“Astronomical Heritage: Progressing the UNESCO– IAU Initiative”

Abstract

Most of the 2500-plus scientists, academics and others who arrived at the International Astronomical Union’s 29th General Assembly in Honolulu, Hawai’i were probably completely unprepared for any controversy. I certainly wasn’t aware of any. It wasn’t as if the IAU were going to demote another planet, as it did with Pluto in 2006. But for readers of the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, as well as attendees of the General Assembly’s Focus Meeting “Astronomical Heritage: Progressing the UNESCO–IAU Initiative” (FM2) such as myself, the controversy that met the convention was and is probably much more interesting than Pluto’s new status as a dwarf planet. Greeting attendees of the conference was a series of protests, followed by a regular, albeit small, presence of sign-holding protestors outside the conference centre’s main entrance. Most of the protestors were Native Hawai’ians, calling for a halt to the construction of telescopes on two mountaintops held to be sacred: the Thirty Meter Telescope on the Big Island’s Mauna Kea and the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Haleakala. Though the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the General Assembly were not affiliated with the construction of the telescopes, the conversations taking place because of the protests, and sometimes between protesters and members of the conference, led to a first-hand opportunity to witness the meeting of fundamentally different cosmolo gies and worldviews regarding the sky, the land and the sacred. While the General Assembly united a vast array of institutions, scientists, engineers, scholars and educators whose work related to astronomy, the Focus Meeting entitled “Astronomical Heritage: Progressing the UNESCO–IAU Initiative” is the topic of this review. Readers of JSA might be unfamiliar with the ongoing cooperation between the IAU and UNESCO with regard to astronomy and heritage, but the two institutions have been working together since 2008 to implement UNESCO’s Astronomy and World Heritage Thematic Initiative. The purpose of this initiative is to promote identifica