European Cultural Heritage and Stonehenge Earthworks Deciphered: Google Earth View Allows Astronomical Interpretation: The Introduction

This series of postings presents our alleged (and surely imperfect)
pioneer astronomical decipherment of the ancient man-made earthworks nearest to Stonehenge. Our main tools are Google Earth and Starry Night Pro, so that our reasoning can easily be followed by professional and layman alike.

In Britain, earthworks are called barrows, tumuli, tumps, dykes, cursus etc., while in America comparable earthworks are generally referred to as mounds.

Have we identified everything correctly at Stonehenge and environs?

That would be unlikely, after thousands of years, but we think we have made progress over previous research and analysis. We hope that others will be able to build on our results. As a matter of fact, we have had no one to check our work up to now, so that inspection can start now. Have fun.

We suggest that the ancient earthworks nearest to Stonehenge are "hermetic" marks of "archaic" astronomy. See megaliths.net for the principles involved and also our recent posting about the monuments of Kilmartin.

We have identified specific groups of tumuli near Stonehenge as marking stars of inter alia Perseus, the Pleiades, and Cetus. We think these are so clear as to be without serious doubt to anyone who follows up the analysis. Identifying e.g. the stars of Aries, on the other hand, is a judgment call.

Our interpretation of the complete astronomy will surely need much further work, especially in terms of the actual chronology and more complex matters of precession, the position of the ecliptic and celestial and ecliptic meridians. 

Stonehenge is apparently located on the ecliptic in this system, but it could only have marked the Vernal Equinox ca. one full Sothic-like cycle (ca. 1460 years) AFTER it was actually last constructed, as we know the structure today, so this location can only be found in an era prior to the earthwork system.

Hence, the current location of Stonehenge can only be as a direct successor to previous (we assume wooden) structures erected for the Winter Solstice, ca. 7500 B.C. by our reckoning, a Winter Solstice point which was located where Stonehenge today stands in an era that marked the end of the last ice age.

In fact, those are the oldest astronomical remnants at Stonehenge, post holes dating to ca. 10000 years before the present, as written at megalithia.com (© Richard M 1992-2008):

"The people of the Mesolithic period who erected the pine posts near Stonehenge are unlikely to have known of the grand vision which was to come. Nevertheless, they erected three huge pine posts in the great pine forest that covered the site at the time. The 1960's car park is built over these - the large round discs you can see in the car park are the modern markers for these 10,000 year old holes..."

This "archaic" astronomy was surely a product of mankind's attempt to discern the natural laws of the Sky above and the Earth below on which men and women found themselves in the ancient era. They were not unlike us in looking to explain their world.

Take a look at The Life of the Law and the posting

For the Birds? Natural Law, Astronomy and Ancient Man.

and consider the following quotation
that we found in a book
we recently downloaded
to our Android smartphone via Google Play,
as modernity meets antiquity:

That downloaded book is by Harold Bayley, Archaic England: An Essay in Deciphering Prehistory from Megalithic Monuments, Earthworks, Customs, Coins, Place-Names, and Faerie Superstitions, Chapman & Hall Ltd., London, 800 pp., published 1919.

Bayley quotes A. Hadrian Allcroft on earthworks as follows:

"Of all the many thousands of earthworks of various kinds to be found in England, those about which anything is known are very few, those of which there remains nothing more to be known scarcely exist.

Each individual example is in itself a new problem in history, chronology, ethnology, and anthropology; within every one lie the hidden possibilities of a revolution in knowledge.

We are proud of a history of nearly twenty centuries: we have the materials for a history which goes back beyond that time to centuries as yet undated.

The testimony of records carries the tale back to a certain point: beyond that point is only the testimony of archaeology, and of all the manifold branches of archaeology none is so practicable, so promising, yet so little explored, as that which is concerned with earthworks.

Within them lie hidden all the secrets of time before history begins, and by their means only can that history be put into writing: they are the back numbers of the island's story, as yet unread, much less indexed."

- A. Hadrian Allcroft [Earthwork of England: Prehistoric, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman and mediæval, Macmillan Co., Ltd., London, 1908, p. 20].

The next 3 postings will each present one large image of the concluding results of our Stonehenge earthworks research and analysis, each in a different resolution in order to accommodate the differing monitors and PC technologies that the user may have at her or his disposal.

First, we show the image in high resolution as a large .png file. 237 KB. That may present a download problem for some.

Second, we show the image in only 16 colors as a .png file. 98 KB.

Third, we show the image in only 12 colors as a .png file. 80 KB.

The reduced colors may actually make it easier to see the results, since the Google Earth © raw map we used as the basis for our work (we use it pursuant to the legal "fair use" doctrine) -- without which our discoveries would not have been possible -- presents a landscape of bright colors which can make it more difficult to differentiate our inserted content of analysis.

Those three postings will then be followed by further postings that examine in more detail the research results shown on the initial large image.