Recent discoveries suggest that much neolithic rock art in Ireland is astronomical in nature and scientific in conception and execution. This puts the origin of western thought thousands of years before the widely accepted idea that it came from the ancient Greeks — or that the Greeks simply took it from the Egyptians.
The Greek mathematician Hipparchus is credited with discovering the precession of the equinoxes (now also known as ‘the obliquity of the ecliptic’) in the year 200 BCE, but it was known to the inhabitants of Ireland in 4,100 BCE and was marked by the people of Menorca in 1700 BCE. What was the connection? These are the dates that the Southern Cross disappeared over the southern horizon from their respective locations.
I wrote earlier this year that three carved megaliths outside Westport appear to display the constellations of Centaurus and Crux, last visible from Ireland 6,100 years ago. Since then, I’ve been looking for proof that other peoples in Europe recognised the phenomenon, and marked the disappearance of the Southern Cross as it slid out of sight across Europe over several thousand years.
The answer appeared courtesy of the Balearic Islands and archaeoastronomer Michael Hoskin. Michael Hoskin, who died aged 91 in 2021, served as head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and was regarded as an eminent historian of astronomy.
During his career, Hoskin studied the orientation of 1700 monuments across France, Portugal and Spain and found that 90 per cent of them had openings facing the rising sun. What stood out for Hoskin was a handful of unusual monuments in the Balearic Islands that faced directly south. These are taulas, large T-shaped stones that might be familiar to anyone who has seen pictures of Göbleki Tepe in Turkey. This is known on Menorca as Talayotic culture.
“This Talayotic culture is very remarkable for the numerous sanctuaries known as taulas,” wrote Hoskin in ‘Orientations of Dolmens in Western Europe’, in the journal Role of Astronomy in Society and Culture. “At the centre of a taula is a tall rectangular stone set into the bedrock, and on top of this stone is (or was) a horizontal slab, the two stones together having the appearance of a capital letter T (see photo above). This central feature is surrounded by a complex precinct wall, with an entrance that faces the central feature. The central feature therefore looks out through the entrance, and so the taula has a well-defined orientation.
With one exception, the thirty or so taulas all face southerly, roughly between South-east and southwest. Significantly, all these taulas have a perfect view of the Southern horizon: either they look directly out to sea, or they are on elevated ground and look down over a plain. This cannot have happened by chance, and so we must ask what it was, close to the southern horizon, that the taulas were facing.
There is no land in that direction, and today there is nothing in the sky that is of any interest. But the sky to the South that we see today is very different from the sky that was visible in Talayotic times. The Earth is not a perfect sphere, and as a result the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon on the Earth causes the Earth's axis to wobble. Calculation shows that the Talayotic people could see, rising out of the sea a little east of south, the star group of the Southern Cross and Alpha and Beta Centauri, a group that is striking enough to be featured today on the national flags of Australia and New Zealand; and this must surely be the object to which the taulas faced (Hoskin 2001).”
Hoskin mused that there were no taulas on nearby Mallorca as it was relatively flat, and required no special monuments to raise views over the horizon. But as it turned out, there was a particular site in Mallorca that would draw him into action.
“A remarkable example of the merit of collaboration between investigators with different skills occurred in 1998, when a team of archaeologists from the popular British television series Time Team visited the Son Mas site near Valldemossa in the North of Mallorca. The site had been excavated by the late William Waldren, and he had found there an Iron Age sanctuary. Near the sanctuary he discovered surprising quantities of high-quality pre-talayotic pottery, and this led him to conclude that the site was already used as a ritual area in Chalcolithic times. Furthermore, outside the Iron Age sanctuary was a boulder in which there was a groove which Waldren was convinced was artificial, and which looked south down a valley. I was invited by the Time Team to measure the groove, and I found that it would have looked towards the Southern Cross when it appeared in the valley, between two hills, some two thousand years before Christ. Because of the movement of the axis of the Earth, the Cross would each year have appeared lower and lower in the sky, until around 1700 BCE the bottom star of the Cross would have become invisible.
Here’s the original show from 1998 on Youtube: skip forward to 40 minutes to see the clip about the Southern Cross.
“However,” Hoskin continued, “Time Team had also invited Mark Van Strydonck, a Belgian specialist in radiocarbon dating. Unknown to me, Waldren and Van Strydonck had been publishing papers listing the dates of finds from the region of the sanctuary, and they had found it impossible to explain a total absence of dates from the centuries immediately after 1700 BCE. It looked as though the site had been abandoned, but they could not imagine any reason why this might have happened.”
“It chanced that I confided to Van Strydonck my suspicion that the occupants of the site might have experienced a crisis around 1700 BC, and he was astonished to find me offering him the motive for site-abandonment for which he had been looking. Next day we were able to present on television the scenario we had arrived at. It was one that had involved the collaboration of an archaeologist, a radiocarbon scientist, and an archaeoastronomer (Van Strydonck, Waldren & Hoskin 2001).
Because of the movement of the Earth, the Cross would each year have appeared lower and lower in the sky, until around 1700 BCE. the bottom star of the Cross would have become invisible. If the groove was indeed looking toward the Cross (as I suspected because of my investigations in Menorca), then presumably there would have been a crisis around 1700 BCE. But there seemed no prospect of demonstrating any such crisis.”
Hoskin suspected that the groove marked a time of disaster, but it’s more likely that it simply marks the disappearance of the Southern Cross which suggests — for scientifically-minded people — that the earth’s path through the heavens is enormously complex but observable and measurable.
And as we’ll find out in the coming months, there is a lot that we’ve overlooked about these ancient monuments, and which we’re rapidly re-discovering. In 2024, we’ll add the growing knowledge of sound and resonance at these sites, and how they are designed to bring us to altered states of mind.
This is going to be a lot of fun!