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| Megalithic Calendar 1 |
| CALENDARS. |
| 2.1.1 | The common theme of calendar making is the desire to organize units of time to satisfy the needs and preoccupations of society. In addition to serving practical purposes, the process of organization provides a sense, however illusory, of understanding and controlling time itself. Thus calendars serve as a link between mankind and the cosmos. It is little wonder that calendars have held a sacred status and have served as a source of social order and cultural identity. |
| From 'The Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac',
P. Kenneth Seidelmann, editor, |
| 2.1.3 | Although some calendars replicate astronomical cycles according to fixed rules, others are based on abstract, perpetually repeating cycles of no astronomical significance. Some calendars are regulated by astronomical observations, some carefully and redundantly enumerate every unit, and some contain ambiguities and discontinuities. Some calendars are codified in written laws; others are transmitted by oral tradition. |
| 'The Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac.' |
| 2.1.11 | Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain p108:
Let us anticipate and say that in Megalithic remains we do find definite evidence of this kind of division of the year. We saw that when Megalithic man subdivided his units of length he used halves, quarters, and eighths so we need not be surprised to find his year similarly divided. But we also saw that he was capable of measuring long distances counting in tens. He would certainly also count days, otherwise how did he divide the year into two? His obsession with numbers may have led him to produce a calendar which would be numerically correct just as he was led to attempt to produce circles and ellipses which were rational in all their dimensions. |
| 2.1.14 | Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain p108;
The sixteen-month calendar As the author collected more and more reliable lines from the sites certain groups of declinations began gradually to appear in positions on the histogram which were difficult to explain. These were at or near -22deg, -8deg, +9deg, and +22deg. The group at +9deg might be ascribed to Spica at 1700 B.C., but there were no convenient stars to explain the others. If they are solar then we seek the times of year at which the sun had these declinations. Accepting these dates, we find that with the fully established solstices, equinoxes, May/ Lammas, and Martinmas/Candlemas days the year is divided into sixteen equal parts. The data in the field on which these subdivisions rest is sufficiently convincing and reliable to make it necessary to go into the matter in detail. |
| Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain p110;
The criterion of a good solution is that the declinations must pair, that is the day in the autumn should have the same declination as the corresponding day in the spring. The solution obtained by the 22/23-day month did not give very good pairing. Accordingly, it was decided to try to find from the observed declinations what solution Megalithic man had obtained. Weighted means for the six necessary declinations (seven with the equinoctial value) were formed from the observed values ...(gained from high class surveys of over 300 sites). Using these the corresponding dates were read off (two for each mean declination) from a large-scale plot of the theoretical declination curve (Fig. 9.1). Fig.9.1:  2.1.16 It is remarkable that this procedure led to a much better solution than had previously been found. The arrangement of the 'months' is shown in Table 9.1, |
| Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain p116;
A possible further subdivision. The improbability that the year was further subdivided into 32 parts of 11 or 12 days is considerably lessened by the accuracy with which certain other- wise unexplained lines support such a subdivision. As some of the lines are Class A it may be desirable to give the evidence and leave it there for future work to decide the matter. As before, guidance in choosing the epochs was obtained partly from the observed declinations and partly from pairing. Ultimately almost complete pairing was obtained with epochs which, it will be seen (Table 9.3, below), retain the eleven- or twelve-day interval, which would thus very likely apply to the whole year although the evidence at present only exists for twenty-four epochs. The calculated declinations for the four necessary extra pairs are given in the table.  It will be seen that the pairing is very good. It is proposed here to call the extra dates suggested above 'intermediate calendar dates'. |
| For recent identification of alignments indicating intermediate Megalithic Calendar dates see html pages;
S1, Llananno/Rhoscrug I, S2, Llananno/Warren Hill, and Rollright, Oxfordshire.
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| 2.1.19 It is not now known when the leap year of the Megalithic Calendar fell nor where the intercalary day was inserted but the need must have been apparent to the megalith builders constrained to slow, trial-and-error methods of constructing their sites. |
| Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain p108;
From the time of Julius Caesar our calendar has inserted that extra day every fourth year. Was the necessity to introduce a leap year known to Megalithic man? We shall see that it is certain that he used a solar method of keeping a calendar and that it depended on horizon marks subdividing the year. But each mark must have been established by counting days from a zero date in the year, and each mark served to define two different epochs, one in the spring half of the year and one in the autumn half. It not only took years of work to establish these marks but many more years to transport and erect the huge permanent backsights. In the interval the marks would have got so badly out as to be useless if an intercalary day were not inserted. |
| Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain p108;
It is true that these people, having set up the mark, might have stopped keeping a tally of days, simply leaving the marks to give the indications. But the Megalithic culture was widespread and communication essentially slow. To transfer the 'date' from one end of the system to the other meant that the messengers must have counted days as they travelled and having arrived at an isolated community the counting had to go on until a year with suitable weather allowed the marks to be set up. The alternative is to assume that each community began independently the arduous task of establishing its own calendar epochs. This is indeed possible, but when we find indications of the same declinations in Cumberland, Lewis, Wales, and Caithness we must consider the possibility that the calendar dates throughout this wide area were in phase. |
| Indeed if it were not, again, for these rigorous standards of construction maintained throughout Britain we would not be able to positively detect the Megalithic Calendar today amongst spurious data.
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2.1.21 It would be a respectable feat for any society, even with precision optical technology, to achieve such a fine mathematical solution to the partitioning of the year but particularly impressive when we consider that, in the terrain where the high- class work was carried out, the society was principally non-urban pastoralist confined to using very limited observational data only gained at sunrise or sunset.
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| Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain p108;
.....since the tropical year (equinox to equinox) consists of 365.25 days, and half a year is 182.625 days. Having set up our mark S and seen the sun rise exactly on it on a day in the spring we may have arranged matters so that the sun rises again on the mark after 182 days or after 183 days but certainly not after 182.625 days. That would be in the afternoon. |
| In effect, for precision transit telescopes, the megalith builders substituted long distance alignments to the horizon emanating from carefully placed back markers and succeeded in identifying one day from another with reliability. This respectable achievement, however, was only the first engineering step upon which was launched a mathematical creation of superb symmetry- a reliable, precise, 16 part partitioning of the year with a further four intermediate divisions. |
| 2.1.22 |
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Date. |
Interval. |
of the sun. |
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Summer solstice. |
1800 BC. |
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Quarter days. |
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Equinoxes. |
1800 BC. |
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Quarter days. |
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Winter solstice. |
1800 BC. |
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All of these Gregorian dates are approximates. The Megalithic Calendar Intervals, (CIs), wander slightly in today's Gregorian calendar due to the differing approaches to maintaining accurate time measurement. These discrapencies may amount to + or - 24 hours around the solstices.
Any investigator who wishes to observe or photograph a suspected calendar alignment at or near a Megalithic Calendar Interval should locate, from the current astronomical data tables, the moment in time when the sun reaches the Required Declination for the suspected CI. A CI is a point in time and may not necessarily occur near the sunrise or sunset on the day date given. If, for example, the Required Declination is achieved in the early morning then the nearest sunset will be on the day before and this would be the most accurate set to observe on an alignment which has been engineered to the sunset of this CI. Email here for current updates on the occurrance of megalithic CIs in Gregorian. Reliable sources of astronomical data online can be found in the U.S. Naval Observatory's data services. |
| Information from the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac, P. Kenneth Seidelmann, editor: Calendars and their History by L. E. Doggett. |
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