Scotland Monuments in Kilmartin Are a Prehistoric European Sky Map of the Heavens

This is a posting about technological innovation in prehistoric Europe for all our readers who hail from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England, or who have an interest in Europe's or man's history or that of Ancient Britain, broadly seen. Reposted from the Ancient World Blog.

Monuments of Kilmartin, Scotland Are a Sky Map of the Heavens

This posting announces my decipherment of the Kilmartin, Scotland monuments showing them to be a sky map of the heavens (at least 4500 years old). That decipherment was completed today, October 15, 2012, completing work initially begun in the year 2000.

Substantial progress was made in 2008 when friends invited my significant other and myself to spend some time at their home in western Scotland.

The monuments of Kilmartin cover a 6-mile radius of terrain and employ the hermetic principle, "as above, so below" in creating a mirror-image of the stars on the surface of the Earth. Kilmartin was a mammoth ancient "star" project.

As written at the home page of the Kilmartin House Museum:

"There are more than 800 ancient monuments within a six-mile radius of the village of Kilmartin, Argyll, many of them are are prehistoric. This extraordinary concentration and diversity of monuments distinguishes the Kilmartin Glen as an area of outstanding archaeological importance. It is one of Scotland’s richest prehistoric landscapes."

The beauty of my decipherment is that once one knows the solution to the monument puzzle, that solution is open to anyone who has or obtains a minimal understanding of astronomy and the stars of the heavens.

The key to the decipherment was the initial  identification of the stars of Cygnus, Draco and Leo. The rest followed. If the decipherment were correct, the other stars had to fit. They do, and ANY reader can check the solution. That solution is not perfect, and surely much will be done down the road to improve it, but its general correctness is without doubt

Of course, the ancients may not have made the same groupings of stars into constellations or asterisms as we do today, and it is unlikely they used exactly all the same stars, but the bright stars in the sky lend themselves to stellar organization and sky-mapping such as we find in our modern Zodiac.

The three images presented below are:

1. Kilmartin Monuments Deciphered as Astronomy by Andis Kaulins, 2000 to 2012, as based on an Ordnance Survey map that maps monument positions at Kilmartin. Kilmartin (page x), An Inventory of the Monuments Extracted from Argyll, Volume 6, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), 1999.
2. Sky map excerpts clipped from Starry Night Pro, the best software program out there for this kind of work, http://www.starrynight.com/, showing how the stars actually looked ca. 2500 B.C.
3. A combined image which combines 1 and 2 above, for comparison.
   

Image 1: Kilmartin Monuments Deciphered

    Image 2: Starry Night Pro Clip, Stars of the Sky for Top and Bottom of Kilmartin Decipherment

    Image 3: Kilmartin Monuments Deciphered plus 2 Starry Night Pro Astronomy Software Image Clips to Show the Stars Depicted

Please be advised that the work above continues the basic research on ancient monuments, signs and symbols published by Andis Kaulins in:

• Stars Stones and Scholars: The Decipherment of the Megaliths
  
  and
   
• Ancient Signs: The Alphabet and the Origins of Writing

The author has deciphered a similar map of the heavens on Earth in the case of Tanum, Sweden. See megaliths.net and for related works, lexiline.com.