Megalithic Calendar

[Bmblbzzz]

Reducing light pollution doesn't mean just less light. It means less wasted light; more directed where it's wanted (on the ground, mostly) and not scattered up into the sky. But certainly many LAs will/do use it as an excuse to, er, "make efficiencies".

[Boreades]

Skeletons have been found in passage graves, long barrows, tumps, so certainly they were graves. But that's no reason to exclude other uses; just as churches are surrounded by graveyards but have many other uses.

This is a good point lost on many archaeologists. They confuse coincidence with cause and function. My usual response is to ask if Westminster Abbey's main purpose is a cemetery. The rest follows.

My little theory is that long barrows were originally warehouses or local storage depots for food e.g. to last the winter. What kind of food is a different subject (agriculture -v- hunter gatherers etc)

[Bmblbzzz]

It also assumes a relationship between burial sites and places of worship or spiritual significance which is typical of Christianity but not even universal among Judaeo-Christian cultures – Jewish kirkuts are not placed next to synagogues and I think the same is true of Muslim burial grounds and mosques – let alone the wider world.

But barrows surely can't have been the only burial sites; the skeletons in them are too few in number and too widely and sporadically distanced in dating. They must have been used for burying people who were in some way special: kings? wizards? priests? maybe the "cells" were exactly that and these were prisoners, left where they fell? Which then raises the obvious question of what was done with the rest of the dead. The barrows are very obvious structures, impossible to miss, which suggests some sort of importance – though it's possible the importance could have been "keep away, here are the dead!"

Warehouses seems unlikely to me. The internal space is so restricted compared to the overall size of the structure. Also, would any culture really bury its dead, however special they were, in a food store? Of course, that could have been a later repurposing; or these particular dead could have been food (but then where are the bones of other meat: sheep, pigs, etc – that you would expect in a meat store?).

[Mick Harper]

I share Beebelbrox'scepticism. His comment

The barrows are very obvious structures, impossible to miss, which suggests some sort of importance

is why I tend to favour them being navigational/astronomical markers of some kind.

[Bmblbzzz]

Which would fit with the "telescopes" as well. Then the graves could be those of bygone Astronomers General (and their families – children's skeletons have been found) or Master Navigators or something of that sort.

[Boreades]

This "telescopes" is good. But long barrows are not easily moved around and pointed in new directions. So, can we find any evidence of significant orientation or alignments, like the equinoxes or solstices?

Newgrange springs to mind as an example. But does it qualify and/or match the context?

[Bmblbzzz]

The article in the Telegraph says most of the passage graves in Portugal have been found to align with Aldebaran, allowing for relative movement of stars over the past 4,000 years or so.

[Mick Harper]

This may be true but after a lifetime of reading such claims I always reflect on the fact that a) if you can choose any bright star b) any time in the past and c) apply any feasible amount of observational error, you can generally get anything lined up with anything.

Then I ask, "Why would you want to?"

[TisILeclerc]

'Why would you want to?'

Didn't Velikovsky answer that one before the unAmerican activities lot shut him up?

[Mick Harper]

You'll have to remind me. I've read all his other works but not that one.