1 Pre-publication final draft. Full citation: Frank, Roslyn M. 2018. “Collective social memory as manifest in skyscape narratives.” Journal of Skyscape Archaeology 4 (1): 124-128. Collective Social Memory as Manifest in Skyscape Narratives Roslyn M. Frank University of Iowa roz-frank@uiowa.edu Nearly every culture perceives the stars to be in groupings of constellations due to the uneven distribution of stars across the celestial sphere. Throughout time people have imposed order on the stars, as they perceive the heavens in terms of their own value systems. (Griffin-Pierce, 1986: 62) In the Navajo version of creation, cited in Newcomb (1967: 83), First Woman says: I will use these [the stars] to write the laws that are to govern mankind for all time. These laws cannot be written on the water as that is always changing its form, nor can they be written in the sand as the wind would soon erase them, but if they are written in the stars they can be read and remembered forever. Over the past 20 years, the field of Cultural Astronomy has become increasingly less compartmentalised in terms of its disciplinary grounding and much more multidisciplinary, even transdisciplinary, in its methodology and approaches. At the same time, the period in question has seen the rise of two other areas of academic concern and a proliferation of publications, journals, and books elucidating them which, at first glance, might not appear to have much to do with cultural astronomy. The first area is that of human–animal studies, which has seen tremendous growth in recent years as the human-animal divide, along with the culture–nature dualism, of Western thought has come under increased scrutiny, driven in part by an increased awareness of the environmental crisis facing the planet (Ingold 1995). Central to these human–animal studies is the conflicted relationship between humans and other-than-human animals and hence, our relationship with what we call “nature” itself. One must recognise that the concept associated with the word “nature”, along with its many connotations, is not universal, but rather a social construct particularly prevalent in Western thought, in the same way that separating human animals from nonhuman animals is far from a universal cognitive category (Frank 2003). The second area that I have in mind is called “memory studies” which, along with work taking place in cultural linguistics (Sharifian 2014; Frank 2015), examines the way that cultural conceptualisations are affected by the acts of individuals at the micro-level and of social collectives at the macro-level. These forms of distributed cognition, taken collectively, play a role in the way that communities of practice view their world and memorialise it. While studies concerning the