Celestia Forums

I'm building a list of locations to "show" some famous old observatories and their relation to the Sun (and the Moon). Here's my preliminary list. Do you have any suggestion to add to the list (prehistoric, antic, greek, chineese, indian, arabic, etc) ?


And we need some custom symbols and colors for the locations, like what we currently have for the markers. Chris ?

Apparently, nobody is interested in this. So I'm publishing a location list of archeological sites. The file is obviously incomplete with 116 sites, but who cares ?

EDIT : Link removed, because of some errors in the location data.

Nice list of antiquities, Cham, but it might not be archaologically accurate to call some of these sites 'observatories' . The truth is, we don't know what some of them were used for. Stonehenge in particular is a complete mystery.

eburacum45 wrote:Stonehenge in particular is a complete mystery.

No. Stonehenge was a calendar (and probably also a religious/ritual center).

There have been some theories about Stonehenge being a calendar, yes, particularly those put forward by Gerald Hawkins; but nothing can be proven at this late stage. Similarly it seems very likely, even inevitable, that Stonehenge was used as a ritual centre; but what those rituals were, how often they occurred, how consistent they were from year to year and from generation to generation, and for how long those rituals were observed, cannot be known for certain.

Archaeologists these days tend to confine themselves to discovering good data about sites and about the evidence found at those sites; speculations about rituals and beliefs remain just that- speculation. Gerald Hawkins' theories are not widely accepted in the archaeological community, as far as I am aware.