Entrance to Newgrange passage tomb. Photo (cc) Sophie Robson.
One of the problems with archaeoastronomy is that it’s quite hard to find an archaeological site where you can be certain astronomy was important. Even Stonehenge is problematic. A lot of people think it was related to sunrise or sunset at one of the solstices, but there’s no certainty as which one. Some people argue that it’s the midwinter sunset which is important at Stonehenge and the alignment towards the midsummer sunrise is a happy accident of geometry. As for other megalithic sites it’s often impossible to show that an alignment wasn’t due to chance. Statistical analysis of many alignments certainly show preferences for astronomical targets, but all archaeology is local and who is to say that, at any specific site, the result wasn’t due to chance?
Newgrange, a passage tomb in the Republic of Ireland, is one of the most compelling sites — if you want to demonstrate an interest in astronomy in the prehistoric British Isles. It is the strongest argument for an interest in astronomy, but at the same time one of the strongest arguments against reading ancient astronomy as an ancient scientific research programme.
Newgrange sits in the Valley of the Boyne with several other Neolithic tombs. It’s a low mound with a passage, which leads quite a way in towards the centre, with side chambers at the end. Initially it doesn’t look too different from the other mounds in the area. It seems to have been a tomb. Cremation burials have been found in the chambers. The fact that the passage is, quite literally, a dead-end means that any astronomical orientation would be from the inside out. The direction of the passage is such that it faces sunrise for a couple of weeks around the winter solstice. The passage is narrow which means you have a shaft of light which penetrates briefly to the back of the tomb, momentarily illuminating the eldritch carvings and highlighting them in light and shadow.
Newgrange Sunrise from Alun Salt on Vimeo.
Interesting yes, but intentional?
Newgrange Entrance. Photo (cc) WormRidden
The Wikipedia entry on Newgrange says that the alignment is far too accurate for it to have occurred purely by chance. I don’t like that line of argument. There are hundreds of tombs. If you have enough tombs from all sorts of periods from all around the world sooner or later you’ll find one which seems extraordinary purely by chance. Instead the intentionality might be built into the architecture.
If you re-run the video you’ll see that I haven’t drawn in the shaft of light coming in through the large doorway at the front. It’s thought that the entrance was blocked off in prehistory, which means light could only enter through the opening at the top, known as the roofbox, or lightbox or sunbox depending on how certain you are of its function. It certainly is puzzling.
My first thought was that it could be an engineering feature. As an example the Treasury of Atreus also has a big hole about the lintel over the entrance. This is a relieving arch and it takes the weight of everything above off the flat lintel. It works in the Treasury of Atreus because the sides are angled which directs the weight away. In Newgrange the top of the roofbox is flat too, so that would relieve nothing. It could be to let something in after the main entrance is blocked. It’s unlikely to be humans, else why block the main entrance? It could be to let in animals. This is not impossible. Societies in the Neolithic sometimes practices excarnation, which means leaving the bodies of the dead out for animals to de-flesh and then collecting the bones. That wouldn’t make sense either. If you wanted to invite animals then you wouldn’t stick anything down the end of a long passageway. The only other thing it can let in is light.
The argument might be strengthened by carvings on the lintel of the roofbox which have been interpreted at sun symbols. There are problems with this too as it requires two assumptions. One is that you can identify the meanings of the symbols that far back in time. The other is that the stone hasn’t been reused after being set up in a sun-worship site. At some point you have to decide at what point does scepticism cause more problems than it solves. I think sheer pointlessness of the hole, other than for letting in light, is enough to make the astronomical explanation the probable answer. More information in the future could disprove this, but if this is astronomy then there’s something strange going on. The observers are all dead.
Presumably there were living observers at some point to set up the alignment, but the site seems to have been made with the intention of it being a tomb from the outset. It’s likely that tombs in the Neolithic weren’t solely for the dead. It seems that losing your actual life didn’t mean the end of you social life and bones were moved round and deposited over a period of decades or longer in many tombs. Therefore alignments of long barrows on sunrises or moonrises could have been built for observation by the living. Perhaps you deposit the bones of the dead on a specific day when sunlight or moonlight penetrates the tomb. Once again the roofbox at Newgrange would suggest that this wasn’t happening here. Certainly sunlight could penetrate on an annual basis, but once that entrance was shut, it’s unlikely that anyone other than the dead would be inside observing. You might not even peer in through the roofbox to check because your head would get in the way of the sunrise and cast a shadow into the tomb. Nonetheless the act of building this roofbox is a signal of intent that light should enter the tomb even when the living don’t.
If that’s the case then this is a serious blow to the cliché that prehistoric peoples used megalithic sites as calendars. Unless the dead were wandering around to reset everyone’s calendars, then no observation made there could have a practical use. Or at least not a use that we would recognise as practical.
One of the peculiar features of a lot of cosmologies is how biological they are. This makes sense. Until recently biological explanations explained how everything came into being. Therefore most ancient peoples explained the creation of the universe in terms of birth and sex. Judaism is unusual. When you start thinking about what a biological universe means then things change. For example the Athenians closed their silver mines in winter so the silver could grow back. I don’t know why it was important that the midwinter sunrise was observed by the ancestors at Newgrange, but I suspect the answer was biological.
If things differences like living and dead don’t mean the same in the Neolithic as they do now, then I suspect that thinking of astronomy as Science or Ritual is also an anachronism. Ritual was part of the mechanics that made the world work. Was astronomy a tool for automating part of the ritual practice of ancient peoples?
Links
You can see the midwinter sunrise live from Newgrange this year, assuming cloud doesn’t spoil the event at Heritage Ireland from 08:30 GMT on December 21 and 22. The solstice actually falls in around 6 o’clock on the morning of December 22 this year.
Victor Geniet has some good pages on Newgrange. He’s given some thought to the problem of simulating the sunrise in the Neolithic period.
Knowth.com is good site for the Irish tombs. I don’t agree with some of the articles. but your opinion may differ. The same goes for Mythical Ireland, which is another site I like.
