At this rate, I would find it startling if ancient stonework didn't have something to do with the sun, moon, and stars. Everywhere you look some ancient society was predicting these things by tracking them.
You do if you want a durable record of your observations
e.g., for the purposes of showing future generations you could align with spring solstice, or predict phases of moon, or eclipses. That's impressive and maybe even useful.
I realize that was tongue in cheek, but what I found more interesting is that is was only to stand for 20 years and was initially set to be demolished in 1909. So your question is even more amusing as the thing was only supposed to be temporary.
Since it was part of a World's Fair, it is unsurprising today that the Eiffel Tower was slated for demolition. I grew up very near to Balboa Park, and it was rather late in life that I learned that all those buildings were sort of hastily erected for the Panama–California Exposition, 110 years ago, and they were expected to be demolished quickly, or decay, because they were never intended for permanent habitation. And so the intervening years have been a saga of very industrious preservation and restoration, as most all of the buildings have been deemed to be architectural marvels and very much worth keeping around.
What's interesting is that it may have had multiple changing purposes during construction.
It took 1500 years to be established in its current form. It's pretty likely (to me at least) that the purpose of the year 1 work was different from year 1500.
The cathedral movement started in 1006 with a quiet goal to redirect resources away from the crusades. It was also from a sort of cultural vacuum after the world didn't end at the turn of the millennium.
IIRC (read the book ages ago when much younger) , the theory was that by using the 56 Aubrey holes to count, say, by moving a pole from one hole to another once a year, an eclipse could be predicted to occur every 18th or 19th year.
I always wondered why this was never simulated, and I guess the answer is that it would not work.
OA makes no mention of Fred Hoyle's 'three hours with a calculator' to check Hawkins figures (and being generally unimpressed). Also nothing about the Thoms (Alexander and Archie) who surveyed many other stone circles, or perhaps a passing reference to John North's chunky book on Stonehenge itself. Latterly Euan MacKie was working out how exactly you could test an hypothesis about ancient observers marking a celestial alignment of some type anywhere in the latitudes of Britain. A multi-route rabbit hole if you are in need of diversion.
As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited.
However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.
First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.
For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.
But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.
Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.
We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.
All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.
Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?
We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".
I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago. We build places like Glastonbury and Burning Man all the time and it doesn’t really mean much beyond looking kind of cool. Stonehenge might just be something like that.
Yep. Reading some of the earliest written stories really shows how little we have changed socially since then, and I imagine that goes back a lot further.
I have always thought they were likely seasonal camps. Many peoples living off of the land are seasonally nomadic. Having the stones arranged to also be season change indicators based on the sun would be helpful.
In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.
And you would make a circle of little rocks at the centre. Next year you would put bigger rocks there, then you needed bigger rocks than the place up the road, or you were not as cool.
I fell down one of those rabbit holes by watching a young adult TV show called "The Children of the Stones" which was filmed at Avebury (a village built around a stone circle, about 25 miles north of Stonehenge) and the book "The Old Straight Track" which claimed all these neolithic sites were linked by Ley lines.
There are a lot of stone circles in Great Britain. I suspect that others located in Europe would have been dismantled for building materials over the past millennia.
It seems like it would be a mistake to say things like "it was for science and not religion" or vice versa. Additionally, also seems like it would be very hard to say "it was definitely not for eclipses," given the difficulty in proving the negative? Like, maybe it was and it just didn't work right.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 5.3 ms ] threadLike, it obviously had SOME purpose.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_Universelle_(1889)
It took 1500 years to be established in its current form. It's pretty likely (to me at least) that the purpose of the year 1 work was different from year 1500.
I think the same way looking at medieval cathedrals or Roman and Greek era theatres, collesiums, and agoras...
At least the Ottomans used the Parthenon as an arms depot, giving those stones some meaning.
(This is sarcasm)
Stonehenge was one of the places they would do this.
Makes sense to make the meeting spot nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_things_(Australia)
[1] https://youtu.be/mbyzgeee2mg
> new investigations since the 1960s have discredited Hawkins' ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg @ 2:13
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_holes#Archaeoastronomy_...
However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.
First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.
For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.
But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.
Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.
We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.
All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.
Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?
We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".
In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.
Which is not surprising since our DNA barely evolved during that "short" time span.
We still like to think we are far superior, which all the people before us probably also thought about the people before them
1000 years of this oneupmanship = stonehenge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Stones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Straight_Track
There are a lot of stone circles in Great Britain. I suspect that others located in Europe would have been dismantled for building materials over the past millennia.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...
It seems like it would be a mistake to say things like "it was for science and not religion" or vice versa. Additionally, also seems like it would be very hard to say "it was definitely not for eclipses," given the difficulty in proving the negative? Like, maybe it was and it just didn't work right.