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Topics: UK News
Cameron Frew
The mystery surrounding one of the UK's most iconic sites may have been solved: we might know why Stonehenge was made.
The origins of the Wiltshire heritage site have been long-debated, although many believe it's an ancient calendar of some form as a result of its alignment with the summer and winter solstices, but the specifics behind how it works have remained a mystery.
However, Professor Timothy Darvill with Bournemouth University may have the answer after thousands of years: it was once used as a giant solar calendar.
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Darvill estimates the stones were first added back in 2500BC and remained in the same formation, indicating they worked as some form of calendar, BBC News reports. The layout of Stonehenge served as a physical representation of a year, with his research suggesting 'the site was a calendar based on a tropical solar year of 365.25 days'.
As outlined in a paper published in the journal Antiquity, Darvill believes the stones represent a solar year and helped people keep track of the time each day.
'The clear solstitial alignment of Stonehenge has prompted people to suggest that the site included some kind of calendar since the antiquarian William Stukeley. Now, discoveries brought the issue into sharper focus and indicate the site was a calendar based on a tropical solar year of 365.25 days,' the prehistorian said.
'Such a solar calendar was developed in the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries after 3000BC and was adopted in Egypt as the Civil Calendar around 2700BC and was widely used at the start of the Old Kingdom about 2600BC,' Darvill added, noting that Stonehenge may have been inspired by one of those cultures.
'It’s a perpetual calendar that recalibrates every winter solstice sunset. All except two of the sarsens at Stonehenge come from that single source, so the message to me was that they’ve got a unity to them,' he said.
However, time worked a bit differently back then - I mean, time is a construct, but it still worked differently to our silly little seven-day weeks. 'The proposed calendar works in a very straightforward way. Each of the 30 stones in the sarsen circle represents a day within a month, itself divided into three weeks each of 10 days,' Darvill explained.
David Nash at the University of Brighton told the New Scientist that Darvill's findings 'make a lot of sense', while Mike Parker Pearson of University College London remains unconvinced. 'The numbers don’t really add up – why should two uprights of a trilithon equal one upright of the sarsen circle to represent one day? There’s selective use of evidence to try to make the numbers fit,' he said.
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