APR 01, 1966
Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in southern England, has been a mystery for centuries. Some have thought it was a pagan temple, others that it was a monument to slaughtered British chieftains. Legends invoked the power of Merlin to explain how the stones were brought to their present location. Recent studies indicate that Stonehenge may have been an astronomical observatory and eclipse computer.
STONEHENGE CONSISTS OF about 2500 tons of stone blocks, which ancient Britons managed to move, some a distance of more than 200 miles, and set in circles and archways on the chalk downs. The stone structures were placed within a circular chalk bank and ditch about 350 ft in diameter. Just within the bank was a ring of 56 equispaced holes, which archaeologists discovered in this century and named in honor of the antiquarian John Aubrey. According to radiocarbon dating of cremated bones the holes were dug about 1850 B.C. Similar dating of a deer‐antler pick indicates that the stonework was put up about 150 years later. Needless to say, no written messages were carved on the stones by the builders, and they left no other clues to their purpose. In my first published discussion of Stonehenge, I showed that the stones and archways point to the sun and moon as these bodies rise and set during the year and that the symmetry of the structure permits it to be used as a computing device for predicting the year in which eclipses of the sun and moon will take place at a particular season, such as midsummer. The 56 chalk‐filled Aubrey holes can be used to predict the year of an eclipse, and the 30 Sarsen archways permit one to count off the actual day of an eclipse. The hour of an eclipse can be determined by watching sunset and moonrise in the appropriate archways; thus, Stonehenge can be used as a sort of vernier. The astronomical alignments are beyond doubt, but the computer aspects are speculative. I have described both more fully in my book.
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© 1966 American Institute of Physics
