Archaeologists Versus Astronomers - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 7

that position for ritual purposes - but often in daylight, seldom if
ever at the Full, and not at midwinter unless by pure chance, and
even then, not to be repeated for centuries.
“The restricted size of these Coves means that they could
never have been used for scientific observation of the heavens [ 11 ].”
No; but to orient them with sufficient accuracy to be recognizable,
despite the changes in the sky since then (Chap. 2 ), the movements
of the Moon would have to have been observed and recorded over
several 18.61-year cycles - even with better weather, probably over
more than a century - before the builders could risk pinpointing
its northerly rise with a stone structure.
More blatantly, a recent TV documentary began with the bold
statement, “Stonehenge has NOTHING to do with astronomy” - then
treated the viewer to reconstructions, based on recent archaeology,
showing feasts, processions and rituals at Stonehenge and nearby
Durrington Walls, held at the summer and winter solstices, along
pathways and avenues aligned with the solstice sunrises and sun-
sets [ 12 ]. It would give the impression that finding those dates, and
determining those alignments, was either done by magic or was so
easy that it couldn't be classified as astronomy. As the later chap-
ters of this topic will show, it's never as easy as that, even if you
know approximately what the answers are supposed to be.
The other attack on Thom's work was based on the archaeo-
logical side of the question, but was carried out with what - to an
outsider - seemed remarkable confidence, given that the mega-
lithic builders did not leave written evidence. Crudely put, the
argument was that Neolithic Britain did not have the social struc-
ture needed to support an astronomical program. Until recently,
there was no evidence for anything more advanced than small
tribal communities under warrior kings who ruled by sheer physi-
cal supremacy. But, since there were no written records, nor even
representative drawings, to assert that the kings and their priests
can't have been interested in astronomy, and that the astronomi-
cal alignments of their monuments must be coincidental, seemed
to be going altogether too far. There was already counter-evidence
at the time of the Glasgow Parks Astronomy Project [ 13 ] , and
more recent discoveries in the Stonehenge area, in Orkney and
in Argyllshire, among others, have acted to radically change this
position (see Chap. 4 ).