MORE ON MEASURING TIME

 

MORE ON MEASURING TIME

 

After my post last year deconstructing Darvill's Stonehenge Calendar theory, I thought I might expand a little on my ideas concerning Neolithic calendars. The starting point has to be that a calendar is pointless if it is more complex or more precise than it needs to be. I would argue that one that fixes the length of the week, perhaps even naming the days, and squeezes the months to fit into the solar year so that you need a chart or a book to keep track of it all, would have been totally superfluous in rural, small-scale societies such as existed in Northern Europe in the Neolithic.

At the end of the Pleistocene, around 12 000 years ago, humans living in the Near East began to settle into smaller territories and even perhaps experiment with sedentary village life. Once they could watch the sun and moon rise and set from a single spot all year round, they would soon have realised that there were patterns to the variation in where the celestial orbs rose and set. A few years of observation would have shown the regularity of the sun's movement around the horizon and I'm sure they worked out very quickly that as the sunrise and sunset moved northward, the days grew longer (and why) and that the opposite was true as it tracked south again. They would equally soon have noticed the movement coming to a halt for several days at each end of the swing. From here it was a short step to picking one of these nodes as the start and end of the annual cycle, the 'New Year'.

Admittedly, the absence of movement at the solstices would have made it hard to judge precisely when the turning point occurred, but on the plus side it gave you several days from which to pick the best for outdoor community celebrations. And what could it possibly matter if one year was 362 days and the next was 369? Day by day accuracy was not required for planting and harvesting schedules, so why complicate things? The system was, in any case, self-correcting both through the year and over longer periods. There was no call to set leap years, because any inaccuracy disappeared within the mobility of the chosen turning point.

I would argue that for early farmers such as these, the summer solstice comes in the middle of the growing season, and that the quiet time of midwinter was the more obvious choice for the turning of the years. If they were then to calculate the mid-points between the solstices, our farmers would have a useful aid to their activities which was perhaps more reliable than the weather alone. You could mark the four points on the horizon with posts around the village, and everyone knew to plant around the spring equinox, harvest around or after the summer solstice, and pick your fruits and make preserves by the autumn mid-point. Or you could do it in a coded way and introduce an 'enlightened' cabal into your society.

 

Anyone could gauge the passage of time between these four points with reference to the moon and its phases. The lunar cycle is about 29 days, so if you make a few one day adjustments through the year you can predict the moon phase quite accurately. That means you can easily judge the passage of time to within a few days, for task management or recording the length of journeys, without ever counting as high as ten. Effectively, you have created weeks and months. And if you were a Neolithic farmer, who needs greater accuracy than that?