8 replies to this topic

[Robert Henvell]

Ar Friarton near Perth,Scotland, a dugout canoe may date to the 8th millennium bce.The earliest European watercraft were identified at Pesse in the Netherlands near the ancient eastern estuary of Doggerland.As the rising waters of the glacial melt seperated Ireland and subsequently Britain from Europe,seafarers along the "Sea Road" and the west coast of Europe were forced to hone their maritime skills.

The age of the first megaliths along the Atlantic Fringe is equivocal.Early precursors may date to the second half of the 6th millennium bce.Construction was more extensive during the next millennium as ideas were disseminated along the "Sea Road".Post 3500 bce some of the larger structures at Orkney,The Western Isles, Ireland and France appear to have had an astronomical [solar] function.

The "solar observatory" at Goseck in Saxony dates to ca 49000 bce and the "Nebra Sky Disc" [ca 1600 bce] is located 23 km distant.Many of the farmers in these settlements lived in long houses.At Balbridie,Aberdeenshire,Scotland, there is a 23 by 13m great hall [ca 3800bce].  Similar structures have been found at Claish Farm [ca 3800 bce] and at Kelso on the Tweed River [A Moffat,2005].The remnants of earlier long houses in the Netherlands suggests that farmers migrated to Scotland from their lowland homes. This
movement of people represents one of the final stages of the prolonged introduction of
farming to Europe from the Near East.

There is fragmental evidence that knowledge of astronomy  reached Britanny from Saxony broadly coeval with the establishment of large,sedentary agricultural communities
.This knowledge seems to have been accepted by the existing megalith societies and communicated along the "Sea Road" as far north as Orkney.

This reconstruction is highly speculative and suggesions and critism would be appreciated.
Bob

[Robert Henvell]

Errors:
The date should read 4900bce not 49000 bce and Brittany is spelt wrong.apologies.
Bob

[belshade]

In general I agree with Bob's comments. The age of megalithic monuments must be hard to determine since they were erected on hand-picked sites and like present-day buildings the sites could have been occupied by structures - often wooden - even thousands of years before stone structures became the norm.
The link between such sites and the coming of agriculture seems generally accepted. In nearly every case the layout has parallels in movement of heavenly bodies so significant to farming and the calendar. It would seem that the moon ("recognised " by many farmers even today) is reflected in the layout of  monuments - as are stars when appropriate. So they are not just solar.
The Sea Road {NW Africa to the Baltic) is thought by some to reflect seasonal movement of shoals of fish. So early fishermen could have also brought farming to the Atlantic shores?
I wonder do we make a mistake in assuming Near/Middle Eastern origins for agriculture and its astronomical-related structures. Perhaps we should be looking at a simultaneous movement - or even an earlier one in the West. Earliest traces of agriculture in a basic form date to around 8000 bce in the Mountsandel/Bann Valley areas in Ireland. (As the ice retreated the fishermen/farmers moved in.)
    Belshade.

[FourWinds]

I know I keep banging on about him, but some books of interest might be, Coastwise Craft & Herdsmen and Hermits by T.C. Lethbridge. He's about the only person to have thought about this and he did it in the 1950s! No one took him seriously then and not many people do now (granted he wrote some wacky stuff, but that doesn't mean the serious stuff should be discounted.) He didn't really go back to the Neolithic in these books, but the trend is there.

[BuckyE]

We're still working on this, and my ideas are changing in details as I continue to read, but broadly speaking, the PRACTICAL links between astronomy, agriculture and megaliths seem tenuous to me, at best. Here are some points to consider.

If the dating is right, Gobekli Tepe demonstrates that sedentarism (village life) and megaliths predate agriculture.

In general, farmers don't need any kind of precise "astronomy" to do their thing. Bird migrations, the very vague position of the sun on the horizon, and phases of the moon are plenty good enough to establish seasons for farmers. Microclimate conditions--local rainfall, temperature of the ground, etc.--are much more important to successful farming, and can vary COMPARITIVELY greatly from year to year. (There's a wonderful bit of folklore that says the way farmers knew when to plant was to pull down their pants and sit on the ground. If the soil was warm enough to be comfortable to nude buttocks, it was time to plant.) Astronomically determined and annually invariant "times" mean little or nothing to farmers or herdsmen.

Despite Alexander Thom et alia, for every monument with a demonstrable orientation to a celestial event, there are dozens of others with different ones. And this in tiny little areas like an island off the north coast of Brittany, let alone Britain where "passage graves" face every degree of the compass.

None of the big stone monuments such as Stonehenge have any kind of pointers to PRECISE sun or moon events. The movement of sun and moon relative to the horizon or even to a pointy stone is so slow around solstices and equinoxes that you would need a perfect headrest and a stone like a needle to see the actual day--out of a range of about six--on which the sun "stood still" or began to move north or south. And have you ever DONE skywatching in Europe? The likelihood of a cloudless sky on any given day (or night) is about nil.

That our ancestors were interested in the sky is undeniable. The base sixty system we still use to count degrees of a circle--and compasses--and to mark time came from Sumeria, of course, and the early astronomers. But by that time, people had been farming and pushing rocks around for millenia. Village life and rocks came along together and led to farming and cities and real astronomy and numbers and writing. But they're not all of a piece. Let's keep working on this!

[fitz]

Hi BuckyE,
I couldn't help but notice the similarities between the nuraghe and the brochs. I also noted that the decline of the Nuraghic Culture roughly coincides with the raising of the brochs.
Remember that our ancestors may not have viewed the sea as a barrier but as a highway.  
cheers
Fitz

[fitz]

whoops ...sorry, wrong thread

[Genesis Veracity]

Stonhenge was, among other things, a precession clock.

The Aubrey hole stone was moved 3 holes every 19 years (metonic cycle length), and so, 3 times 19 is once around the Aubrey ring (56 holes), plus 1, which represented 361 years (19 x 19), and then, once again around counted another 361 years, as the second counting of the 361 years around left the stone at once around (56 holes) plus 2 holes, so the plus 2 holes is like the little hand on a clock, having had counted two blocks of 360 years, so 72 "little hand" moves would represent 72 x 360 yeas = 25,920, which when divided by 12 gives us the length of time of each "house of the zodiac" (2,160 years).

[yogro]

Tasty!