Neolithic Astronomy at Avebury Henge: Being a Two Part Examination of the Avebury Stone Circle Alignments With Celestial Bodies. Part 1 Prehistoric Astronomy.

In previous posts I have examined the broader issues of two English sites, Stonehenge and Avebury, in physical terms. This post is addressing the more esoteric and anthropological meanings of Avebury’s connection to the cosmos. I would recommend first reading my post Exploring the Avebury Neolithic Complex: A Journey into Ancient Mysteries to come up to speed on this complex site.

The astronomical observations at Stonehenge are clear, as I pointed to in my first post The Enigmatic Stonehenge: A Journy Through Time and Space. Avebury however is much harder to grasp. The clarity of the alignments (in what I would call Professor Thom-like sightlines - precise, clear and measurable as he researched), are much harder to find at Avebury. This has led the academic archeological establishment such as Professor Clive Ruggles and Aubury Burl as well as Thom to argue there is very little evidence of relationships with celestial objects within the Avebury complex. However, there are researchers that are taking a less precise and more holistic view of the evidence to come to fascinating conclusions that there are strong relationships with the sun moon and stars built into the site. Some of which are spectacular and performative, opening a crack in time’s door to glimpse a sliver of the myth, ceremony and grandeur of this most extraordinary of neolithic complexes.

An Introduction to the Neolithic.

The Neolithic or New Stone Age stretched from about 4500 BCE to around 2500 BCE a stretch of some 2000 years. The Bronze Age followed the Neolithic into the Iron Age. With the coming of the Romans to the British Isles, prehistory ends, and recorded history begins.

The peoples who built the surviving monuments of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages would have lacked literature, but in common with all peoples would have had a rich tradition of language, music, art, and a vibrant oral tradition including a philosophy that informed their complex planning and engineering skills. Their lives would be full of stories, customs, songs, poetry, lore and myth. They developed sophisticated funerary practices and began to build grand monuments, first in wood, then in stone. These peoples were the first pastoralists in these islands, they began to farm, store food, raise livestock and settle and use the landscape in a profoundly different manner to their Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunter gather predecessors. As the settlement became permanent, senses of ownership and connection to place influenced their conceptions of the world they inhabited and not least a new need leave a permanent mark. A grand expression of “we are here” that spoke not just to and about themselves but also to others that found themselves arriving in these new island landscapes a few thousand years after the British Isles became sundered from Europe by the melting of the Ice Age, and the rising sea levels that it brought with it.

In the Upper Kennet Valley in central southern England, one tribe or network of people began to settle and change their landscape in a monumental manner. From the fourth millennium BCE, they started to put down roots at the previous hilltop site of seasonal gatherings now named Windmill Hill.  At this time, they began to construct the first stone burial monuments, the long barrows. On Windmill Hill, according to Francis Prior, groups of families dug pits and trenches that profoundly reshaped the area and eventually formed together in a communal effort the new monumental construction known as a causeway enclosure. Later, around the end of the fourth millennium, these people laid out a large piece of land for construction below Windmill Hill. This was to become the magnificent site of Avebury. Here they began to reshape the land on an unprecedented scale. Starting with a few founding stones in what were to become the inner circles, then a deep and angled ditch with a large non-defensive bank outside and henge within, later the large encompassing sarsen stone circle and twin internal circles built around the founding Obelisk and Cove stones, avenues and gigantic hill plus many other refinements followed in due course. The entire complex was to eventually extend over several square miles and became one of the greatest examples of Neolithic monumental construction anywhere in the world. Avebury’s main stone circle is the largest in the world and Silbury Hill the tallest human made mound in Europe. The henge is the third largest in Britain. They incorporated so much into the landscape we are left with the enigma of why go to all this trouble? Many have grappled with this, and here I will look at some of those I find interesting and plausible. Much has been lost over the millennia, but modern archeology is beginning to draw back the veil on what the ancients were doing and why. We will look at the ideas of researchers who are trying to make sense of this most monumental of monuments focusing on the research of Terrance Medan’s ideas around fertility and the importance of the Sun and Moon, and Nicholas Mann’s conception of Avebury as “a mirror of the cosmos.”

The Significance of Astronomical Alignments in the Neolithic.

We know one thing for certain. The builders of Avebury and other ancient monuments around the world were looking at the sky. The astronomical alignments and framings at places like Stonehenge and Avebury reflect a sophisticated understanding of the cosmos among Neolithic peoples. These alignments, broad and precise, suggest that places like Avebury were not just religious ceremonial sites, but also complex calendrical systems, used to mark important agricultural dates via the observation of Sun, Moon, stars, and significant seasonal dates within the cycle of the year. The alignments and framings of significant risings, peaks and settings of celestial objects would have also had religious or cosmological significance, with the movements of cosmos being associated with the cycles of life, death, fertility and rebirth. The orientation and positioning of the stones, earthworks, and associated structures indicate a deep connection between the landscape and the heavens. This connection would have been central to the community's belief system, shaping their rituals, festivals, and their understanding of the world and their place within it.

The Importance of Solar and Lunar Observations.

The longest and shortest days of the year are regular events that frame the seasons in the Northern hemisphere as elsewhere. At places like Stonehenge and Windmill Hill, mid-Winter gatherings and associated feasting are well documented in the research; just as we today celebrate mid-Winter at Christmas with parties and indulgence, our ancestors were doing the same. Livestock reared in the spring and summer that could not be overwintered due to the lack of fodder were slaughtered and consumed in great gatherings such as at Durrington Walls near Stonehenge. Mid-Summer is now a somewhat forgotten celebrations, although thousands gather at Stonehenge to witness the Sun’s rising, the emphasis today has moved on to the celebration of Easter and Halloween, Other days such as Candlemass, Mayday, Midsummer and Michaelmas day, portion up the year. The Sun’s rising and setting measures our days. The Moon’s phases define the months as they did for the ancients. Rare events like the Major and Minor Lunar Standstills and eclipses are particularly significant within the Neolithic cosmos. The ability to predict and observe these events would have demonstrated an advanced understanding of astronomy, giving power and status to those who could display such knowledge. The builders of Stonehenge and Avebury used these Lunar events to track time and to schedule agricultural or ceremonial activities according to the Moon's cycle. Today, modern neo-pagans – including modern druid orders - still hold rituals at the Solstices and the nights of a full Moon in Avebury and elsewhere. The Moon's associations with the night, tides, and fertility likely gave it significant symbolic meaning. The Major Lunar Standstill, with its dramatic extreme and minimum Moonrise and set, were marked and therefore seen as a time of heightened significance, perhaps spiritual power. The alignments at Avebury must have facilitated rituals aimed at harnessing or honouring this power, or why memorialise them? The integration of celestial, solar and Lunar alignments at Avebury suggests that the Neolithic people had a holistic view of the cosmos. They may have seen the movements of the Sun and Moon as complementary forces, each playing a crucial role in the balance of nature and in their religious and ceremonial practices.

Silbury Hill

Father Sun, Mother Earth. The Ritual Conjunction of the Archetypes.

Professor Terence Meaden has done much work on Avebury and its surroundings, including the Solstice alignments within the circles. In his book The Secrets of the Avebury Stones (1999) he outlines several alignments and his theories on their significance. Central to his argument is the role played by the Sun and shadows cast by stones onto others at significant dates. Important to his theory is the symbolism of straight sided stones and triangular or lozenge shaped stones that appear throughout the site. The Avenue for instance, alternates these shapes. Meaden agrees with the opinion of archaeologists and original excavators Alexander Keiller and Sir Stuart Piggott that the shapes represent male and female archetypes. The column like male stones are phallic, and the lozenge/diamond/triangular shapes are female.  Meaden also points to several vulva shapes (natural or carved) on the female shaped stones to emphasise his point. Avebury is a large and complicated site with many former stones and monuments missing, so a definitive view of the astronomical alignments is not easy. However, Meaden points to two major features as important in this respect. The north and south inner circles that sit within the henge and their central features, probably the first megaliths erected at the site, the Obelisk and Cove.

The Inner Circles Looking North

The Southern Inner Circle

 The Southern Inner Circle originally containing around 29 stones, though many of these have been lost or removed over the centuries, their settings survive as holes beneath the turf indicating their original positions. The most notable feature within the southern site was the Obelisk, a tall, single standing stone and older than the great circle (probably the first stone to be erected, indeed it marks an even older “founders” neolithic house beneath). A large concrete plinth now marks the position where the Obelisk once stood. It was the central stone of the Southern Inner Circle and survived long enough for antiquarian William Stukeley to record it lying on its side in the 1720s. He described it thus:

"The central obelisk of this temple is of circular form at base, of a vast bulk, 21feet long and 8 feet 9 inches in diameter; when standing, higher than the rest".

It served as a focal point within the circle. Meaden argues that the male shaped Obelisk is aligned with a specific celestial event. The rising of the Sun 6000 years ago on May the 6th (now the 8th due to the earth’s precession, more on that later), the exact halfway point between the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, themselves halfway between the Winter and Summer Solstices. This is close to May Day on the 1st; a very old fertility celebration, that marks the start of Summer that survives as a bank holiday in the UK to this day. Meaden points to the still existing female triangular stone (no. 106) that faces the Obelisk. Meaden goes on to describes a vulva shaped feature on this megalith cementing the feminine archetype. At the beginning of May, the Sun rises behind the Obelisk casting its shadow into the center of stone 106, bringing Father Sun into a symbolic union with Mother Earth. For Meaden, this shadow play symbolizes the fertility ritual connected to the season and its start of the growth of crops for the coming harvest, as well as May Day’s well documented associations with romance, human fertility and conception. Due to the loss of the Obelisk, in the 1990s Meaden recreated this event with a temporary erection made of wood and canvas, that simulated the male shadow penetration of the female stone for a Yorkshire TV broadcast (pun intended). Meaden has described similar events at other stone circles in Ireland and the UK, not least at Stonehenge where the midsummer Sun casts a shadow of the Heel Stone into the cup like inner sanctuary.

The Obelisk

The Northern Inner Circle

The Northern Inner Circle was somewhat smaller than the Southern, originally containing around 27 stones. One of its most distinctive features was a rectangular stone setting, referred to as the Cove, composed of three large stones (one now missing) at right angles to each other, two male flanking a female. This feature is a similar shape to the large horseshoe arranged trilithions in central Stonehenge (that has a similar shadow event penetrating them at Summer Solstice Sunrise) and is also reflected by another ruined Cove at the end of the lost Beckhampton Avenue, more on this later. Meaden points out that southern circle Cove is orientated towards the Summer Solstice where the Sun peaks over the top of intervening Hackpen Hill. A missing stone F stands in a similar orientation to the obelisk in the northern circle so possibly it too would cast its shadow in a similar way. And to top it all, the afore mentioned cove at Beckhampton is broadly aligned to the Winter Solstice Sunrise. There is more to the Beckhampton Cove though as we shall see.

For Professor Meaden these two original sites that predate the rest of the monument are intrinsically linked to as the masculine, fertilizing aspect of the Sun at the start and middle of Summer. Meaden’s theories are not universally accepted. Others, like Professor Aubery Burl, view the inner circles and cove as places of death, mortuary ceremony and cremation. But I like Meaden’s ideas, they speak to the human in us all and the mysteries of life and death. The creation of the world and the central role of the Sun and the Earth to produce food, warmth and fertility, and, after all, these placements were deliberated upon and chosen, coincidence say many archeologists. There are a lot of coincidences at Avebury.

The Cove

Author Michael Dames' theories on the giant mound of Silbury Hill (The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered 1978) , also delve into the potential astronomical alignments and their significance, particularly concerning the August full moon. He suggests that the orientation and design of Silbury Hill may have been deliberately aligned with celestial events, with a particular focus on the full Moon during August at the start of harvest. This Moon can be observed from all over the Avebury complex, but Dame also points to the importance of the  inner two circles as good observation points, as well as the western arc of the great circle and the West Kennet Avenue. For Dame, Silbury is a symbol of the pregnant Earth Goddess, associated with fertility and the harvest.

The astronomical alignments at Avebury and its surrounding monuments reflect a sophisticated understanding of the sky among Neolithic peoples. These alignments suggest that Avebury was not just a ceremonial site but also a complex calendrical system, used to mark important agricultural dates, Solstices, and Lunar events. The alignments may have also had religious or cosmological significance, with the movements of the Sun and Moon being associated with the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The orientation and positioning of the stones, earthworks, and associated structures indicate a deep connection between the landscape and the heavens. This connection would have been central to the community's belief system, shaping their rituals, festivals, and their understanding of the world and their place within it.

As we have seen, the Neolithic people watched and depended on the movements of the Sun and Moon that measured the rhythms of their life. Days measured by the Sun, weeks and months or “Moonths”, measured by the Moon. Seasons, and years measured by the Solstices, Equinoxes and other calendar days. We have seen several references above to these events expressed in the monument and greater landscape. In part two of this blog, I will turn to the other celestial events built into the Avebury site. The significance of stars, constellations, The significance of Windmill Hill and their choice of placement for Avebury within the landscape. I will also look at the enigma of the banked henge and how this relates to a spectacular celestial event that could explain why Avebury was built and how it was envisioned as a Mirror of the Cosmos.

Alexander Peach. Year of the Major Lunar Standstill. August 2024.