is the vehicle of Dr Fabio Silva, a UK-based skyscape archaeologist. Fabio has spent the last 20 years researching how societies have perceived and conceived their environment and used that to time and adjust social, productive and magico-religious behaviours. This steered his academic career along two distinct yet complementary strands: archaeological modelling and skyscape archaeology. With respect to the latter, he is not so interested in identifying and collecting celestial alignments but in understanding how they can help us peek into how past societies made sense of the world and their place in it. This takes careful, robust and reflexive approaches to the archaeological record – both qualitative and quantitative – which he has been not only keen to explore but also develop.

Fabio has over 15 years of experience teaching archaeoastronomy / skyscape archaeology to both undergraduate and postgraduate students in academic settings. He is also very research active having published dozens of research papers and book chapters, and edited ten volumes on these topics. He co-founded the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, the leading academic journal in this field, and was its co-editor for the past decade. His “outstanding contributions” to the fields of cultural astronomy and archaeoastronomy/skyscape archaeology have led to the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC) giving him the Carlos Jaschek Award in 2016.

is an opportunity for Fabio to provide distinct and innovative services that are becoming sought after but difficult to find as there are not many experts in both archaeology and archaeoastronomy.

Why STONE x SKY ?

Stone has been a common material to build structures that were meant to endure the test of time. It is for this reason that prehistoric and historic structures made out of stone are so ubiquitous in world archaeology. Here, however, we are using it to represent all structures, whether actually made of stone, or made of wood, bone, earth, etc, and whether they be monumental or domestic in nature, prehistoric or contemporary in chronology.

Sky relates to the celestial dome that is part of the cosmovision/worldview of all societies, past of present, and which often finds expression in the archaeological record too.

The x between the two words is used to mean ‘and’. This has become a common usage recently to emphasise that there is a crossing over and not going a joining of two things. Skyscape archaeology is not simply about considering the stones – the archaeology – and then the sky, it is about looking for and making sense of those points where the two crossover.