. It is significant that groups with more sophisticated and complex social and technological systems constructed correspondingly more elaborate observatories. The Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, to mention only one example from the many sophisticated ancient civilizations around the world that did likewise, built magnificent pyramids that functioned as components of an observation apparatus; one is still the highest humanly constructed edifice in Belize. With this apparatus the Maya identified cycles of time, varying in length from 52 to 256 to thousands of years. Pyramids were built collectively, and
Figure 5.
Sunrise at Big Horn Medicine Wheel, aligning with
cairns and spokes. (Illustration by Steven Patricia.)
so construction was a ritual of sorts. Each served as an axis mundi and therefore a center of ritual. These rituals were social mechanisms that stemmed from religious impulse but were appropriated for "practical" purposes. The Mayan civilization, like our own, has been described as being "obsessed with numbers and time." Whatever the practical benefits to society of this obsession, which might include the ability, to better coordinate specialized societal components as society increases in complexity, in order to understand it one must see that the concern with and valuation of quantified time is neither wholly rational nor inculcated by means of the human capacity for critical thought.