Astro-Archæology & Archæoastronomy
News Archive 1998

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Stonehenge 'built as air raid alert'

The Daily Telegraph of 6 November 1998 had a story about astronomer, Dr Duncan Steel, who, it says, has found:

'astonishing evidence that it (Stonehenge) was an early warning system for meteor storms'.

A number of astronomers have calculated that a giant comet entered the solar system about 20,000 years ago and disintegrated, leaving a trail of debris through which the Earth's orbit occasionally passes. The newspaper reported that:

"Dr Steel found that the Earth would have been at greatest risk from meteor impacts about 5,000 to 5,500 years ago - when work began on Stonehenge."

The article reportted he also found that " ... on the day of highest danger, the comet trail would have risen above the horizon at Stonehenge in line with the Heel Stone", and suggested that the link between the Heel Stone and the Midsummer Solstice sunrise was a fluke - that the Earth cut across the trail of cometary debris around the same time - also that the various Long Barrows, usually thought to be Iron Age burial chambers, might have been built for a very different purpose:

"They certainly look like air-raid shelters - perhaps that's what they are"

The Daily Telegraph was reporting on the publication of the proceedings of the Cambridge Conference held in July 1997, details of which can be found at:

http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis

Astro-archæology Controversy over tomb
at Crantit, Orkney Islands

On September 10th, 1998, The Guardian science writer, Michael Pitts, told of a row that had broken out when a Neolithic tomb at Crantit in the Orkney Islands had been opened for the first time after remaining undisturbed for over 4000 years. While being initially disappointed with the scant remains inside, the co-director of the dig, Colin Richards, a lecturer in archæology at Glasgow University, noticed a small shaft of light shining through a notch in one of the stone slabs which made up the tomb.

He has claimed it is part of a deliberately constructed 'light-box' designed to allow the rising sun to shine into the chamber on a particular day, much as the Winter Solstice sun does in the massive tomb at Newgrange in Ireland. But, his co-director at the dig, Beverley Ballin-Smith of GUARD, Glasgow University Archæological Restoration Division, disagrees. She was quoted in The Guardian story as saying that the slab in question is 'too rough', and that:

"I would have expected, given their skill with stonework, that they'd have removed a few bumps and made it squarer."

Also quoted was Audrey Henshall, secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, who it says has spent a lifetime studying Scottish tombs, and who agreed saying:

"I'm totally unconvinced. I think it's wishful thinking."

Richards, though, is optimistic, convinced that anyone who knows anything about Neolithic masonry will see something odd in the slab. While Frank Zabriskie, a former astronomy professor at Penn Sate University who had retired to the Orkneys, has calculated that the 'light-box' works around February 16th. - not a significant solar date, but he says:

"It is more or less the time you might start farming". .

Whatever the truth turns out to be, one important feature of this dig was that a daily journal was from Day 1 posted on the Internet, so that those interested in its progress could follow developments. The Morien Institute put links to the 'electronic journal' on our website in early September 1998 for visitors to follow the progress. Regretably that link is no longer active.