Archaeologists Versus Astronomers - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 6

One can sympathize with an archaeologist with a liberal-arts back-
ground who finds them hard going, but not if the objection takes
the form that “ancient Man couldn't have done anything I don't
understand.”
Far more to the point, however, is that the calculations are
needed only to set back the clock of Earth's shifting axis, back
to prehistoric times. The Neolithic observer did not need to cal-
culate where the Sun rose at the solstice of 2700 b.c., because he
could watch it! It is no coincidence that megalithic astronomy is
widely accepted by amateur astronomers, who spend their nights
watching for meteors or aurorae with the naked eye or with small
telescopes. To the prehistoric Britons, occupying a sparsely popu-
lated island thousands of years before the invention of the street
lamp, with generally better weather due to heightened solar activ-
ity between 3000 and 2000 b.c. [ 9 ] , the sky overhead was anything
but an abstraction.
Referring to the star lore of pre-Columbian Central America,
and its possible survival in Amerindian cultures, Michael D. Coe
wrote: “This area has hardly been touched, and the reasons are
not hard to find. In the first place, there is scarcely an ethnologist
or social anthropologist who can identify anything other than the
Moon or the Big Dipper in the night sky; the so-called natives are
a great deal wiser [ 10 ].”
Just two examples may serve to underline that point. In
Aubrey Burl's comprehensive topic Prehistoric Avebury (1979), he
cites and accepts some evidence of astronomical alignments, but
goes on: “That the rituals involving human bone at Avebury were
held in the darkness of the night is unprovable but the fact that
its two Coves, themselves in the likeness of tomb entrances, were
connected with the night, the North Circle Cove facing towards the
moon's most northerly rising, the Cove at Beckhampton towards
the sunrise at midwinter, suggests that nocturnal winter activities
were performed here…. Whether, then, from the west along the
Beckhampton Avenue or southwards from the Sanctuary, one can
imagine torchlit processions as the Moon rose…” which he goes
on to imagine in detail. But the Moon rises at its most northerly
position, not at every midwinter, but only once every 18.61 years.
For about a year either side, the Moon would rise near enough to