Silbury Hill 180
Image by Jane
Silbury Hill

(sil)barry white

You obviously have a problem with this, and I have quite a few myself.

However, suggesting that these people thought about and found practical solutions in their everyday lives is surely not only demonstrated by the achievement of the monuments themselves, but through a long established academic and popular corpus that includes works and papers considering their approaches to illness and disease from the eminent Don Brothwell and the Archaeology of Disease through to such as Aubrey who thought the mental health of the people of this area was troubled through eating too much cheese, and Guy Underwood in the Pattern of the Past. I think it was Underwood who was suggesting that the sarsens were placed on water courses to act as a radiator not of heat but some sort of health convector to make those with spinabifida more comfortable. It is perhaps not obvious that greens have to be eaten to combat spinabifida, but if abstaining from eating through sickness one still has to drink but is still being sick it may not take the genius of those that designed Silbury to twig that it could be the water that was making people ill.

Still to be thought through undoubtedly, misguided it might be, perhaps even downright wrong, but I don't think it's all that spurious.

You say spurious I say spa-rious, let's call the hole thing off...

VBB

I wonder if there was anywhere nearby to Silbury Hill that would, or was able to be, flooded in December ? I think the centres of the two inner circles, at Avebury, point toward north (+36 declination) and supposed indicates the setting point of Deneb - a near circumpolar star, then, in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. There's speculation about one of the Irish winter solstice sites that the festival, then, was marked by flocks of migratory swans arriving. (And presumably being added to the feast. Sadly Deneb doesn't go so far north nowadays - precession of the equinoxes - but this +36 line is present at several sites (and is 'awaiting an explanation').