Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:52:38.506Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Science or symbolism: problems of archaeo-astronomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Aubrey Burl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A convincing case has now been made out for linking [the cursus, avenues, alignments, henges and circles] with a remarkable store of engineering, mathematical and astronomical knowledge’ (Burgess, 1974, 195)

… it is fantastic to imagine that the ill-clad inhabitants of these boreal isles should shiver night long in rain and gale, peering through the driving mists to note eclipses and planetary movements in our oft-veiled skies’ (Childe, 1930, 164).

Over the last decade many claims have been made that early prehistoric Britain was the focus of a scientifically learned society whose mathematical, geometrical and astronomical discoveries anticipated those of the Babylonians and Greeks, and some of whose megalithic observatories survive for us to examine.

Type
Articles
Information
Antiquity , Volume 54 , Issue 212 , November 1980 , pp. 191 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ALLCROFT, A.H. 1927. The Circle and the Cross, I (London).Google Scholar
BARBER, J. 1973. The Orientation of the recumbent stone circles of the S.W. of Ireland, J. Kerry Archaeol. Hist. Soc., VI, 26—39.Google Scholar
BURGESS, C.B 1974. The Bronze Age, in (ed. C. Renfrew), British prehistory: a new outline (London), 165—232.Google Scholar
BURL, H.A.w. 1974. The recumbent stone circles of North-East Scotland, Proc. Antiq. Scot., CII (1969—70), 56—81.Google Scholar
BURL, H.A.w. 1976. The stone circles of the British Isles (London and New Haven).Google Scholar
BURL, H.A.w. 1980a. Strichen, Discovery and Excavation in Scotland, 1979 (Edinburgh, 77).Google Scholar
BURL, 1980b. A word in time. Folk stories and stone circles, Sangreal 3 (2), 5—13.Google Scholar
CAMPBELL, D. & THOMSON, H.A.W.J.L. 1963. Edward Lhuyd in the Scottish Highlands, 1699—1700 (Oxford).Google Scholar
CHILDE, v.G. 1930. The Bronze Age (Cambridge).Google Scholar
HAWKINS, G.S. 1965. Callanish, a Scottish Stonehenge, Science 147, no. 3654, 127—30.Google Scholar
HAWKINS, G.S. 1977. Beyond Stonehenge (London).Google Scholar
HENSHALL, A.S. 1963. The chambered tombs of Scotland, I (Edinburgh).Google Scholar
KEILLER, A. 1934. The megalithic monuments of NorthEast Scotland (London).Google Scholar