Stonehenge Barrows Astronomical Interpretation
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The Astronomical Interpretation of the Stonehenge Barrows by Andis Kaulins Edit

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The authoritative historical work for the Stonehenge Barrows is a book by William Long (Esq., M.A., F.S.A) titled Stonehenge and its Barrows, published by Devizes in 1876 from the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. xvi. That book has a survey map of the barrows which surround Stonehenge to a maximum distance of about 2 to 2 1/2 miles around the Stonehenge central stone circle.

These barrows are not scattered randomly throughout the countryside but are clumped together in definite groups, some of which look very much like known asterisms viz. constellations of the stellar heavens, i.e. bright stars that can be grouped together to form a recognizable shape, even though these groupings may not have been exactly the same in ancient days as they are today. At the Stonehenge Barrows, this unmistakeable similarity holds particularly true for the stars of Scorpio, which in prehistoric times marked the line of the Equinoxes.

Andis Kaulins thinks that the Stonehenge Barrows are the key proof for the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge and its environs. Kaulins thinks - quite apart from any other use to which the barrows may have been put by ancient megalithic man in the Neolithic Era (Stone Age)- that the Stonehenge Barrows mark stars of the sky in an organized formation called a planisphere, a hermetic practice evidenced for example among the archaic traditions of Native American Indian tribes and described, for example, in an article by Alice C. Fletcher in the 1902 issue of the American Anthropologist.

The Stonehenge Barrows support an Astronomical Interpretation of Stonehenge Edit

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The above graphic meshes with an astronomical interpretation made by Andis Kaulins of both the general and specific orientation of the Stonehenge sarsens and trilithons, as shown in the graphics below. The identified star groups for the Stonehenge Barrows are located at the same relative geographic positions on the ground and with respect to the sky as the positions of the sarsens and trilithons of the main Stonehenge circle. Simply put, the position of Scorpio on the main Stonehenge Circle matches the position of Scorpio in the barrows.

Furthermore, the astronomical explanation provides substantial clues as to the various purposes of the general earthworks of the area, which appear not only to have marked the line of the Equinoxes, but also to have mirrored the shape of the Milky Way, which would not be surprising, since ancient stargazers gave the Milky Way much more attention than we do today. This is probably in part because they had no electric lighting and their air was probably cleaner than ours is in the modern era.