It had been thought that the site of Stonehenge was an ancient calendar. How it may have worked has been identified by research.
New finds about the stone circle's history, along with analysis of other ancient calendar systems, prompted professor Timothy Darvill to take a fresh look at the stone circle. The site was designed as a solar calendar according to his analysis.
The clear solstitial alignment of the site has prompted people to suggest that the site may have had a calendar since the antiquarian William Stukeley.
Recent research has shown that the sarsen were added during the same phase of construction as Stonehenge. They were from the same area and were in the same formation. They worked as a single unit.
The stones were analyzed and compared to other known calendars from this period. He suggested that the solar calendar in their layout was a representation of the year that helped the ancient inhabitants of Wiltshire keep track of the days, weeks, and months.
The calendar works in a very straightforward way. Each of the 30 stones in the sarsen circle represents a day within a month, divided into three weeks each of 10 days.
An intercalary month of five days and a leap day every four years was needed to match the solar year.
The winter and summer solstices are framed by the same pair of stones every year. The new year may have been the winter solstice, as one of the trilithons frames it. Any errors in counting the days would be easy to detect as the sun would be in the wrong place.
The calendar with 10 day weeks and extra months may seem unusual today. Many cultures adopted calendars like this during this period.
The solar calendar was developed in the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries after 3000 BC and was adopted in Egypt as the Civil Calendar around 2700 and was widely used at the start of the Old Kingdom. It is possible that one of the other cultures influenced the calendar tracked by Stonehenge. The nearby Amesbury archer was born in the Alps and moved to Britain as a teenager.
Professor Darvill hopes that future research will shed light on these possibilities. Archaeological artifacts could show connections between the cultures. The identification of a solar calendar at Stonehenge should change how we view it.
He said that finding a solar calendar represented in the architecture of the monument opens up a whole new way of seeing the monument as a place for the living.
More information: Time keeping at Stonehenge, Antiquity (2022). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2022.5 Journal information: Antiquity Citation: Stonehenge served as an ancient solar calendar: New analysis (2022, March 1) retrieved 2 March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-stonehenge-ancient-solar-calendar-analysis.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
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