Astro-Archaeology & Archaeoastronomy News Archive 2003

“Welcome to the Maeshowe Webcam Site

This Internet broadcast from Orkney’s 5,000 year-old Neolithic chambered cairn remains unique. There are three cameras sending images from Maeshowe.

From Neolithic farmers in Ireland to Pueblo peoples in the Southwest to Christians celebrating Advent to neopagans marking the annual descent of the sun in the Northern Hemisphere, all acknowledge winter solstice. Sunday marks the year’s longest night, shortest day.

Archaeologists reported the Goseck circle’s identity and age this past August. First spotted by airplane, the circle is 75 meters wide.

The ancients dreaded it for fear the sun was dying. That dread led to multitudinous rituals to welcome the halt of the sun’s decline and the lengthening of the days. Winter is rich in the traditions of mythology: of life, death and rebirth. A tradition that dates back at least 5,000 years.

A large passage grave tomb exists at a Neolithic site dating from 3200 B.C., at Newgrange, Ireland. It is about 40 feet high and nearly 300 feet across. It dominates the landscape overlooking the Boyne River Valley northwest of Dublin.

The tomb, built over several generations, is aligned so the sun’s rays passing through the roof box above the entrance illuminate the central chamber on the morning of Dec. 21, the winter solstice.

The passage of the tomb is about 60 feet. The interior chamber has three recesses, each with stone basins in which cremated human remains were placed.

Some archeologists believe that the remains of members of the Newgrange settlement who had died in the previous year were placed in the basins during the winter solstice ceremony as it marked the beginning of the new year.

Coupled with an etched disk recovered last year, the observatory suggests that Neolithic and Bronze Age people measured the heavens far earlier and more accurately than scientists had imagined.

Archaeologists reported the Goseck circle’s identity and age this past August. First spotted by airplane, the circle is 75 meters wide.

Originally, it consisted of four concentric circles – a mound, a ditch and two wooden palisades about the height of a person – in which stood three sets of gates facing southeast, southwest and north, respectively. On the winter solstice, someone at the center of the circles would see the sun rise and set through the southern gates.

Although aerial surveys have demarcated 200-odd similar circles scattered across Europe, the Goseck structure is the oldest and best preserved of the 20 excavated thus far, and it is the first circle whose function is evident.

Though called the German Stonehenge, it precedes Stonehenge by at least two millennia. The linear designs on pottery shards found within the compound suggest that the observatory was built in 4900 B.C..

Perhaps the observatory’s most curious aspect is that the roughly 100-degree span between the solstice gates corresponds with an angle on a bronze disk unearthed on a hilltop 25 kilometers away, near the town of Nebra.

The Nebra disk, measuring 32 centimeters in diameter, dates from 1600 B.C. and is the oldest realistic representation of the cosmos yet found. It depicts a crescent moon, a circle that was probably the full moon, a cluster of seven stars interpreted to represent the Pleiades, scattered other stars and three arcs, all picked out in gold leaf from a background rendered violet-blue – apparently by applying rotten eggs.

If it is declared treasure trove, the National Museum of Wales will try to buy the sun disc for its collection, once its true value has been independently assessed.

Adam Gwilt, the museum’s curator, said: ‘Gold sun-discs are one of the very earliest kinds of metal objects ever to have been made and used in Britain and Ireland.’”

Experts say the Copper Age or early Bronze Age decorative artefact, no bigger than a milk bottle top, is one of the most exciting finds in years.

Freelance archaeologist Simon Timberlake unearthed the 4,000-year-old sun-disc during a routine search of a site in West Wales in October 2002.

The unexpected find later proved to be an example of one of the earliest kinds of metal object ever created in Britain and Ireland.

According to the team, the site discovered a year ago by archeologist Jovica Stankovski had served both as a ceremonial place and as an observatory.

The research carried out this year showed that the observatory had a specific place for monitoring the stars and the sun, as well as specific holes through which the movement of the sun and the moon could be recorded.

A television programme, to be shown this weekend to coincide with a full moon and also a total eclipse of the moon, will explore the stones’ lunar importance.

The lunar association with Callanish will be examined in Moon Power, a BBC Natural World programme. The site includes a central circle with four limbs running out in line with the points of the compass.

Some of the stones are said to be aligned with the sun and moon at various times of the year and could have been used to predict eclipses and the coming of the seasons.

The programme will feature a simulation of a moonlit event which happens every 18 and a half years at Callanish and which culminates in the appearance of the ‘Earth Mother’, a figure seemingly outlined in the shape of the hills to the south of Callanish. The next event is not due to happen until 2006.

Local people call the image ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in English or ‘Cailleach na Mointeach’ in Gaelic – which translates as ‘The Old Woman of the Moors’.

After rising over the Earth Mother, the moon passes through the Callanish stones two to five hours later. As this happens, if a person stands on the hillock at the higher south end of the site, the moon is ‘reborn’ with a person silhouetted within it.

Carving of axe heads, as well as daggers and cups, have been found at burial sites all over the UK, Trueman told New Scientist: ‘They seem in some sense to be commemorating the dead.’

He thinks the same could be true at Stonehenge, especially as there are hundreds of burial sites in the area around the monument.

Other theories of Stonehenge’s purpose have centred on the fact that it was designed to line up with the sunrise on the morning of the summer solstice, and served as a calendar.

But the theories may not be mutually exclusive. The Sun could have had a symbolic value and been part of the memorial, suggests Trueman, or Stonehenge’s use could have changed over time.”

Almost a century later, the antiquarian William Stukeley overturned Jones’ theory, noting the site’s ancient age and astronomical alignments. Stukeley also suggested the ruins shared a uniform system of measurement. Whoever they were, our ancient monument builders were no barbarians.

Two hundred years later, such notions were largely forgotten, the stones a quaint picnic spot still untouched by hippy hands. All that was about to change.

In 1967 came the publication of Megalithic Sites in Britain by Alexander Thom, a retired Oxford engineering professor who had spent more than a decade surveying megaliths throughout the land. Thom concluded that the builders used a standard unit of measurement, which he called the megalithic yard. This measured 2.72ft (40 megalithic inches, half a megalithic fathom), a number reached through statistical analysis of 145 stone circles.

To Thom, the design, placing and likely function of the stone circles showed the builders had a profound understanding of topography, astronomy and the measurement of time. They demonstrated a knowledge that would be lost for thousands of years.

But this is indeed exactly where archaeologists digging in the region last September stumbled upon what they believe is Europe’s oldest astronomical observatory ever unearthed.

Wolfhard Schlosser of the Ruhr University Bochum believes the site’s unique construction indicates that it is indeed one of the earliest examples of an astrological observatory.

Schlosser, a specialist in astro-archeology, says the southern gates marked the sunrise and sunset of the winter and summer solstice and enabled the early Europeans to determine with accuracy the course of the sun as it moved across the heavens. Schlosser is convinced the site was constructed for the observation of astronomical phenomena such as the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and for keeping track of time.

Frank Prendergast of the Dublin Institute of Technology presented the results of his research to date at the UK/Ireland National Astronomy Meeting in Dublin on Wednesday 9 April.

‘By examing the relationship between the landscape, the monuments and astronomy, we can complement existing archaeological knowledge and hopefully gain insight into how prehistoric communities might have perceived their place in the cosmos’, says Frank Prendergast.

Loughcrew is a nationally important archaeological landscape located 70 km north-west of Dublin in County Meath. It is the site of one of the four major passage tomb cemeteries in Ireland and dates from the Middle Neolithic (3600-3100 BC) and later.

Frank Prendergast’s investigations show that two of the largest focal tombs are oriented towards the rising Sun at the equinoxes. On these days, at dawn and for a period of some 20 minutes afterwards, the interior of the tombs are spectacularly illuminated by a shaft of sunlight.”

It suggests settlers in the area some 5 to 6,000 years ago knew the yearly cycle of the Sun and perhaps centred their lives around it.

Tombs found elsewhere in Ireland have been found to point towards the rising Sun at the summer and winter solstices.

At these times, the Sun reaches its most northerly and southerly points in the sky, which can be easily observed from any place on Earth.

Why tomb builders wished to do this remains a mystery but it suggests the Sun was at the heart of ritual and ceremonial practices of ancient people.”

Perhaps as many as 10,000 mounds and earthworks up to 15 feet high once existed in Ohio alone. They included sophisticated geometric shapes stretching thousands of feet.

Most have been destroyed in the past 200 years by agriculture, canal and road construction and other activities. Only a few, such as Fort Ancient in Warren County and Serpent Mound in Adams County, are visible today.

Three ancient cultures built earthworks in the Ohio River and Miami River valleys. The Adena (600 B.C.) constructed cones and rings. The Hopewell
(200 B.C. to 500 A.D.), built geometric enclosures and mounds.

The Fort Ancient people (700-1,200 A.D.) specialized in animal shapes. The earthworks were thought to be ceremonial centers tied to festivals and astronomical events.

But despite this mystery, most archaeologists think they know a thing or two about these strange monuments. William Stukeley, the 18th century antiquary, famously thought the cursus at Stonehenge looked like a race-track – which is how cursuses got their name – and nowadays we all confidently scoff at that theory. Instead, we generally think of cursus monuments as ‘arenas for ritual processions’, referring to their invariably ‘massive scale’ and ‘permanence’ within the landscape.

But these fashionable theories don’t really add up either – at least, they cannot be generally applied. Some cursus sites are unlikely to have been used for processions. Some had rounded or squared off ends, others were open-ended. Some were very short-lived. Some were even fairly short. There are no rules.

Many cursuses were sited at transitional places, not only rivers but also at the crossover points of different types of geology. Confluences of two rivers seem to have been particularly favoured. It is notable that at Buscot, near Swindon in the Thames Valley, the relationship between the two cursus enclosures – in terms of relative size and orientation – mirrors that between the River Thames and the River Cole.

Overall, the varied settings and alignments of cursuses – linked to rivers, ridges, astronomical features, and the rest – seem to suggest a desire among Neolithic people to enmesh these monuments and the events taking place within them with prominent features of the natural world. Similar links are found in the settings of some long barrows and panels of rock art.

The ivory tablet was found in 1979 in Asch Valley, in outskirts of the German city of Ulm. The dating of other things found along with the tablet allows to determine the age of the find as 32,500-38,000 years.

The tablet was left by a mysterious nation, Auriniaks. There is no information about them, expect but that they came to Europe from the East about 40,000 years ago and forced out native Netherlands population.

The tablet could have been, among other purposes, a pregnancy calendar. On its sides and on the back, there are 86 incisions which may have two meanings. On the one hand, this is the number of days which should be subtracted from full year to get the time of a human being gestation, and it is hardly a coincidence.

On the other hand, the most prominent pulsing star, making up the constellation, Betelgeise, could be seen for 86 days. For ancient people, this could mean a connection between gods in the sky and a human birth.

These could be a primitive ‘pregnancy calendar’, designed to estimate when a pregnant woman will give birth.

It was found in 1979 in a cave in the Ach Valley in the Alb-Danube region of Germany. Carbon dating of bone ash deposits found next to the tablet suggest it is between 32,500 and 38,000 years old, making it one of the oldest representations of a man ever found.

The stars were in slightly different positions 32,000 years ago because they are moving across the sky at different speeds and in different directions, a phenomenon called ‘proper motion’.

Dr Rappenglueck allowed for this effect by using a computer program to wind back the sky and found evidence for a particular star in Orion that was in a different place all those years ago.

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