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PREFACE

To the Greeks, the primary sense of cosmos was that of order, harmony, and proportion. When the word was applied to the universe as a whole it was to insist that those properties—appropriate to a well regulated state, a finely decorated vase, a formally beautiful building—belonged to the universe too. Aetius tells us that Pythagoras was the first to use the word in this sense, and Stonehenge had stood for two millennia by his time. Today, as it presumably did then, Stonehenge impresses the onlooker more for its engineering than for its cosmic qualities, but it too was in a very real sense a cosmos, a geometrically ordered monument aligned on the universe of stars, Sun and Moon, and an embodiment of the spiritual forces they represented to most of mankind.

Such a claim is easier to make than to justify. It is not easy to catch at the mind of a people who lived more than four thousand years ago, and who left no written history, but the aim of this book is to do just that. Except indirectly, its concern is not with the realities of daily life, not with social structures, habitation, subsistence, or sheer survival, but rather with types of Neolithic monument that speak for the qualities of mind of the people responsible. We may have no texts, but the relatively large scale on which so many Neolithic monuments were built, combined with the modest way in which they merged into the landscape, have together ensured that time has not quite managed to obliterate them or all of their meaning. The monuments in question might not have compared in appearance with the polished glories of Egypt and Greece, but they have hidden qualities, and when those are found, the fact that they were concealed makes them all the more surprising.

What was the motivation of those who invested so much care and energy in them? The view to be defended here is that, as well as being religious, that motivation was in a strong sense astronomical, and that in this respect, few cultures of the time can compare with it. Such a claim is neither new nor precise. What is new here is the detail with which probable observing procedures are worked out, and connected with others detectible from at least as early as the fifth millennium BC. Stonehenge is like no other monument in the world, but there are many respects in which it is mistaken to regard it as unique. To understand it we must fit it into its context, both in time and space. In time, it can be shown to have continued in a venerable tradition. In space, its context is the remarkable landscape in which it stands. The number of prehistoric monuments within two kilometres of the site is to be counted not in tens but in hundreds. What is less widely recognized is that the astronomical properties of Stonehenge, as of so many earlier Neolithic monuments, were also heavily dependent on that landscape. But not entirely. Their design depended also on the state of the heavens.

It will not of course be suggested that the monument on Salisbury Plain was an astronomical observatory, at least in the current meaning of that word. The stones were not erected as a means to investigating the heavens in a detached and abstract way. The aim was not to discover the patterns of behaviour of the Sun, Moon or stars but to embody those patterns, already known in broad outline, in a religious architecture. There are signs that such ritualized architecture had been practised in the Wessex neighbourhood and elsewhere for well over a thousand years before the first phases of building at Stonehenge. While that monument in stone surpassed all before it, in architectural subtlety as well as in grandeur, to appreciate even this point one must know something of the earthen and timber structures that went before it and consequently about half of the book is concerned with that earlier material.

The book was prompted by a certain symmetry I noticed in 1979 in some published plans of excavations made on the site of a Bronze Age burial mound at Harenermolen in the northern Netherlands. (The monument in question is discussed and illustrated in Chapter 7 below.) When built, that mound had been surrounded by rings of wooden posts that had of course rotted away millennia before the excavation performed by A. E. van Giffen in the 1920s. As at many other comparable sites, he and others have been able to chart the traces of the original posts with considerable accuracy, through the discoloration of the sandy soil. It soon became clear that when such rings of posts were erected they were placed with reference to the rising and setting of the Sun and Moon at critical times and seasons. A similar claim has often been made for many of the stone circles, but the positioning of the timber posts seemed to offer more reliable evidence as to precisely how the Sun and Moon had been observed.

Using the key astronomical ideas that emerged in this way, it was natural enough to try to apply them to the much earlier Aubrey holes at Stonehenge, and to timber monuments at Woodhenge, Mount Pleasant, and elsewhere. Doing so led me in turn to consider the potential astronomical implications of the much earlier English long barrows, tombs roughly similar in form to others in various regions of Neolithic northern Europe. Many of them seemed to indicate that the stars, rather than the Sun and Moon, were for their builders the prime focus of religious attention. Needless to say, the order of the book is more or less the reverse of that of my search, and begins with the long barrows. The path to Stonehenge is well trodden, although usually more direct.

The direction of the argument as presented here might disturb the casual archaeological reader, with eye trained to find the nub of the argument by looking for histograms and comparable statistical tools of evaluation. They could have added little of value, and they are certainly not the only valid way of assessing an argument. Like most archaeological reconstructions of the past, mine follows a perfectly conventional method. It puts forward a series of hypotheses about past human actions, and it tries to determine which of them best survive attempts to refute them in the light of the evidence. The evidence in question concerns not only the excavation but what is humanly possible and humanly probable. Those last two factors are all too often left out of the equation, but they play an important part in the initial search for alternative hypotheses. A rigorous search for alternatives is often far more important than a blinkered analysis of only one. To take a simple example: the existence of large temples as evidence for the organization of society into chiefdoms (the positive argument for the fact that large numbers of people can be controlled efficiently in chiefdoms is irrelevant for the moment) is worthless if one cannot rule out all the engineering possibilities for building such temples with small groups of people. And to take an astronomical example: a typical histogram of notable celestial events to which a monument seems to point is worthless if only one observing position and only one technique are considered, and viable alternatives are ignored. Open-mindedness as to alternatives is a much harder lesson to learn than statistics.

How this general method will work out in practice may be illustrated in regard to the long barrows, the subject of a long chapter in which the pattern might easily be overlooked. At an early stage the hypothesis is made that the very brightest stars were observed rising and setting over the barrows, and this according to a series of very simple but precise rules, at which the barrow architecture seems to hint. Making that assumption, the barrows can be reasonably precisely dated, even without evidence of a scientifically high quality. These dates fit well with radiocarbon dates (which are occasionally used to help select alternatives, but not to refine them after the initial stage). A single instance is not compelling, but statistically the argument is strengthened by the fact that this can be done in several independent ways at a single barrow, and the dates usually then hang together well. (The evidence for this is evaluated in passing, for example, at pp. 45, 52-3, 79-80, but more especially at pp.) What is more, the case is strengthened when it is found that the same procedure gives acceptable results at all the barrows examined; and that the same fundamental principles can be readily extended to other monuments, such as chalk figures and causewayed enclosures. A thousand instances might give the reader more satisfaction than a dozen, depending on the mentality of the reader, but the evidence from even a few is compelling. And there are other respects in which this is so.

I am referring here to the way some hypotheses have of leading up to unsuspected situations. In the case of the long barrows, for example, it comes as a surprise to find that, accepting our starting point, it turns out that there were strong preferences for certain simple gradients—for example, one in five and one in ten—in the angles of observation set by the barrows. These gradients conform with the known architecture of the barrows, also often in unexpected ways, and the same simple gradients even turn up on critical ridges of the landscape on which later monuments were placed. There are other unexpected shared elements to be found in monumental design, and a fair-minded reader will admit that they are at least as objective as many other archaeological constructs—for instance, the common social structures held to be discernible on the basis of monumental building techniques in widely separated cultures. (Perhaps they are even more so, since those of the first sort were quite unexpected while those of the second often owe as much to Max Weber and Émile Durkheim as to mounds of earth.) Just as unexpected is another finding of ours, namely that the long barrows fall into regions in which they are aligned on the landscape in groups of three or more. This cannot be explained by chance, and it is therefore of enormous value to our general thesis that the very stars that seem to have been the focus of attention at the long barrows were evidently used to align the barrows on the landscape over great distances (pp). Of course it may be that there is a better archaeological explanation than mine for those extraordinary alignments of barrows—ley lines of cultural stress, perhaps—but I doubt it.

There have been numerous attempts to interpret the Stonehenge monument in astronomical terms, and what has been said of tacit presuppositions in archaeology was never truer than there. One of the greatest of omissions has been to ignore potential observing techniques almost totally, and to imagine that an observer stood in some position that was only roughly defined, ‘near such and such a stone’. Rules of a much more exact kind are offered here. Of course they may be wrong, but since assuming them leads to a much more precise fit with astronomical data than those offered previously, the rules of evidence require us to accept them until something better is suggested. Some of the earlier astronomical interpretations of Stonehenge, dating from the seventeenth century, are sketched in Chapter 7. Archaeologists as a whole remain quite properly sceptical about most of them—in fact they are usually prepared to accept only the approximate alignment of the Heel Stone on sunrise at the summer solstice. They have had good reason to resist the astronomical hypothesis, in view of the fact that hardly a single really precise line of sight has hitherto been found, but they have not been sceptical enough, for even that old favourite, the line to the Sun at summer solstice, is a very sorry specimen that has been quite misunderstood. Stonehenge was indeed built to an astronomical design, or rather succession of designs, but all of them were much more ingenious than has previously been recognized. (The real test of honest druids hereafter will be their readiness to face the elements on Salisbury Plain in midwinter. Since Stonehenge is now seriously outdated, the most honest of all will learn the necessary techniques from the pages that follow, and build another temple far away from it.)

The true astronomical arrangement of the stones would have been appreciated sooner had there not been an almost universal preoccupation with plans of the monument, that is, with charts in only two dimensions. To understand the acumen of its builders one must study its three-dimensional form—a hard lesson that we are taught by the long barrows and timber circles. Another obstacle to progress has been an obsession with the idea that sightings from prehistoric stone circles were usually made towards points on distant horizons. The horizon is all-important, of course, but the people of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages will prove to have been in the habit of creating artificial horizons, just as surely as astronomers and surveyors today use something of the sort in their levels and theodolites, albeit for quite different reasons. Such reference planes were created long before the time of Stonehenge—in the first place, no doubt, to remove the irregularities of a tree-covered horizon. They were incorporated into the Stonehenge monument in several different ways, and the alignments of the stones there will be properly understood only if they are systematically taken into account.

Addressed as it is to a general rather than a professional audience, this book includes only the barest details of the underlying calculations, but those who wish to repeat them should be able to do so—with the help, if needed, of the appendices. There is not a single result in it that might not be made more precise after closer study and field work, but there is a law of diminishing returns in these matters and I believe that the main drift of the argument will survive such improvement. The analysis of prehistoric astronomical alignments demands accurate data, and the Stonehenge archaeological record is not in the best of shape. I have drawn heavily on the field work of archaeologists who are likely to feel uneasy at the use to which their work is being put. They inhabit an earth-bound world that makes them uncomfortable with lines of geometrical straightness, and it is not surprising that they have often omitted to record precisely the information needed here. The real cause for surprise is that they have so often recorded what was needed, and my debt to their recording is almost total. Many will be horrified at my defence of Alexander Thom’s Megalithic Yard (0.829 m), and even more so by its occasional use in plans. By this I do not mean to prejudge the question of whether it was in use, but merely to simplify the task of judging whether it might have been so. Of one historical truth one may be quite certain, when adding a scale to one’s plan: the metre was not in use in the Neolithic period.

The interpretations offered here do not lend themselves to exactness, and it is all too easy to quote results to a nonsensical degree of accuracy that might suggest otherwise. There are writers who publish declinations and directions that by implication are accurate to a thousandth of a degree, but who have not even taken astronomical altitude into account, although it would have displaced their findings by angles of the order of a degree, twice the diameter of the Sun. There have been archaeologists who have considered that they have done their duty by the points of the compass if they have marked them on their plans to within five or six degrees. Those who repeat the threadbare story of Mrs Maud Cunnington, who is said to have made some of her measurements with an umbrella, should compare her azimuths with their own. A good umbrella is far better fitted to the accurate measurement of length than is a pocket compass to the accurate measurement of direction.

The many different sorts of monument to be considered were first and foremost religious centres, or at least focal points of religion, built by people in whose spiritual lives the stars, Sun, and Moon played an important role, perhaps even a central role. There are limits to what an insight into past observational practice can reveal about prehistoric religion, its symbolism and ritual, but one should not be unduly apologetic about its genuinely scientific nature. The activities reconstructed here were rule-directed, scientific in a very real sense, and their implications for human history, intellectual and practical, are anything but trivial. Here, for instance, we can dimly perceive the beginnings of mathematical astronomy, the oldest of the exact sciences, not to mention the roots of a geometry of proportion—which was destined to have an important place in ancient Greek philosophy and science. As a window into the beliefs of the past, this all surely deserves at least as much attention as a showcase of flint scrapers.

* * *

My debts are numerous. I was very fortunate to have Bill Swainson cast an editor’s eagle eye over my script. To the late A. G. Drachmann I owe the idea of self-denial in the matter of footnotes. I have weakened only occasionally—but then at some length—when adding asides that might have stood in the way of the main argument. Appendices and Bibliography are included at the end. (Those unaware of the distinction between dates BC and bc, for example, might consult Appendix 1. A few readers might want the basic astronomy in Appendix 2.) I should never have turned in the direction of Stonehenge in the first place without the encouragement of Francis Maddison thirty years ago, and his broad view of archaeology has certainly coloured my own. Richard North passed a critical eye over my Scandinavian asides. Above all I owe a debt to an entire profession that is not really mine, and especially to Tjalling Waterbolk for his expert comment, on the continental material in particular. The book’s dedication, however, can only be to my wife Marion for her unstinting support. And to her patience, not even Chaucer’s Clerk could have done justice.

J. D. N.

July 1996

A few typographical corrections to the first printing have been made here, together with some minor adjustments to the star maps of Figs. 4 and 210. That the corrections called for were not more numerous I owe largely to the care of my editor Toby Mundy. My indebtedness to him has accumulated steadily since he first took the book in hand.

J. D. N.

November 1996