Pawnee Star Chart: A precontact elk-skin map used by Indigenous priests to tell an origin story

The Pawnee Star Chart is a series of crosses sprinkled around an oval piece of elk skin. Likely made in the early 17th century by the Skiri (also called the Skidi) band of the Pawnee Nation, the chart is a fairly accurate representation of the night sky, but the meaning of the chart is still debated.

According to amateur astronomer Ralph Buckstaff, who published a study about the chart in 1927, it was discovered in a sacred bundle in 1902 by Skiri anthropologist James Murie, who passed it on to the Field Museum in Chicago. At the time, the chart was estimated to be at least 300 years old. The piece of tanned elk skin measures roughly 15 by 22 inches (38 by 56 centimeters), and hand-drawn stars cover the surface.

Buckstaff interpreted the chart as a depiction of the night sky, separated into two halves by a centerline of very small stars possibly representing the Milky Way. On the left side, the stars line up into Northern Hemisphere winter constellations, while the right side features summer constellations. This suggested to Buckstaff that the Pawnee recognized the seasonal shift of the stars.

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Although Buckstaff attempted to show that the Pawnee identified star patterns like the Pleiades and Ursa Minor in the same way as European astronomers did, this claim was refuted by astronomer Von Del Chamberlain in his 1982 book "When Stars Came Down to Earth: Cosmology of the Skidi Pawnee Indians of North America" (Ballena Press). Chamberlain examined Murie's early 20th-century journals and discussed the chart's potential ties to a Skiri Pawnee "star cult" first reported in a 1902 study. Chamberlain wrote that the chart was probably never intended for use as a star map but rather as a conceptual depiction of the heavens used perhaps by Skiri priests.

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In a 1985 response to Chamberlain, anthropologist Douglas Parks, an expert on the Pawnee, agreed with Chamberlain that the star chart was most likely made as a kind of mnemonic device. The chart may have been used by priests or knowledge keepers to recount the origin myth of the Skiri world, rather than being a precise recording of the position of stars, Parks wrote.

The exact meaning of the Pawnee star chart and its date of manufacture are still debated. But it remains an object of deep interest to anthropologists and astronomers alike because, "as a portrayal of stars in the heavens, it is unique for aboriginal North America," Parks wrote.