#1595 The Solar Eclipse of 2024

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay Jenkinson joins his friend Dennis McKenna in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico to observe the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. Chaco Canyon dates to at least the ninth century CE, more than a thousand years ago, and somehow their skywatchers know how to observe equinoxes, solstices, and eclipses. What better place to see the solar eclipse of 2024? Administered by the US National Park System, but interpreted for us by a Native Navajo and Zia expert Kailo Winters, it was a magical experience in a sacred place. We came away impressed by the capacity of the European Enlightenment to figure all of this out, but far more in awe of the Puebloan scholars who figured such phenomena out centuries before European science was out of its swaddling clothes. We also check in with our favorite Enlightenment correspondent David Nicandri.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the special edition of
0:07.8	listening to America with Clay Jenkins and today the Eclipse of
0:12.4	April 8, 2024.
0:15.0	I had the great, good fortune to be with one of my favorite people,
0:18.4	Dennis McKenna, from the heart of Chaco Canyon
0:21.6	for the eclipse.
0:22.4	It was not total there, but Chaco Canyon is one of the most extraordinary places that I have ever been. It's in extreme northwestern New Mexico. It's a sacred place and it was designed more than a millennium ago to be
0:39.3	a calendar to be able to determine equinoxes or observe them at least and solstices and to help the people, the Pueblo and people, to know when to plant and when to harvest and when to migrate and when to do their festivals.
0:54.3	So here's something before the Arabic alphabet, an entirely different system, surely
0:59.9	lunar in some sense of the term and solar without instruments of the kind that we take for granted
1:07.2	telescopes and computers and so on.
1:12.2	Observing the heavens over millennia passing on this information from
1:16.4	medicine man to astronomer to Skywatcher etc, preserving this oral knowledge of the world and then applying it in stone at Chaco Canyon,
1:30.0	which even if it weren't a calendar, even if there hadn't been an eclipse,
1:33.5	is one of the most extraordinary and beautiful and moving places that I have ever been.
1:39.2	So I recorded while I was there in real time, I've also had a chance to talk to our Enlightenment
1:44.8	correspondent Mr David McCandry of the state of Washington so you'll get a
1:49.7	little sense here of what it is to see the eclipse in a sacred place, Chaco Canyon.
1:57.0	And now I'm just looking out at this view shed and it's just absolutely astonishing and here's what surprised me I've
2:10.0	never been here before I've been told for many, many years, oh you need to go to
2:14.2	Chaco Canyon, it's even better. Canyon de Chay. But of course, just think of that, I mean,
2:21.8	I've been to a better Anisazi site than you have I
	...

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