Archaeologists Versus Astronomers - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 3

much as a comment on it, by a small group of people who definitely
did support the astronomical interpretation of the ancient sites.
To date, that comment has not influenced the debate - its point
is perhaps a subtle one - but it may have an effect in time. Mean-
while, ongoing events at the circle have provided lessons on what
could and could not be done at the ancient sites.
At Stonehenge, in the 1960s, the literature available at the
nearby souvenir shop without exception placed some emphasis on
the alignment of Stonehenge to midsummer sunrise, while stress-
ing that there was no evidence to support modern names for fea-
tures such as the “Altar Stone” and “Slaughter Stone [ 2 ] .” There
was nothing to counteract the impression that Stonehenge had
functioned at least partly as an observatory.
Behind the scenes, however, controversy was building up. In
1963 C.A. Newham and Professor Gerald Hawkins, working inde-
pendently, had published interpretations of alignments at Stone-
henge indicating a lunar observatory function as well as a solar one
[ 3 ] . As shown below, even approximate lunar alignments would
indicate a much longer and more painstaking program of observa-
tions than the solar ones require. Hawkins had used a computer to
analyze the positions of the stones, and perhaps that rather unneces-
sary sophistication made his account the focus of the controversy.
Looking back on it in 1984, under the heading, 'Whatever happened
to megalithic astronomy?', Christopher Chippindale wrote, “[His]
hushed reverence for the wonderful IBM computer which could
decode the language of the ancient Stonehenge computer, reads like
a period piece now. It is a revealing fact that IBM did not do the first
decoding at all: Hawkins did it with good old-fashioned pencil and
paper and only checked his result with the machine afterwards [ 4 ] .”
In 1965 Prof. Hawkins published an enlarged version of his
account, with anecdotes and speculation, in his topic Stonehenge
Decoded [ 5 ]. Archaeologists at once joined battle - “Moonshine on
Stonehenge” was the title of one review. Revising his 1959 HMSO
Stonehenge: Official Guide-Book , R.S. Newall wrote that year:
“The orientation of ancient monuments is not popular with some
archaeologists, but, if it be a fact that two stones or one stone and a
space between two other adjoining stones are in line with a certain
sunrise or sunset, the student may justifiably consider theories
based on such facts [ 6 ] .”