Clive Ruggles

The age of Stonehenge

Stonehenge is the icon of British prehistory, and continues to inspire ingenious investigations and interpretations. A current campaign of research, being waged by probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled, is focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it. The campaign is still in progress, but the story so far is well worth reporting. Revisiting records of 100 years ago the authors demonstrate that the ambiguous dating of the trilithons, the grand centrepiece of Stonehenge, was based on samples taken from the wrong context, and can now be settled at 2600-2400 cal BC. This means that the trilithons are contemporary with Durrington Walls, near neighbour and Britains largest henge monument. These two monuments, different but complementary, now predate the earliest Beaker burials in Britain – including the famous Amesbury Archer and Boscombe Bowmen, but may already have been receiving Beaker pottery. All this contributes to a new vision of massive monumental development in a period of high European intellectual mobility….

Chankillo: A 2300-Year-Old Solar Observatory in Coastal Peru

The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo run north to south along a low ridge within a fourth-century B.C.E. ceremonial complex in north coastal Peru. From evident observing points within the adjacent buildings to the west and east, they formed an artificial toothed horizon that spanned—almost exactly—the annual rising and setting arcs of the Sun. The Chankillo towers thus provide evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated Sun cults, preceding the Sun pillars of Incaic Cusco by almost two millennia.

A system for identifying datasets for GIS users

Abstract The collection and entry of data are very expensive, and have been identified as a major cost in establishing a working GIS. There are, therefore, considerable benefits to be gained from establishing a mechanism that will identify the existence of datasets that have already been collected and entered and may therefore be available for use by others. With the widespread use of GIS and the consequent very rapid increase in the number of datasets being created, the problem is unlikely to be solved by using existing database technology to hold information about available datasets, and requires a radically-different approach. This article describes a system being developed by the Midlands Regional Research Laboratory which aims to solve the problem of identifying relevant existing datasets. Both holders of data and enquirers will provide a description of the data in their own words, which will be refined interactively by the system to remove ambiguities before conducting the search. The system is to b...

Shifting Perceptions: Spatial Order, Cosmology, and Patterns of Deposition at Stonehenge

The changing cosmological symbolism incorporated in Phases 1 and 2 at Stonehenge is reviewed in the light of new evidence from patterns of deposition prior to the construction of the bluestone and sarsen stone settings. The early structure of the monument and attendant depositional practices embodied a scheme of radial division, including a symbolic quartering primarily demarcated by solstitial rising and setting points. Through sustained ritual practice, however, the motions of the moon came increasingly to be referenced through deposition, particularly of cremations. This evidence seems to contradict earlier claims of a sudden shift in and around Wessex during the mid-third millennium BC from a predominantly lunar to a predominantly solar cosmology. It suggests instead that interest in solar and lunar events did not necessarily preclude each other and that over the centuries there was a process of subtle change involving the continual reworking of symbolic schemes emphasizing a sense of ‘timelessness’ and the unchanging order of the universe.

Ritual and Landscape on the West Coast of Scotland: an Investigation of the Stone Rows of Northern Mull.

In view of the theories of the astronomical significance of standing stones proposed by Alexander Thom, extensive fieldwork was undertaken during the 1970s and early 1980s in the west of Scotland to reassess the field evidence. Two groups of sites were identified from this work that seemed to support an astronomical interpretation, but the poor condition of many of the sites made identification of their original orientation problematical. Excavations were carried out at two damaged sites in one of the groups, in northern Mull, in order to identify the original positions of the stones. Radiocarbon dates from one of the sites, the first for a Scottish stone row, suggest construction in the Late Bronze Age. The alignment of the excavated rows, and the results of detailed theodolite surveys at and around the north Mull sites, suggest a more complex relationship between site locations, astronomical events, and the landscape than has hitherto been appreciated.

STILE: a Hypermedia Approach to the Provision of a Flexible, Interdisciplinary Resource Base for Teaching and Learning

SUMMARY The STILE Project is using hypermedia to provide greater opportunities for independent and flexible modes of learning both in a campus situation and for distance learning. The approach is resource‐based. STILE provides a mechanism for users (both teachers and learners) to discover and access relevant resources when they need them, together with facilities that enable users readily to use and re‐use existing materials and to integrate them with further materials of their own in a way that seems natural to them. The result is not a closed and finished product, but a set of tools and services and a continually developing resource base. The effect is to ease the load on academic staff in maintaining and supporting student access to resources and to enrich the set of resources available to both staff and students. This paper outlines the underlying philosophy of the project, the technical infrastructure that has been developed, and current use, and discusses some of the associated theoretical and pract...

Agreeing to Disagree: The Measurement of Duration in a Southwestern Ethiopian Community [and Comments and Reply]

The Mursi are cultivators and cattle herders who live in the Lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia and whose methods of measuring duration have so far been unaffected by contact with literate cultures. In this article it is shown how the Mursi solve the problem of relating a cycle of seasonal events to a nonintegral series of lunar months, while remaining unaware that this cycle is related, in fact, to the solar year. This analysis leads to three main conclusions which may have some relevance to the understanding of time-reckoning systems in other ethnographic and historical contexts. Firstly, institutionalized disagreement about which month of the year and which day of the month it is, at any particular moment, with retrospective resolution of this disagreement, is revealed as the (unconscious) mechanism of adjustment where by lunar months are kept in step with the solar year. Consequently, the Mursi do not have a calendar which is capable of dating events, since there is no absolute standard to which people can refer to find out what time of the year or month it is. Secondly, while the evidence presented in the article does not support the Durkheimian view that different cultures have fundamentally different ways of perceiving time, it does demonstrate, in a less extreme form, the social determination of knowledge, for it shows that the measurement of duration in Mursi country is as much a matter of public opinion and social consensus as it is of the application of objective criteria of measurement. Thirdly, a discussion of Mursi astronomical observations and, in particular, of their use of the rising positions of the sun to determine the summer and winter solstices leads to a cautionary conclusion about recent attempts to reconstruct, from archaeological evidence and astronomical calculations, methods of time reckoning and their associated social structures in communities about which we know very little indeed. The Mursi evidence suggests that it might be all too easy to reach false conclusions-for example, about accurate solar observations-from evidence which is, of necessity, divorced from its social context.

Cosmology, calendars and society in Neolithic Orkney: a rejoinder to Euan MacKie

The authors examine critically MacKies long-standing contentions concerning Neolithic Britain — theocratic control of society, the relationships between monuments and sunrise or sunset on significant days of the year, the use of an ‘elaborate and accurate’ solar calendar and its survival into the Iron Age and into modern times.

Megalithic astronomy: The last five years

Abstract Until recently, megalithic astronomy too often consisted merely of seeking out specific examples of astronomical alignments at particular sites and laying great emphasis upon them. Too little attention was paid to the question of whether the alignments could have arisen through factors quite unrelated to astronomy, and also to wider archaeological evidence about the sites involved. In recent years a more critical approach has emerged, both in discussions of individual sites and in statistical studies of groups of sites. Interdisciplinary collaboration has become more common, involving workers trained in the numerate sciences and those in the humanities. As a result, we are just beginning to see more reliable conclusions about astronomical observations in ancient times, and to see them interpreted in the context of current archaeological thought. At last, it seems, archaeoastronomy in Britain is starting to produce results of genuine interest to archaeologists and historians of astronomy alike. This paper attempts to review developments in megalithic astronomy since 1979 and to examine the topic in the wider contexts of world archaeoastronomy and of archaeology and anthropology in general.

The social and ritual context of horizon astronomical observations at Chankillo

School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester,Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdomemail: rug@le.ac.ukAbstract.The authors have shown previously that, as viewed from an evident observing pointto the west, and a plausible observing point to the east, the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo formedan artificial ‘toothed’ horizon that spanned the annual rising and setting arcs of the sun andprovided a means to identify each day in the seasonal year by observing the position of sunriseor sunset against them. The Thirteen Towers thus constitute a unique solar observation devicethat is still functioning, and a remarkable example of a native form of landscape timekeepingthat preceded similar facilities in imperial Cusco by almost two millennia. Yet the social, polit-ical, and ritual contexts in which Chankillo’s astronomical alignments operated deserve furtherexploration. In this paper, we present new archaeoastronomical evidence that not only clarifiessome aspectsofthe solarobservation device butsuggestsa widerrange ofalignmentsvisible frommore publicly accessible parts of the ceremonial complex, and also suggests a possible interest inmarking lunar alignments as well as solar ones. We also bring together archaeological evidenceto suggest that the society that built Chankillo was differentiated. The Thirteen Towers mayhave served to regulate the calendar, solar andritual, while the solar cult centred on them mayhave lent legitimacy and authority to a rising warrior elite through ceremony in an impressivesacred setting that brought society together while reproducing its growing inequality.Keywords.solar observation device, horizon solar observations, Chankillo, solar cult, warriorcult