This beautifully illustrated book accompanied a major exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art on the interaction between cultural astronomy and the arts. It is a sumptuous feast for the eye. In her introductory chapter, the editor, Christine Kreamer, points out the long-standing problem of understanding African cultural astronomy and art, which has often been miss-judged by Western epistemological perspectives and characterized as emphasizing magic over science, the sacred over the profane, and non-rational over rational thought. However, this volume offers a collection of authentic encounters with the heavens leading to elaborate, complex, and non-Western ontologies. Interest in alternate ontologies has been growing rapidly in anthropology and archaeology. This concern with alternate ontologies, which certainly needs to be incorporated in cultural astronomy, has been described as a theoretical bomb, in that it provides a fundamental challenge to dominant western understandings of culture.[1]For the cultural and archaeoastronomer, the indigenous worldviews contained in African Cosmos provide valuable clues for interpreting astronomy contained in the archaeological record. A challenge is to explore sufficiently the full meanings of the astronomy of ancient people, to go beyond Eurocentric interpretative tool kits of observatories, horizon calendars, and navigational aids. These standard interpretations are often useful, but as Keith Snedegar has observed, lion's share of Africa's astronomical heritage is not locked in silent stones; it exists in still-living and exceedingly rich oral traditions.[2] Much of that heritage involves animism, which can be described as a belief in the ability of people, places (horizons), and things (sun, moon, stars, and stones) to communicate with each other and engage in reciprocal relationships. Whether it be the standing stones of Great Britain and Europe, the carved huacas of the Andes, or the sunrises of American southwest, we need alternate hypotheses for understanding their skyscapes.African Cosmos is a treasure trove of alternate hypotheses, containing discussions of the astronomy of the Yoruba (Nigeria, Benin, and Togo), Dogon (Mali), Tabua (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Igbo (Nigeria), and Ngas (Nigeria), and to a lesser degree, the Baule (CEte d'Ivoire), Bamana-Bambara (Mali), Luba (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Batammiliba (Togo). For example, the elaborately carved bowls of the Yoruba may not be merely ritual containers or representations of the cosmos but the actual cosmos, which is fed, watered, and animated. These lidded vessels reflect the interconnected upper and lower realms of the Yoruba cosmos. The similarly complex dualities of the Dogon are discussed, as well as the controversy involving the white dwarf star, Sirius B. …