Astronomy and the Medicine Wheel

LOVELL — Ivy Merriot will be giving two programs about the Medicine Wheel on Aug. 25.

There will be one program at the Lovell Bighorn Canyon Visitor Center at 5 p.m. and the other at the Horseshoe Bend amphitheater at 8 p.m.

She will share her current research on the astronomical possibilities imbedded in the design of the 28-spoked wheel on Medicine Mountain. At 5 p.m. on Aug. 25 at the Visitors Center just outside Lovell, Merriot will show astrophotographic images of the Wheel at night with the Milky Way blazing overhead along with a tour of cultural history of the site. Following that program visitors meet Merriot at the Horseshoe Bend amphitheater for an encore presentation at 8 p.m. incorporating the real sky above the Big Horns in her demonstration of ancient indigenous astronomy.

Ancient cultural sites all over planet Earth show evidence of people’s attention to celestial cycles. The Big Horn Medicine Wheel is one of six known large stone wheels in the northern plains of North America whose design is intricate enough to track complex astronomical cycles. In 1974, John Eddy and later in the 1980s, Jack Robinson proposed the first stellar alignments at the Big Horn Medicine Wheel and suggested that the alignments of the Wheel’s stones to particular stars could predict the time of the year, thus helping people prepare for solstice celebrations, the Sundance, and the approach of winter.

In 2014, 30 years after Eddy and Robinson, Merriot finished her doctoral study of the Wheel and concluded that the Wheel’s placement within its geographical context reveals extensive symmetry with cosmic cycles including the movements of the galaxy, sun, moon, planets and stars. She found that the Big Horn Medicine Wheel never stopped keeping track of time. By placing the Wheel nearly 10,000 feet above sea level, the builders gained a view of more than half the sky.

Did they build the Big Horn Medicine Wheel already knowing the cyclic patterns of sun, planets, and stars or did they place stones slowly over hundreds of years as they slowly gained sky knowledge?

Ivy Merriot will have copies of her newly published book “Star Circle: the Big Horn Medicine Wheel” on hand.

For more information, contact the Lovell Visitor Center at 307-548-5406.