Tim Darvill, OBE, who we have met here before, has a new paper about the possible calendrical intents of Stonehenge. We have long known about the solstice identifying stones, but he has a good deal more detail offered. This one is not just a 365-day calendar, but a 365.25-day one, with additional counters counting off the four years for the additional day. Indigenous, or copped from the Eastern Mediterranean?
Calendrical speculation is easy whenever there are stones standing up and you can count them. There is a lunar cycle of 18.6 years, so anytime you find 9 stones in a pattern, or 19, you can say "Voila! It must be representing the lunar cycle! They counted off the years." Anything around 28 days you can say is the other lunar cycle. Four stones and it's solstices and equinoxes somehow. 13 stones is moons in a year. It gets to be like p-hacking, so that whatever number of stones you have, you can make them into some sort of calendar, especially if you start breaking them into groups.
Another problem arises when it turns out the various stones at a site were put up in different eras, as is the case at Stonehenge. It makes the explanations harder to square. As the several eras of original builders of the site were all uh, replaced by other tribes moving in, we also lost some continuity of what things might mean to them. Remember making grandfather into a flute, still one of my favorite stories.
And yet when you have 30 stones, and they have these gaps that arrange them into 1-10, 11-20, and 21-30, you get nicely into the 12 months of 30 days territory, with 36 ten-day weeks. Need five more days? The Egyptians had a major festival every year of five days, celebrating five gods, a little before this. And at Stonehenge...we have the five sarsen trilithons arranged in a horseshoe shape in the interior. Nice big ones, appropriate to represent gods...Was there communication at such a distance between those cultures at times that might possibly provide explanation. Opinions have differed sharply over the years, as the article explains.
Well a problem remains, in that there doesn't seem to be anything counting those 12 months. That is not dispositive, as they could have been far outside the circle and still functional, but it does remain that we haven't got 'em, or not yet.
Although archaeological accounts often rehearse the notion that early farmers needed time-reckoning systems to know when to plant and when to harvest, no self-respecting farmer needs to be told these things—their skill and experience dictates how they work the land. Where farmers do need guidance, however, is in knowing when to celebrate the harvest festival for best effect, or when to please the gods with their presence at key ceremonies. Hutton (Reference Hutton1996: 427) reviewed 40 festivals recorded in Britain over recent centuries, and while many were modern inventions, he found a vigorous seasonal, festive culture surviving from ancient times. These are not so much calendar festivals as festivals whose timing has been calendarised: important events that serve as landmarks in time (Nilsson Reference Nilsson1920: 83)...time-reckoning systems bring communities closer to their gods by ensuring that events occur at propitious moments.
2 comments:
When you are explaining to your son when to start getting the plow sharpened, regular calendared special days would be very helpful. Planting happens when the weather allows, but getting ready for it could benefit from prompting. Harvest I think the farmer could figure out for himself--he needs a meteorologist more than an astronomer.
I would question the need for a 12 month aka year marking. If you've got the solstices and equinoxes with the weather changes you know when the cycle starts over. The ancients, and even not so ancients, seem to play pretty fast and loose with year reckoning. 'The fifth year of such-and-so's reign' or 'when my son was born' are probably sufficient.
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