  Ethnographic evidence indicates that bora (initiation) ceremonial sites in
southeast Australia, which typically comprise a pair of circles connected by a
pathway, are symbolically reflected in the Milky Way as the 'Sky Bora'. This
evidence also indicates that the position of the Sky Bora signifies the time of
the year when initiation ceremonies are held. We use archaeological data to
test the hypothesis that southeast Australian bora grounds have a preferred
orientation to the position of the Milky Way in the night sky in August, when
the plane of the galaxy from Crux to Sagittarius is roughly vertical in the
evening sky to the south-southwest. We accomplish this by measuring the
orientations of 68 bora grounds using a combination of data from the
archaeological literature and site cards in the New South Wales Aboriginal
Heritage Information Management System database. We find that bora grounds have
a preferred orientation to the south and southwest, consistent with the Sky
Bora hypothesis. Monte Carlo statistics show that these preferences were not
the result of chance alignments, but were deliberate.
