STONEHENGE AS A NEOLITHIC CALENDAR

 

STONEHENGE AS A NEOLITHIC CALENDAR

 

The controversy over the real purpose of Stonehenge and why it was built continues. Recently a 'new' theory has been published by Prof. Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University. It is in reality a re-think of an old chestnut, the 'Stonehenge is a Stone Age calendar' hypothesis, and like its predecessors does not stand up well to close scrutiny. Or even quite distant scrutiny, come to that.

 Basically, Darvill suggests that "the site was a calendar based on a tropical solar year of 365.25 days". He refers here to the Sarsen phase monument, constructed around 2500 BC. In this interpretation, each of the 30 upright stones in the circle counts as a day marking off a thirty day month. Twelve of these, like the Egyptian calendar, form a year of 360 days. To correct the calendar each year, there are five additional days at the year's end, represented at Stonehenge by the five trilithons. Leap years would be calculated by counting off the four station stones, to give a pretty accurate calendar.

 It's a neat solution, except…

 The main problem is: where are the stones to count the twelve months? Darvill suggests vaguely that they may have been part of a bluestone arrangement, now vanished. We know the various arrangements of the 'bluestones' and none of them contain just twelve stones. None of them are perfectly contemporary with the sarsen circle, either. So why build a calendar out of twenty-ton stones and not add the months until later, and then remove them while the structure is still in use? And since the bluestones belong to a different phase of the monument and presumably had their own significance and symbolism, why use them and not a dozen more sarsens?

 And why, if we are to count one stone per day in a month, do we suddenly switch to special structures of three even bigger stones to count off the five left-over days? Surely there has to be more to the trilithons than this?

 On the subject of phasing, there is no evidence that the four station stones were positioned at the same time as the main circle: most writers put them later (so that the sight lines pass outside the pre-existing circle), although some have said they might be earlier (so that the circle is constructed so as to not interfere with the sight-lines, or the stones were used to plot the centre point of the new monument); very few have theorised that they were built at the same time. Then there are those sight lines. They are so obviously the best reason for the positioning of the station stones it seems trivial to suggest that they were needed, by the people who planned this clock, to count to four. And why were they not incorporated into the main structure?

 Finally there are several sarsens excluded from the master plan. There is one (or was there two?) Heel Stone at the entrance and one (or was it two - or three?) upright stones just inside the circle. What purpose did they serve? 

  Looking at the monument overall, is there any indication at all of significance in the numbers of stones? Well, there are perhaps a few. There were thirty uprights in the sarsen circle, apparently divided into three sets of ten by the slimline stones 11 and 21. The trilithons are, as the name indicates, comprised of three stones each, and there are five of them. 2x5=10, so there may be a correlation with the ten stone segments, albeit a slightly tenuous (no pun intended) one. One Heel Stone (or two?), one Slaughter Stone (or three?), one Altar Stone and one extra-large Trilithon. The trilithon uprights seem to alternate with pairs of rough + smooth. So, almost certainly three is significant, with one, two, five, ten and thirty all having possible symbolic meaning. The only occurrence of four is in the station stones, which seem to be made from two pairs of stones.

 If we turn instead to the first phase Aubrey Holes, which I believe were originally filled by bluestones, there were fifty-six of them. That number itself is significant as the number of years in a great lunar cycle as outlined elsewhere in this blog. You can subdivide that by 2, 4, 7, 8, 14 and 28, numbers which bring to mind calendrical periods in our own calendar. But since no stones or posts survive in situ, we cannot assume that any of these numbers were important to our Neolithic forebears. Dealing with later settings of the bluestones is tricky. We are not sure how many Q&R holes there were originally, nor how many bluestone were set into the circle inside the sarsen temple. The inner feature was altered at least twice using different numbers of settings. Significantly, none of these comprised just twelve stones, so we are still missing our counter for the twelve months of Darvill's calendar.

One more thing about those months. Why did our farming forebears feel the need to create an artificial month of 30 days with three 10-day 'weeks', when they had a perfectly usable lunar month of 28/29 days already? A natural month that is can easily be divided into two periods of 14 or 15 days (waxing and waning moon) and with little effort, into 'weeks' of 7 or 8 days. These divisions would have been adequate and quite accurate enough for any timekeeping needed for a rural community or tribe. And they would hardly need to rationalise differences between the lunar and solar year: they could just choose which of the solsticial days is the start of the new year and adjust their farming routine by about a week each month. It wouldn't have been beyond our ancestors to do that, and less bother than dealing with months which never seem to self-correct.

 Darvill has looked at the numbers, seen a few passing similarities to the Egyptian calendar, and thrown together a house of cards. Egypt was an urbanised state with a complex professional priesthood and bureaucracy. They needed to tally the passing of each day and to calculate and plan for major events involving co-ordinated effort from various groups that all needed to come together on the same day. What evidence is there for a similar need among the late Neolithic people of southern Britain? The answer is that there isn't any.

 So there was no need to build a calendar from massive stone blocks, and whilst they worked so hard to move and shape the stones, they forgot to include key elements of the calculation. The theory also fails (like the 'health-spa' idea that was Darvill's last theory) to explain a single one of the many other stone circles and henges in the British Isles.