Astro-Archaeology & Archaeoastronomy News Archive 2007

In the same way the ancient Egyptians must have turned in their pyramids at the sight of King Tutankhamun’s leathery mummy being unravelled last month for all the world to see, they would probably find the whole affair rather unsavoury.

But anyone who has witnessed the burial chamber at Ireland’s most ancient treasure fill up with golden sunlight on December 21 will know there are few sights more beautiful and mysterious in the world.

Such is the popularity of the event at what is arguably the planet’s oldest astronomical observatory, more than 24,000 people now apply to a new lottery to enter the tomb on the shortest day of the year after the 15-year waiting list was abandoned.

But seasoned solstice watchers know that the orientation of ancient standing stones towards celestial dates of significance is not confined to Newgrange. Here’s a selection of the best of the rest:

‘Just once a year at the winter solstice Orion passes due south at midnight’.

The center’s nine ancient platform and burial mounds are part of an 80-acre site believed to have been occupied from A.D. 850 to 1450 by American Indians who were part of a Caddoan cultural tradition called the Southern Cult or Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.

Some of the man-made earthen mounds are aligned with the sun at sunset on the winter and summer solstices and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

Jeon Sang-un, a science historian and member of the Cultural Properties Committee, said on Thursday that he bought and brought the astrolabe that a Japanese person took during the Japanese colonial rule after being made in 1787 back to Korea.

An astrolabe is a mobile astronomical instrument for locating the positions of stars, determining local time, and surveying longitude and latitude. While the Honjeonui, a huge celestial globe, is a fixed astronomical instrument, an astrolabe is one that can be carried.

Recognizing the significance of this site, Sofaer began a three-decade odyssey of intense investigation to recover the meaning of astronomical expressions throughout the architecture and rock art at Chaco Canyon. These efforts changed forever the public’s understanding of what has been termed “America’s Stonehenge.”

This map reflected the crucial role that the sky played in ancient Chinese thought. The heavens weren’t remote from everyday life. The sky was a mirror of the Earth.

Every time that something unexpected occurred in the sky, it showed a disruption on the Earth – which, in effect, meant somewhere in China. To pinpoint exactly where, the Chinese split the stars into 283 small constellations, representing different parts of the Empire.

On 7 December, AD 185, for instance, Chinese astronomers spotted a brilliant new star and reported: ‘A guest star appeared within the Southern Gate. It was as large as half a mat; it showed the five colours and it scintillated.’

The Chinese astronomers kept watch from a raised platform, where four observers faced north, south, east and west; while a fifth lay on his back and looked straight upwards – surely the best job! The next morning they reported to the Astronomical Bureau, which kept records from 206 BC to AD 1912 – the longest-lived bureaucracy the world has ever seen.

The Thunderbolts Project offers remarkably simple explanations for ‘black holes’, ‘dark matter’, the electric sun, comets that are NOT made of ice, planetary scarring and many other ‘mysterious’ phenomena.

It proposes that much of the currently observable phenomena of deep space can be intelligently explained by already known principles of electricity. High school students get it immediately. A doctorate in higher math is not required.

Iseminger showed the reconstructed earthen lodge in Georgia where twice a year the chief’s seat at the entrance is illuminated by sunlight. He also showed El Castillo pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico where the shadow of a snake moves along the steps of the pyramid during the spring and fall equinoxes.

‘The archaeological analysis has resulted in two significant revelations, which define Kokino’s lunar calendar, and assist in the measurement of 29- and 30-day lunar months’, Stated Conev.

On these days, the rays of the rising sun pass directly through the main doorway, straight down the central axis, and reach the innermost, central apse. This phenomenon can also be seen during the spring equinox.

Although there is no definite proof that the temples were used as calendars, the orientation of these megaliths is so systematic that it is widely believed that this was very probable. In prehistoric agricultural societies, observation of the motion of the stars, the moon and the sun could have been related to the changing seasons and times of planting and harvesting of crops.

Participants will meet at 6am in front of the main gate of Hagar Qim Temples to walk down to the Mnajdra Temples, afterwards they will climb back for a tour of the Hagar Qim Temples.

And then it happened: Quetzalcoatl, the god of wind, creativity and fertility, poked his head through the cloud revealing a glimpse of his snakelike image, an undulating shadow illuminated on the side of the pyramid’s nine-tiered northern staircase.

This is the essence of pilgrimage that lies at the center of the mystery and appeal of Chichén Itzá’s equinox celebrations, held each year on Sept. 22 and March 20. This fall, the ceremony will have added honor: In a recent global poll, Chichén Itzá was named one of the Seven New Wonders of the World.

Here and there, among the otherwise flat terrain embellished by the wayside with colourful, plastic bags, small hills jutted out. Partially covered with small trees and bushes, they resembled islets on TV’s Survivor.

On the surface, literally, the tumuli seemed haphazardly arranged and random in size. Scientists, however, have noticed that they mirrored the brighter constellations such as Gemini, Eridan and Orion. The particular mounds here matched the Canis Major-which includes the North Star. Nedelcheva told us that these had been built by the Getae, a people whose exact origins and identity are still being debated.

No one knows for certain what they mean. Perhaps they are a depiction of Mother Goddesses that in turn represent the continuation of life, revival and bountiful harvests. Or they may symbolise the Getae’s 10-stage cosmology cycle. With individual faces they may also be images of ladies in attendance.

Dr Adam Mosley will study cosmography, a subject believed to combine geography, history and astronomy.

The subject became popular around 500 years ago but died out and part of Dr Mosley’s work will be to find out why. He is undertaking a two month fellowship at Cambridge University to find out more

Historians believe that cosmography as a discipline originated as the result of a mistake in translating texts recovered from the ancient world. It is first used in a translation of a text by the mathematician, geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, in a description of the world as it was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The find was made by members of the Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society (Bacas) working on the island of Foula.

Isobel Holbourn, who owns the land in Foula where the discovery was made, said: ‘We knew there was something there, and the archaeologists found an egg-shaped circle of stones. It turns out that the winter sunrise goes right up the middle, while the summer solstice rises at right angles to it.

‘The circle is egg shaped, and in the centre they dug a trench and found a paved area and a bit of black pottery in between the stones.’

The Nebra disc is emblazoned with symbols of the Sun, Moon and stars and said by some to be 3,600 years old.

While many scholars support its status as an object from the Bronze Age, it is claimed to be a fake by others, notably the German researcher Peter Schauer from the University of Regensburg. ‘German archaeologists don’t say clearly that this is a fake. They hide, thinking that the thunderstorm will blow over’, Dr Schauer told BBC News.

Two golden arcs on the outside of the disc may show how far the sunrise and sunset move along the horizon between winter and summer solstices. The arcs are 82.5 degrees long, which is the angle the Sun is seen to travel between the high mid-summer sunset and the low mid-winter sunset.

Several astrolabes have been suggested to have once belonged to Chaucer.

It’s more likely, she says, that these instruments were made after Chaucer’s death, inspired by the design given in the English scholar’s treatise.

‘It is extremely unlikely that any of the surviving instruments were Chaucer’s own astrolabe’, she concludes in a paper soon to be published in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science

Just how much older has been disputed — the estimates go back to 2,300 BC.

Now Brad Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, says he has dated the observations to 1,370 BC, give or take a century.

If the plan is successful, Cailleach na Mointeach, the Old Woman of the Moors, would have some of the 53 turbines sprouting from her knees.

The Cailleach, also known as the Sleeping Goddess, can be seen to the south side of the ancient Callanish stone circle.

Ian McHardy says the visual impact of the highest seven turbines will destroy the effect of the ‘major lunar standstill’ around which the mythical site of Callanish appears to have been built about 6,000 years ago.

Every 18.6 years, the moon appears to rise from between the ‘knees’ of the woman and travels in a low arc over her body, lighting it up, until it reaches the end of the ancient avenue of stones at Callanish. At this point, the moon is huge and low in the sky, and a person standing on a ridge in front of it also appears enormous.

The phenomenon, which extends over a year and is unique in Britain, was first noted by archaeologist Margaret Curtis in 1987. It is now believed that the whole complex at Callanish was designed around it. The latest major lunar standstill has been occurring since last year, with this weekend and the end of June good times to observe it.

Mr McHardy said: ‘The landscape around Callanish turns this event into a spectacular piece of natural theatre, which the stones make full use of.’

Mr McHardy said the visual impact of the windfarm will be significant, with parts of seven turbines visible on the ridge.

‘However, the link between Roman towns and sky symbolism has never been fully nvestigated’, Magli says. The Romans founded many towns, or colonies, especially during Rome’s Republican period and the first Imperial period, roughly from the 5th century BC to the 1st century AD.

Among towns with two clear main roads, Magli looked at the orientation of grids’ axes in relation to the movement of the rising Sun at the eastern horizon over the course of the year.

King, who also received his Ph.D. from the University last year, presented his latest research findings about ancient Maya depictions of constellations, meteor showers and eclipses.

‘The sky is the only universal topic across all cultures’, King said. ‘It therefore provides for an extremely interesting cross-cultural study.’

Standing just inside the National Museum’s basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum.

Freeth was a member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project—a multidisciplinary investigation into some fragments of an ancient mechanical device that were found at the turn of the last century after two thousand years in the Aegean Sea, and have long been one of the great mysteries of science.

Freeth, a tall, taciturn man with a deep, rumbling voice, had been a mathematician at Bristol University, taking a Ph.D. in set theory, a branch of mathematical logic. He had drifted away from the academy, however, and spent most of his career making films, many of them with scientific themes.

The Antikythera Mechanism, which he had first heard about some five years earlier, had rekindled his undergraduate love of math and logic and problem-solving, and he had all but abandoned his film career in the course of investigating it. He was the latest in a long line of men who have made solving the mystery of the Mechanism their life’s work.

Another British researcher, Michael Wright, who has studied the Mechanism for more than twenty years, was coincidentally due to arrive in Athens before the Bladerunner had finished its work. But Wright wasn’t part of the research project, and his arrival was anticipated with some trepidation.

It had been Freeth’s idea to contact X-Tek in the hope of finding a high-resolution, three-dimensional X-ray technology to see inside the fragments of the Mechanism. As it happened, the company was working on a prototype of a CAT-scan machine that would use computer tomography to make 3-D X-rays of the blades inside airplane turbines, for safety inspections.

Once, some 2500 years before the birth of Christ, there lived a people that placed their mark in history with the construction of megalithic temples on the Maltese Islands.

Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.

This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.

In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from two to 7 metres and extending 333 metres, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings.

The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo have been discovered to span, almost exactly, the annual rising and setting arcs of the sun when viewed from two specially constructed observation points.

The existence of this observatory predates the European conquests by 1,800 years and even precedes the monuments of similar purpose constructed by the Mayans in Central America.

Chankillo is a large ceremonial centre covering several square kilometers. It was better known in the past for a heavily fortified hilltop structure with massive walls, restricted gates, and parapets. But the purpose of a 300m-long line of Thirteen Towers lying along a small hill nearby had remained a mystery. New evidence now identifies it as a solar observatory.

And the researchers go further-pointing to evidence of an ancient Sun cult participating in public rituals and feasts directly linked to the observation and interpretation of the seasonal passage of the Sun.

They claim Sun worship and related cosmological beliefs could have helped to legitimize the authority of an elite class – two millennia before the Incas.

It comprises of a group of 2,300-year-old structures, known as the Thirteen Towers, which are found in the Chankillo archaeological site, Peru.

The towers span the annual rising and setting arcs of the Sun, providing a solar calendar to mark special dates. The study is published in the journal Science.

Clive Ruggles, professor of archaeoastronomy at Leicester University, UK, said: ‘These towers have been known to exist for a century or so. It seems extraordinary that nobody really recognised them for what they were for so long. I was gobsmacked when I saw them for the first time – the array of towers covers the entire solar arc.’

The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo run from north to south along the ridge of a low hill within the site; they are relatively well-preserved and each has a pair of inset staircases leading to the summit.

At Chankillo, not only were there towers marking the sun’s position throughout the year, but they remain in place, and the site was constructed much earlier – in approximately the 4th century B.C.

Historical records also describe ‘Sun pillars’ suggesting that South America’s Incan civilisation was observing the Sun – possibly to help mark when to plant crops – around 1500 AD, though those pillars have since been destroyed.

The Incas also held public rituals to observe the Sun rise or set at marked positions on the horizon, and Incan leaders claimed authority to rule through kinship to the Sun. Now, Ivan Ghezzi of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura in Lima, Peru, and Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester, UK, say earlier civilisations in Peru may also have been observing the Sun as early as the fourth century BC.

They base their conclusion on ruins at a walled coastal Peruvian site known as Chankillo. Once thought to be part of a fort, ceremonial centre or fortified temple, the researchers now argue the ruin’s central complex may have actually been used as a solar observatory.

From early on, archaeologists identified pieces of inscribed gear wheels within the corroded lump, which led to the consensus that it was some sort of astronomical device.

But all is not quite as it seems with this apparently timeless phenomenon.

Step out of your house and you might notice your street is fixed on a cardinal grid: north, south, east, west. This pattern defines many American and European cities, as well as Neolithic sites such as Anyang in China and the Mexican city of Teotihuacan.

These finds add to the picture of an enigmatic Neolithic religion, in which stone-paved roads are aligned with celestial features and great circles frame the rising and setting sun at key times of the year.

This all has an uncanny resemblance to Neolithic sites in different parts of the world. The Big Horn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, dating back several hundred years, is a complex celestial calendar, its 28 spokes of aligned stones pointing to risings and settings of the sun and various stars. This medicine wheel, in turn, is similar to the Nonakado Stone Circle of Japan, from the 1st millennium BC, where standing stones mark important, calendrical events on the horizon.

My friend and colleague, Kim Malville, recently discovered an Egyptian Stonehenge in the Sahara dating back more than 6,000 years. Malville believes that it acted as both a calendar and a temple for people living along the edge of an ancient lake, and it is the oldest known megalithic site in the world.

My personal favorite Stonehenge look-alike — at least in concept — is in northern New Mexico, where in the 11th century, the Chaco culture built hundreds of miles of processional “roads.” Rather than rings of giant standing stones, the Chacoans erected enormous masonry temples known as great houses. Many of these great houses are aligned to view celestial events through portals and windows.

Earlham College professors Ray Hively and Robert Horn demonstrated in 1982 that the walls of this 2,000-yearold circle and octagon were aligned to the points on the horizon, marking the limits of the rising and setting of the moon during an 18.6-year cycle.

The implications of this argument for our understanding of the knowledge and abilities of the ancient American Indian builders of the earthworks are astounding. But how can we know whether they deliberately lined the walls up with the moon or whether the series of alignments is just an odd coincidence?

Hively and Horn focused on five alignments. These are the main axis of the site, which points toward the maximum northerly rise point of the moon, and the orientation of four of the octagon’s eight walls, which align variously with the moon’s maximum southern rise point, the minimum northern rise point, the maximum northern set point and the minimum southern set point.

Subhashis Das has been working tirelessly to preserve them and started the Megalithic Utsav at Punkhri- Barwadih two years ago to generate awareness about these sentinels from the remote past. The Utsav is held on the morning of the two equinoxes each year, when the sun can be seen rising through the V-shaped gap between a pair of tall megaliths.

‘This beautiful astronomical sight can be seen only on equinox mornings here. It’s a rare, spectacular phenomenon’, says Das, who quit his job to research and popularise the megaliths full-time. ‘These ancient stones were actually superb astronomical-astrological observatories’, says Das, who has discovered three megalithic observatories in Jharkhand.

The revelation of the time markers confirms the observatory’s values at a global level. The revelation shows that there was a culture that created lunar calendars 3,900 years ago, said Canev as Wednesday’s press conference, adding that besides the three Sun markers, additional four markers for monitoring of the Moon’s movement were also found.

Archaeologists have revealed the discovery of a huge ancient settlement in Wiltshire used by the builders of Stonehenge and their descendants to celebrate life and death with lavish feasts of freshly slaughtered livestock.

Professor Mike Parker Pearson, from Sheffield University, who co-led the excavations, said: ‘We believe Durrington was a complementary site to Stonehenge. It was a place for the living to come to celebrate and bring the ashes and bones of ancestors, I think, to be deposited into the river. The village was more than houses.’

‘There was a clear sequence between the sites. People would come to mark the winter and summer solstices, using the avenue to reach the river and then walk back up the other avenue to reach the sacred site.’.

The avenue leading from Durrington is aligned with the sunset for the midsummer solstice while that from Stonehenge would have given a perfect view of the sunset.

Similarly, the Durrington circle was aligned with sunrise for the midwinter solstice and Stonehenge would have framed the sunset, suggesting that generations of inhabitants made twice-yearly pilgrimages along the routes.

The result, according the archaeologists, is evidence that the Durrington village attracted Neolithic tribesmen from across the region for vast midwinter bacchanals. Enormous piles of pig and cattle bones were found along with shards of pottery which contain chemical traces of a milk and meat stew consumed by the pilgrims.

The houses at the site known as Durrington Walls were constructed in the same period as Stonehenge, less than three kilometers, or two miles, away. The village was probably built as a religious center, presumably for people who worshiped the sun.

Over the years, Stonehenge has inspired a wide range of conjecture, though it is now assumed that this was a place of worship that seemed to be related to solar cults. Mike Parker Pearson, a leader of the excavations from the University of Sheffield, said the discoveries last summer supported the emerging recognition that the ring of standing stones and earthworks at Stonehenge was part of a much larger religious complex.

Scholars and other archaeologists not involved with the project reserved judgment on the ramifications of the findings. But Parker Pearson and Thomas emphasized the importance of the Durrington roadway in understanding the two sites’ intimate connection.

They said the road was paved with flint and led straight from the Durrington enclosure to the Avon. A similar road at Stonehenge, discovered in the 18th century, is aligned with the summer solstice sunrise, the archaeologists noted, while the one at Durrington lines up with the summer solstice sunset.

The Antikythera Mechanism is believed to be one of the world’s oldest known geared devices. It dates from around the 1st century BC and is the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world.

X-Tek is a leading company with a reputation for high-resolution industrial X-ray systems. Founded by British X-ray entrepreneur Roger Hadland, the company was approached in 2000 by freelance film-maker Tony Freeth who had heard about X-Tek’s high-resolution X-ray radiography work and wanted to apply this to investigating the mechanism.

Over the next four years, Freeth brought together researchers from Cardiff University, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the National Archaeological Museum of Athens to form the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and supported by the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece.

Recovered in 1901, fragments of the bronze geared mechanism were found by Greek sponge divers on a Roman shipwreck near the island of Antikythera. From readings of the external inscriptions, the device dates from about 100 BC and is technically more complex than any known device for a millennium afterwards, consisting of 80 bronze fragments containing approximately 30 gear wheels.

X-Tek’s X-ray scanner revealed a complicated arrangement of more than 30 precision, hand-cut bronze gears, with up to 223 teeth. With these the mechanism could predict solar and lunar eclipses and planetary positions many decades into the future. The device may also have predicted the positions of some planets, in particular Mercury and Venus.

The site, atop a wooded bluff 235 feet above the Little Miami River in Warren County, 75 miles southwest of Columbus, was built 2,000 years ago by Indians whom archaeologists call Hopewells. The intricate series of mounds stretches nearly 3 ½ miles and encloses about 100 acres.

The earthen walls are as tall as 23 feet and as wide as 68 feet. They’re divided by 67 crescent-shaped gateways. Stone pavement survives in some places. Some call Fort Ancient Ohio’s Stonehenge, and it is one of Ohio’s top prehistoric sites.

The earthworks were used for about 600 years from 100 B.C. to 400 or 500 A.D. Evidence suggests that many people stayed outside the earthworks. But recent excavations indicate some people also lived within the enclosure.

They hope that a study of the site will settle the long-running argument between those who believe the landmark is simply a place that Colonial settlers built to store their vegetables, and others who believe its existence proves that Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years before Columbus.

The best way to solve the mystery is to find some sort of artifact – an ax handle, a bit of leather, or a bone – associated with the cave. If the artifact’s age could be determined, it would be a clue to the cave’s age.

So far, just one artifact has been found in the chamber — a small shard of metal believed to be silver. Its owner, Malcolm Pearson, said he has no intention of allowing others to examine it. He believes the chamber was built by an ancient and unrecorded native civilization because of its similarity to structures in the British Isles that are thousands of years old.

‘We’re looking into having an assessment of the site done to better date the structure’, said Barbara E. Burke, Upton Historical Commission’s chairwoman.

“The Upton Chamber is one of the largest and most perfectly built of the more than 300 stone chambers catalogued throughout the Northeast.

It is one of several similar structures in New England that are sometimes attributed to pre-Columbian European monks.

It is very likely that meteorites had dropped near the pyramids. The material was collected during the December expedition of geologists. Another aim of the expedition was to study some geoglyphics, i.e. gigantic pictures drawn on the ground.

According to ‘Dziennik Polski’, the scientists were intrigued by some unusual structures, which resembled craters formed after meteorites hit the ground. They noticed them when analysing satellite pictures of areas north of the great pyramids in Giza.

‘We found very solid metallic fragments in this area. These are probably meteorite fragments’, – says Prof. Maciej Pawlikowski from the Mineralogy, Petrography and Geochemistry department at AGH University, who was the supervisor and main organiser of the geological expedition.

In a report released at a scientific symposium in Seoul, Park Chang-bom, an astronomer at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, claimed that detailed studies of dolmens on the Korean Peninsula showed that patterns carved on the cover stones of these graves copied the known constellations in the night sky.

Dolmens, found throughout the peninsula and Manchuria, are believed to be graves of local leaders. Most in South Korea date between 2,000 B.C. and around A.D. 200. The region has one of the highest concentrations of dolmens found anywhere in the world.

Park and Yang Heung-jin, a researcher at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, said that this early interest in astronomy was carried over by Goguryeo (B.C. 37-A.D. 668), Goryeo (918-1392) and Joseon (1392-1910) kingdoms.