Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 23, 1990 TAG: 9006230129
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E3 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. LENGTH: Medium
For them, as for other early Meso-American people, the rabbit came to symbolize the moon in religion and art.
On the morning of July 5, 1054, the Mimbres Indians arose to find a bright new object shining in the Eastern sky, close to the crescent moon.
The object remained visible in daylight for many days. One observer recorded the strange apparition with a black and white painting of a rabbit curled into a crescent shape with a small sunburst at the tip of one foot.
And so the Indians of the Southwestern United States left what archeologists and astronomers call the most unambiguous evidence ever found that people in the Western Hemisphere observed with awe and some sophistication the exploding star, or supernova, that created the Crab nebula.
The ethereal light of the spreading nebula, now visible by telescope in the constellation Taurus, is the best-known remnant of a recorded supernova.
Dr. R. Robert Robbins, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, said a Mimbres bowl decorated with the painting is "the most certain record of the supernova that has ever been discovered outside China and Japan."
Of even more importance, he said, it provides new insights about the level of astronomical accomplishment of North American Indians, who have been overshadowed by the more advanced Aztec and Maya civilizations to the south.
Astrologers to the emperor of China left documents of the sudden appearance of a bright object in the sky on July 5, 1054, and how it was visible in daylight for 23 days.
Astronomers early this century determined that the descriptions fit the Crab nebula.
The first indication that American Indians may have made a pictographic record of the phenomenon emerged in the last decade or so. Rock art dated at about the 11th century was found in several states that appears to depict a stellar object associated with a crescent moon.
Dr. John C. Brandt, an astronomer at the University of Colorado, said the Mimbres artifact "greatly strengthened" his earlier interpretation of the rock art as depictions of the Crab nebula supernova.
"It is more and more likely," he said, "that Native Americans recognized the event as something unique and significant and left us a record."
Analysis of the Mimbres ceramic bowl was made by Robbins and a graduate student, Russell B. Westmoreland, an archeologist. It was found nearly 60 years ago by University of Minnesota archeologists at Indian ruins near Silver City in southwestern New Mexico.
by CNB