Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 50

instance, blanks for Neolithic hand-axes were distributed through-
out the country from a very few quarries. In 1977, a Council for
British Archaeology symposium at the University of Nottingham
revealed that in a study of 3,300 axes, more than 900 (27%) were
made of a form of hornstone available only close to Scafell Pike in
the Lake District. About 9% were of greenstone found only near
Penzance in Cornwall, 9% of a stone from Graig Llwyd in north
Wales, and the remainder from just 17 other sites, none of them
contributing more than 2% to the whole. Some were moved by
sea, from Cornwall to the Thames estuary, for instance, but as
many were found within 100 miles of their origin; probably they
came overland. “Discussing the question in Current Archaeology,
one of the editors of the journal, Andrew Selkirk, speculatively
visualizes Neolithic youths in Yorkshire, ready for initiation into
adulthood, setting off overland for the Lake District on a ritual
quest, determined to collect in the shadow of Scafell Pike stone for
the axes symbolic of man's estate [ 5 ] ”.
For those found more than a hundred miles from the quarries,
especially those in the Thames estuary, the existence of a trad-
ing network seems undeniable. Notice that word 'speculatively.'
When concerned with shipping axes rather than measuring rods,
somehow it failed to provoke accusations of ignorance, madness
or similarity to Erich von Däniken.
The evidence suggests that the timing of rituals had primary
importance. The burial of the dead, with accompanying ceremo-
nial, can be traced to our predecessors, the Neanderthals; and the
oldest astronomically aligned structures are tombs. And, when we
take into account the experiences of an observer on the surface of
the real Earth (Chap. 2 ), it is not surprising that those first align-
ments are solar.
The earliest megalithic tombs - stone-lined communal burial
places, roofed over with earth - were created in Portugal and Brit-
tany before 4500 b.c. The marked preference for coastal sites
strongly suggests that the builders were seafarers, at least along
the coast of western Europe; but just who they were the absence
of records makes it very hard to say. The revision of the radiocar-
bon dating scale has swept away the assumption that the tech-
niques of building in stone “must” have come from Egypt, where
they began about 2700 b.c., or from Crete or Mycenae more than