Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 59

and bank at Stonehenge, but it is generally agreed that Silbury Hill
and Avebury are contemporary.
There's greater disagreement over how long Silbury Hill took
to build. Estimates vary by a factor of 10, from 15 years to 150.
However, it is agreed that the stone circles at Avebury were not
begun until Silbury Hill was finished, and that Stonehenge II had
to wait until Avebury was completed; in terms of commitment of
resources (in prehistoric times, manpower), Silbury Hill, Avebury
and Stonehenge II can each be compared to the Great Pyramid or,
in recent times, the Apollo Project. In Prehistoric Avebury , Aubrey
Burl views the projects as competition between rival groups, per-
haps extending to the enslavement of the Avebury workforce for
Stonehenge III [ 10 ]! An alternative view is that they were directed
by a group with a single purpose, just as, in the space program,
Project Mercury and Project Gemini ran concurrently with the
early work on Apollo, the three projects producing their results
consecutively.
If so, was that purpose astronomical, or was the main incen-
tive still related to the dead? At first glance Silbury Hill might seem
to be the greatest burial mound of them all, or the individual burial
place of the greatest chief of them all, and it has been tunneled into
and excavated on that supposition. But, like the Great Pyramid,
Silbury Hill shows no evidence that it was ever used for burial;
apparently it was never even planned as a burial place, since there
are no counterparts to the unused chambers of the Great Pyramid.
In The Silbury Treasure , Michael Dames puts forward an
elaborate argument that the hill represents the swollen womb of
the Earth Mother, giving birth to the reflection of the Moon in the
moat [ 11 ]. This interpretation may be overimaginative, but the
fact remains that Stenness, Stonehenge I, Silbury Hill and Brod-
gar were created in short succession and have no overt connec-
tion with the dead. Stonehenge I was quite definitely solar - there
were only the ditch, the bank and the outlying Heelstone to the
left of which the Sun rose at midsummer solstice (of which more
later). There were cremations in the ring of 56 “Aubrey Holes”
that were dug within the bank, then filled again, but these sym-
bolic acts within the circle are very different from the creation of
communal megalithic tombs. The emphasis on the midsummer
sunrise, rather than the midwinter one associated with death - at