“For what is orientation, or direction? What is the meaning of North, South, East or West?
How did we derive these fixed points to start with? Not from any local or national origin;
for pure direction is entirely independent of locality. It is, in fact, derived solely from the movements
of the ‘heavens’. It is only by reference to the position of the stars, sun or moon that azimuth,
or true direction, exists. There is no other meaning in the term.”

- H. Boyle Somerville (1912)

Clocks, calendars, navigational devices – all have their origins in astronomy. At any given time, in almost any country in the world, 21^st century human beings can know their position in time and space. This knowledge and technology has been acquired almost exclusively within the last half millennia. It is hard to imagine life without them, and often difficult for our modern minds to even conceive of the challenges facing pre-historic peoples. For thousands of years the sky was as mysterious to our ancestors as quantum physics is to us now.

It is generally acknowledged that advanced civilisation began in the middle east from approx. 3000 BC, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, a region then known as Sumer, and which is now Iraq. The Sumerians developed writing, large scale agriculture, the first known system of laws and lived in city-states. They are widely held to have forged the path towards the later Babylonian and Egyptian civilisations, and the foundations of the modern world.

	Sumerian ‘Elamite’ inscriptions

In the last few decades, however, a radical new theory has emerged. It concerns the legacy of a people who inhabited Northern Europe from as far back as 26,000 years ago. We know them as the Mesolithic – ‘Stone Age’ peoples, and their descendants as the Neolithic – ‘New Stone Age.’

From the furthest western shores of Ireland, to the eastern borders of Poland and into areas of north Africa and the Mediterranean region are some of mankind’s oldest and most mysterious monuments. Standing stones, stone circles, long ‘Barrows,’ chambered ‘Cairns,’ earth mounds and ‘Dolmens’ were constructed by a people we have come to know as the Megalithic (from the Greek – meaning ‘large stone.’)

The enormous southern entrance stone at Avebury weighs 60 tons and stands 16ft tall.

Aerial view of Avebury; the surrounding 'Henge’ is a quarter of a mile in diameter.

Sunset at Callanish in the remote Hebridean Islands, Scotland.

Beginning in approx. 4500 BC, and reaching a climax around 1800 BC, the size, scale and design of these monuments ranges from the prosaic to the truly extraordinary, and some pre-date the Egyptian pyramids by over a thousand years.

The British Isles are saturated with Megalithic sites, and yet the culture that was responsible for them had not, as far as it was known, developed a written language.

Archaeological research has shed much light on the physical evidence recovered from such sites, revealing a society very much concerned with cycles of life, death and agriculture, and who possessed burgeoning skills in art and crafts, but the overall purpose of these sites, and by what means they came to be built, continues to generate a huge spectrum of debate.

The first known rendition of Stonehenge from a 14th century manuscript	St. Genevieve, portrayed in a stone circle, circa. 1590

Such studies are relatively recent. Their constructions had aroused little interest from academics until the 19^th and 20^th centuries, whilst the monuments themselves endured wrath and devastation at the hands of post-millennial religious belief systems, and the ravages of industrialisation and modern farming.

It is a train of events that we may come to bitterly regret, for encoded within many of them may lie some of the answers to the origin of our culture, and the beginnings of science itself.

The first serious study of a stone circle was undertaken by John Aubrey, a fellow of The Royal Society. In his book, MONUMENTA BRITANNICA, compiled between 1665 and 1693, he remarked of Stonehenge and other megalithic structures that there was:

“….clear evidence these monuments were Pagan temples….” [and a] “….probability that these were the temples of the Druids.”

John Aubrey	Aubrey’s ground plan of Avebury, 1663

Aubrey’s cautious thesis remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1697, but twenty years later it came to the attention of Dr. William Stukeley. A physician and antiquarian, his most enduring contribution to the study of Stonehenge was his observation that the axis of the structure, as defined by the orientations of key features, pointed

“…directly North East, whereabouts the sun rises, when the days are longest.”

Stukeley was the first to suggest that Megaliths were possibly built with astronomical alignments in mind.

Stukeley’s sketches of Stonehenge, and a now lost stone circle at Overton Hill, Wiltshire, circa 1724. His studies are invaluable, recording a wealth of Megalithic sites prior to their destruction in the 18th and 19th centuries. A combination of Christianisation, and the need for building material and land clearance, particularly devastated Avebury and the two enormous processional avenues that once led to it.

It was not until the 19^th century, however, that archaeologists began to notice a consistent pattern of sun worship in many countries, and in 1901 they gained their most notable recruit, Sir Norman Lockyer. Founder of the prestigious journal NATURE, Lockyer had made his name with the first astronomical studies of the great pyramids of Egypt. Turning his attention to his own country, and utilising the same techniques, Lockyer published his findings in the 1906 book STONEHENGE AND OTHER BRITISH STONE MONUMENTS ASTRONOMICALLY CONSIDERED.

He asserted that the ancient Britons were easily the equals of their Egyptian contemporaries and that they had designed Stonehenge and other sites as calendars, to mark crucial points in the cyclical movements of the heavens, thus mastering complex feats of long term astronomical observation and calculation.

Though Lockyer was a giant in the field of astronomy, many attacked his conclusions. The reception to claims made by astronomer Gerald Hawkins of Boston University in his 1965 book STONEHENGE DECODED were similarly dismissive. His calculations convinced him that the chances of so many astronomical alignments occurring purely by chance were greater than a million to one.

Gerald Hawkins		Some of his proposed Stonehenge alignments

Professor Sir Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University, known for his radical viewpoints, was one of the few hospitable to his conclusions:

“A veritable Newton or Einstein must have been at work. It demands a level of intellectual attainment that is orders of magnitude higher than the standard to be expected from a community of primitive farmers.”

It was not, however, an astronomer, but an engineer, whose dogged investigations would gather the data that would contribute to the birth of a new science, Archaeo-Astronomy.

Alexander Thom, a professor at Oxford University until his retirement in 1961, had been studying ancient stone structures since before World War 2. He had published two books – MEGALITHIC SITES IN BRITAIN and MEGALITHIC LUNAR OBSERVATORIES – even before making his first trip to Stonehenge in 1973.

Alexander Thom	Some of the astronomical alignments claimed by him at Castlerigg stone circle, Cumbria. Note the ‘flattened circle’ type.

Thom’s methodical surveys of nearly 600 sites demonstrated that many stone ‘circles’ were not in fact so. As many as 30% were actually elliptical and a further 10% were ‘flattened’ circles, often laid out in six regularly proportioned shapes. He concluded:

“Megalithic man had a highly developed knowledge of geometry. It now appears that his knowledge of how to apply it put him intellectually in line with the greatest civilisations of antiquity.”

He went on to note that many sites appeared not just to be isolated observation posts, but acted in concert with one another, sometimes lining up across several miles like rifle sights, as well as with natural features in the landscape, against which relative movements of celestial objects could be accurately observed.

To achieve regularity he proposed an underlying, constant unit of measurement that was employed in the construction of many European sites. He called it the ‘Megalithic Yard.’ This 2.72 ft unit was derived from the mean regular spacing of standing stones within the three principal layouts. This indicated a commonality of knowledge and communication between disparate sets peoples never previously contemplated.

In his book WALKING IN ALL OF THE SQUARES,  Thom went so far as to claim:

“A statistical analysis of the sites shows that they were so carefully erected that we can from them deduce:

1. The inclination of the ecliptic
2. The inclination of the lunar orbit
3. The mean amplitude of the lunar perturbation, and
4. The mean lunar parallax

..with an accuracy better than one arc minute.”

Historian R.J.C. Atkinson, who had dismissed Hawkins’ work as statistically suspect, was forced in the face of Thom’s carefully compiled surveys to reconsider his position:

“It is important that non-archaeologists should understand how disturbing to archaeologists are the implications of Thom’s work. His opinions do not fit the conceptual model of the pre-history of Europe which has been current during the whole of the present century.”

Atkinson’s opinion was a rarity amongst the archaeological community. Thom never formulated a possible mechanism for arriving at his Megalithic Yard, and his work was largely ignored. For many years no serious attempts were made to refute or confirm his data. Yet it very much caught the public imagination, and led to a greatly increased interest in Megalithic sites generally.

Interviewed by the BBC in 1969, Thom was asked:

“Your theories about Stone-Age Einsteins have got up the back of some archaeologists. […] Does it worry you?”

“Not at all,” he replied, “I just go right on recording what I find.”

In the early 1970’s American artist Charles Ross conducted a simple experiment. On a rigid frame he mounted a magnifying glass to direct the suns rays, and a plank of wood to receive them. Each day for 366 days he replaced a plank, each having captured a tracing of the sun’s daily movement. At the end of the year, he transposed the successive day’s patterns into an overall picture of the transit of the solar year.

Unbeknownst to Ross, strikingly similar and correlated variations of this image, are to be found carved into the stones of dozens of the most complex Megalithic sites in Europe, most notably Newgrange in Ireland.

The entrance stone at Newgrange Passage Tomb

During the Newgrange excavations of 1962-1975, project leader Professor Michael O’Kelly had at first dismissed local folklore that the main interior chamber was lit by the rising sun on a special day of the year. But acting on a hunch, he was finally able to literally shed light on one particular feature whose significance had eluded him.

Above the main entrance was a mysterious opening, framed by an inscribed lintel. Referred to as the ‘Roof Box’ its purpose was unknown, until O’Kelly, on the morning of the winter solstice of December 21^st 1969, stationed himself in the main chamber.

Four minutes after local sunrise a shaft of light pierced through the Roof Box and illuminated the interior. For 17 minutes the sun’s beams traced over the far walls and their carvings, and O’Kelly witnessed the presence of natural light in the chamber for the first time.

Fellow Irish archaeologist Martin Brennan had begun investigating his own country’s sites and artefacts in the late 1970’s. Though he could find no evidence to support the Megalithic Yard in Ireland, he was fascinated by the extraordinary abundance of markings on stones and Thom’s theories of ancient astronomy. He wondered whether these markings might comprise a language of some type, and if so, whether they might be providing astronomical information.

Analysing 360 carved stones, Brennan highlighted the most common symbols used, and the frequency of their occurrence.

Identifying nine principal types, he first published his findings in 1983, and expanded upon them in his 1994 book THE STONES OF TIME

“They are all found in ‘Passage Mounds’ and [ ...] they have all been shown to be astronomically oriented, which reveals the context in which the art appears. The relationship between the art and astronomy is further reinforced by the presence of engraved sundials, calendars and explicit solar-lunar imagery.”

Two years later British newspaper The Sunday Times ran an article concerning the discovery of inscribed pottery fragments, attributed to a Neolithic culture whom have become known as the ‘Grooved Ware’ people.

“[An] 89 symbol script is preserved in scores of fragments used 3500 years ago in settlements reaching from the Orkneys to Majorca. It is more complex than any previously known.”

William Waldren, an archaeologist from Oxford University commented:

“These finds suggest that some part of Western Europe, previously regarded as illiterate, may have been as advanced as the ancient Greeks and Romans.[…] Historians may no longer be able to regard the Eastern Mediterranean as the only spiritual home of modern culture.”

His colleague Professor Nicholas Purcell, a lecturer in ancient history at Oxford, remarked:

“It would be sensational if this civilisation had developed its own script. It would show that they had developed for themselves the complex concept of using symbols to represent sounds and so moved towards developing a rudimentary alphabet.”

The study of pre-history had begun to travel in startling, new and controversial direction. A civilisation earlier than the Sumerian may have developed a written symbolic script, and a knowledge of geometry far in excess of any known requirement of subsistence agriculturists. They may have recorded and utilised divisions of long duration time and distance, and devoted huge efforts to the construction of massive stone monuments based on astronomical principles.

If true, the questions were how……and why?