Stonehenge: Sighting the Sun

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 417

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REVIEW BY ROB IXER

This is the second of two recent, non-mainstream Stonehenge books (the other is Mike Pitts’ publication on the technicalities of building the circle), both of which must be on the required reading list for this monument. Sighting the Sun explores the underlying ‘celestial design concepts’ for Stonehenge and other monuments in the Stonehenge Landscape (and elsewhere). The book is written for the layman, so complex archaeo-astronomical mathematics are absent, replaced by invaluable diagrams and augmented by a glossary of archaeological and spatial/‘compass’ terms. The main text is interspersed with slightly distracting ‘boxes’ describing specific examples or concepts, but these are enrichment areas and in truth the book is reminiscent in style to a well-conceived late 20th-century Open University course unit. Unlike many recent popular archaeology books, it is abundantly illustrated, in full colour, on good paper – though many of the figures showing landscape features are rather small and it can be difficult to see what is being illustrated (even when you know the landscape). They are, however, welcome and essential, and deserve praise on all counts.

The first three chapters describe and discuss humanity’s relationship with the heavens, first globally, then within prehistoric Britain, and eventually focusing on the Stonehenge Landscape and its three major contemporaneous monuments: Stonehenge, Woodhenge, and Durrington Walls. In six chapters the authors succinctly describe this rich Wessex landscape, before, in painstaking detail, plotting the spatial relationships/intentional sightlines between the monuments and solar, lunar, and astronomical phenomena, firmly dividing them by likelihood. They suggest the winter solstice alignment to be the most important of the major (and possible) intentional astronomical solar and lunar sightlines at Stonehenge. However, at the southern circle and associated avenue at Durrington Walls, alignments are south-east to the winter solstice sunrise and north-west to the summer solstice sunset, suggesting an inversion to the other monuments, intending not to look out/through the monument to the sun but, as at the older Newgrange and (Hair-like), to let the sunshine in.

The penultimate chapter moves away from Wessex to describe other astronomically aligned British monuments, including the perhaps oversold Waun Mawn in Pembrokeshire and the potentially anomalous ‘sun temple’ at Godmanchester. Finally, more recent manifestations, from Ra’s sun boat to the weekly ‘seven for the seven stars in the sky’ (sun, moon, and five visible planets, not the Pleiades) are described, allowing the sun god to blaze away in his prime place in many global mythologies.

There are some surprises: determining the very precise spatial positioning of the solstice may not have been as important as is commonly accepted – maybe there was no great urge to be there for the one-day special event praying for a cloudless sunrise, but rather having the choice over a few days while, either side of the solstice, the change in the lateral solar movement along the horizon is imperceptible. More surprising, the solar attraction of the monuments might have only been a presence for a short time, perhaps only 50 years for Woodhenge and a few centuries for Stonehenge.

The authors have little time for eclipse-predictors, calendar time-keepers, and the generally starry-eyed, surgically demolishing their arguments. The dissection is clean, almost brutal, but closely reasoned and compelling: for example, possible alignments, especially lunar ones, are dismissed as being impractical to ‘accurately’ determine or, like those purporting to pinpoint quarter days, felt to hold little significance.

While the book explains, reasonably and persuasively, the reasons for the configuration of the monuments, it is less secure in answering the greater question: the underpinning cause(s). Why go to that enormous effort and then compound it with extensive rebuilding? Although this book, crammed full of insights, is exactly what is needed to scour away the speculative calendrical and other theories that encloud the monuments, it does not, or cannot, fully explain why the monuments, like an elaborately chased astrolabe, are so overspecced.

Stonehenge: Sighting the Sun
Clive Ruggles and Amanda Chadburn
Liverpool University Press, £40
ISBN 978-1802074673