Archaeologia Baltica

This work aims to present a panorama of the space-time of certain Brazilian native peoples, and especially the Tupi-Guarani and the Apinayé, as reported by some of the early ethnologists who traveled to Brazil, including Paul Ehrenheich, Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Curt “Nimuendajú” Unkel, as well the Canadian naturalist C. F. Hartt. This ethnohistoric data is compared to recent fieldwork.

I have previously presented some evidence concerning the possibility of a Baltic zodiac, documented by archaeological artefacts and supported by historical sources (Vaiškūnas 2000). It seems clear that such knowledge was imported into the Baltic region from Classical and Medieval cultures to the south. If the Baltic zodiac was a simple copy of the Mediterranean one, it would be of minor interest for the iconography of Baltic constellations, but in the Baltic versions we observe very important differences from the Classical model. In this paper I analyse the relevant traditions in more detail and discuss these differences in the hope that it can offer us valuable information about sky mythology in northern traditions.

This article presents some known Belarussian “astronyms” and related beliefs based on folkloric-ethnographic sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries together with material collected by the author and other researchers in the last decade.