Book Review: Solving Stonehenge

I’ve just finished reading Anthony Johnson’s “Solving Stonehenge: The New Key to an Ancient Enigma,” first published in 2008. The basic gist of the book is that the primary astronomical alignment of Stonehenge is a reflective axis along the winter solstice sunset / summer solstice sunrise; the placement of the fifty six Aubrey holes, the thirty stones for the sarsen circle, and the upright stones for the five trilithons can be described—not by alignment with whatever star is handy—but by using a regular octogram of two squares to fix the position of key points and deriving additional stone points from arcs built from the octogram’s vertices. No need to conjecture Megalithic Yards for the accuracy of alignments; it’s all done with circles, squares, and simple peg-and-rope geometry.

Although he does throw some shade on “Stonehenge Decoded,” Johnson’s crankiness about astroarchaeology (and computers) comes through as an exasperation that never quite reaches entertaining levels of snark.

The first several chapters are a historical review of various scholars, antiquarians, myths, speculations, and archeological theories around Stonehenge, with a focus on survey work. There’s a brief pause to question the racial distinctiveness of the “so-called Beaker People,” and a later a detour to discuss the geometric design elements of the Bush Barrow lozenge (~1750 BCE). Arguments, more like geometry demonstrations, for the underpinnings of the monument aren’t given until chapter 8, on page 207, about two-thirds of the way through the book.

Johnson is more interested in how the builders of Stonehenge built the monument, but not on why they did it—which is fair, since Johnson is a surveyor and the ancient builders left no written records telling us why. The conclusions of the book are 1) that the geometric steps that can be used to construct the pattern on the Bush Barrow lozenge are similar to the steps which can be used to construct the placement points for many stones and holes at Stonehenge; 2) searching for astronomical alignments within the monuments is unnecessary and distracting; 3) the stones can move or be moved around a lot in four thousand years; 4) that despite incorporating pagan mumbo-jumbo and Druids into it, John Wood’s 1740 survey of the monument is Very Good; 5) “there is absolutely no way that the master design of the central sarsen structures or even the earlier arrangements can simply have been worked out ‘on the ground’ without first having been drawn on a prepared surface…”.

“Solving Stonehenge,” is dry, but interesting; I’d say Johnson is writing for amateur surveyors and archeologists and Stonehenge historical enthusiasts. It’s a more scholarly book than some of the much briefer (but much more woo-woo) Wooden Books publications on geometry or astronomy that I own. I came (and stayed) for the Stonehenge parts, and the book’s focus is more on the geometry of surveying. I appreciated that Johnson showed his work in the earlier chapters, but I could have been satisfied with a summary of chapters six, seven, and eight. Mark, of course, accuses me of giving resources to the “Stonehenge-Military-Industrial-Complex,” and opined that I should be reading a peer-reviewed journal covering archaeoastronomy instead.

While I was reading “Solving Stonehenge,” someone asked me what it was that I found so compelling about Stonehenge. I had to pause and think about it for a while before I came up with an answer that was satisfying. There is no one answer. Part of it is the mystique surrounding the site (and being able to sing along with Spın̈al Tap about the Druids); who wouldn’t be drawn to the wonder-stories woven into the tapestry of the Matter of Britain—it’s magical. Part of it is that the stones of Stonehenge and the site itself, which I’ve been fortunate enough to visit, are beautiful and impressive; four thousand year old neolithic architecture does have its physical charm. Another part is that the arches imply portals and the romanticism of being transported to an other place or when. Part of it is how the placement of the stones interlocks with the sky’s geometry, which appeals to the part of me that builds sculptures out of forks interlocked by their tines, tracks the motion of the sun and moon on a home-built portable Aubrey hole pegboard, and owns pierced gnomon spherical sundials. But I think the main reason I find it compelling is that Stonehenge is massive statement about human participation with and appreciation of the site’s locality; it’s a place that draws one’s attention to the sun’s (at least) motion and the land’s response, and in doing so becomes an axis mundi.

Virtual Locations and Solstice

Happy Solstice (a few days late).

As I write this, the U.S. is struggling with a just plain evil policy of seperating infants, todlers, and young children from their parent when families attempt to seek assylum or immagrate (sometimes illegally) into this country.  Immagration is a complicated issue, and I'm sure any solution will be equally complicated, but federal government's crackdown and its psychological and physiological damage to over 2000 children is immoral.

For my Solstice pause, I rearranged the statuary in the back yard, placing the Sphinx to the west of of the lawn circle and the Lion to the south.  I need to find a replacement shell for the Sphinx so she can have a reservoir of water between her front paws again.  The Lion looks good in a kind of cave of laurel and vibernum, and the Sphinx is peeking over some plant I haven't indentified astride some goldenrod.    

When I have ritual in the circle, I think I'll place the labyrinth stone in the north.  The eastern flower bed currently features foxglove (thanks, Mark!) and arbor vitea (thanks again!) and other plants that Mark has managed to coax out of the ground (our clay-heavy soil is in dire need of amendment).   If I can get my act together, I would like to build some standing tables with spiked leges so I can level them after they've been set in the ground.  

And in the back of my head, as I arrange things, I wonder about boundaries and boarders, and the chainlink fence running between our house and the houses of our three neighbors.

Wednesday night, as I lay in bed, I watched a live-stream of Stonehenge.  The sky here had just darkened, but at Stonehenge the pre-dawn Summer Solstice sky was casting enough light to see people.  Our house is far enough from Stonehenge to make it awkwardly late to watch the sunrise there.  On one hand, the technology of live-streaming made it very cool to be virtually among the trilithons of Stonehenge. On the other hand, I was in bed watching something happening that for some of the folks there must have been luminous, but that luminous experience wasn't translating across the Internet.  Honestly, it looked like a bunch of (mostly British) people standing around as if they were waiting for a rave to start.  I was very much aware that I was looking at a plastic-and-glass slab rendering of a crowd of strangers holding up their plastic-and-glass slabs to capture a photo of the pre-dawn crowd milling around Stonehenge.  

We have a planetary network that reduces the world's boundaries to palm-sized panes of glass.  

I watched for about twenty minutes, but there didn't appear to be any sort of organized ritual; of course this made me feel like I was in an old Carleton College comic strip, "Tall Corn" (renamed for the purpose of this particular strip "Mystic Corn"), where two undergraduates go out to watch the Carleton Druids have a ritual ("Wait! The Blonde is taking off her mittens!"), are disapointed that it's not a nude ritual ("That's it?!"), and end up asking incredulously, "Don't you people do crazy things?"  ("Well... Jon's a vegitarian....")

A few crazy things went through my mind, but Mark was wiped out from all the pollen and had passed out even before I started the Stonehenge live-feed, so I turned out the light and went to sleep, too.

Hutton and Archaeoastronomy

I was reading more of Ronald Hutton's "Pagan Britain" Wednesday night.  The only difficulty with reading it just before I go to bed is that I sometimes get too tired to follow the review of the archaeological literature.

I'd just gotten to the point where Hutton is talking about "The Strange History of British Archaeoastronomy" and was laughing a little bit about some of the more woo-woo examples when Mark wanted to know why Hutton was dishing people like Robin Heath on one hand, and then pleading ignorance of astronomy and engineering (and thus being able to contribute to the scholarly debate about Archaeoastronomy) on the other.

"He seems to dish people a lot," Mark said.  "All it does is elevate the arguments of folks like Heath"

"Well, he's not exactly dishing Heath," I said.  "He's, um, ... well..." -- and this was were I wished I was a little more awake-- "...he's um, pointing out that some folks outside of archaeology's methodology are making archaeological claims.  I'm not sure if he's cherry-picking for silly examples the same way Philip Davis did in 'Goddess Unmasked.'"  

Apparently, to cross-reference "Pagan Britain," I need to read Heath's "Sun, Moon and Stonehenge."  And probably re-read "Stonehenge Decoded."  After re-reading the section on British Archaeoastronomy, the discipline started with Sir Norman Lockyer's circa 1900 studies, where-in he claimed Phoenicians brought sun worship and accompanying megalithic structures to Britain (and now I have to re-read Hutton's "Blood and Mistletoe").  Unfortunately, (according to Hutton) there's no evidence for Phoenicians coming to Britain, and Lockyer got some key dates of things (like the construction of Stonehenge) wrong.  Carbon-dating threw a wrench into the theories.

Fast forward to Gerald Hawkins' "Stonehenge Decoded," (which I own) and Alexander Thom's work, which introduced the "megalithic yard."  Suddenly all sorts of religious structures are being theorized based on the alignment of various rocks, which would be like assuming my family has festivals on the Equinoxes because our current house happens to be aligned on an east-west alignment.  (Well, I've got the robes and stuff, but Mark doesn't, and getting up before dawn is hard and...)  The other difficulty is that the stellar alignments are more probable than clock-work, and there's always the question of, is such-and-such structure finished or abandoned?

Heath is an engineer and a college instructor--at least according to Hutton; Wikipedia lists him as an astrologer.  I own a small book by Heath:  "Sun, Moon & Earth" which I purchased at the Glastonbury Tor Chalice Well Gift-shop.  Other than a woo-woo tone, a fixation on mathematical coincidences, and an interest in Thom's megalithic yard, "Sun, Moon & Earth" is a fairly straightforward introduction to the apparent astronomical motions of the sun and moon.  With suggestive drawings using the golden ratio or phi.  OK, and a fairly anti-intellectual introduction.

It's the main reason I own what I call "Portable Stonehenge," because in it, Heath shows a picture of how you can take 56 holes in a circle and use it to track eclipses of the sun and moon.  Which I do.  Now I'm going to have to go back and see if the 56 Aubrey holes at Stonehenge were used this way, or simply suggested by Hawkins in "Stonehenge Decoded."

Hutton singles out Heath as an example of someone with mystical, counter-culture "archaeological" theories created by out-dated or misinterpreted readings of the archaeological record and promoted outside the academic review process.  I think there is some expert-dishing-of-non-experts going on, but it's fair to say that Mark's perception that Hutton's books are full of dishing is skewed by how much I laugh and laugh when Hutton uncovers what I call "The Gourd and The Shoe Moments" in Neo-Pagan history.