Long Barrow Alignments

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slumpystones S
slumpystones Mar 28, 2007 13:13:55
Replying to tiompan

tiompan wrote:
slumpystones wrote:
It seems likely though, with most aligned E-W, that there was some kind of reasoning behind their positioning. Of course it could have just been a vague alignment on the side where the sun and moon both rise as an acknowledgement of that fact without being too specific. Of course, they may all have been aligned on particular lunar or solar episodes, but with so few remaining in anything close to their original state, it is unlikely we'll ever have enough data to make any meaningful judgement.
In many respects the vagueness should be expected at a local level , but the majority of figures that we do have don't suggest anything astro . Entrances between 330 and 30 degrees are uncommon but the rest of the spectrum gets covered .
Are they covered within the same time frame though? The huge problem with dating LBs is the date of the placement of the material within - if bones and remains were removed and reused over generations, then placed in a later context, it is hard to make a judgement on the timing of their placement or death, making it all very vague.

So were they all built within, say, 500 years of each other, we could at least attempt to maske some sense of their placement in the landscape, but with some being possibly 2000 years older than others, its impossible to say if the rituals and procedures carried out at the beginning are anything close to the way they were used at the end of their lives.

T tiompan
tiompan Mar 28, 2007 13:26:53
Replying to slumpystones

slumpystones wrote:
tiompan wrote:
slumpystones wrote:
It seems likely though, with most aligned E-W, that there was some kind of reasoning behind their positioning. Of course it could have just been a vague alignment on the side where the sun and moon both rise as an acknowledgement of that fact without being too specific. Of course, they may all have been aligned on particular lunar or solar episodes, but with so few remaining in anything close to their original state, it is unlikely we'll ever have enough data to make any meaningful judgement.
In many respects the vagueness should be expected at a local level , but the majority of figures that we do have don't suggest anything astro . Entrances between 330 and 30 degrees are uncommon but the rest of the spectrum gets covered .
Are they covered within the same time frame though? The huge problem with dating LBs is the date of the placement of the material within - if bones and remains were removed and reused over generations, then placed in a later context, it is hard to make a judgement on the timing of their placement or death, making it all very vague.

So were they all built within, say, 500 years of each other, we could at least attempt to maske some sense of their placement in the landscape, but with some being possibly 2000 years older than others, its impossible to say if the rituals and procedures carried out at the beginning are anything close to the way they were used at the end of their lives.

Some of the big excavations have delivered dates for construction ,and they do cover a wide time scale but regardless of change of use or ritual the orientations would still be the same .