News from Stonehenge:
Archeologists have discovered two new pits at the mysterious Stonehenge site that shed potential light on its ritual use. The pits are aligned in a celestial pattern, suggesting that they could have been used for sunrise and sunset rituals; the pits pre-date the construction of the famous rock formations more than 5,000 years ago.
The discovery was the handiwork of a group called the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, which has been working at the Stonehenge site since last year. The project's leaders are an international team of archeologists who've been using geophysical imaging techniques to develop a profile of the site's ritual uses. Investigators theorize that the pits, positioned within the Neolithic Cursus pathway, could have formed a procession route for ancient rituals celebrating the sun moving across the sky at the midsummer solstice.
Man has always had a need to understand the world around him, and has made the tools it could to help in that endeavor. These were the tools of the day. The original purpose of architecture (as opposed to shelter in say, a cave) was astronomical, to know the calendar and the seasons so as to be able to predict what food sources would be available, or able to be grown.
ReplyDeleteThese things amaze us now, because too many of us don't spend much time looking at the universe with those goals or understanding in mind. What surprises me is that people find these sorts of things extraordinary, implying that they imagine our ancestors wandering around aimlessly hoping to find food by dumb luck. Of course not, and of course they developed things like this, and deemed them of extreme importance.