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From: kissell@flairvax.UUCP (Kevin Kissell)
Newsgroups: net.nlang.celts,net.astro,net.physics,net.puzzle,net.origins
Subject: Re: New Answers to Mysteries of Stonehenge
Message-ID: <554@flairvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Jun-84 18:36:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: flairvax.554
Posted: Wed Jun 20 18:36:32 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Jun-84 01:36:57 EDT
References: <120@bonnie.UUCP>
Organization: Fairchild AI Lab, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 59

(sigh)

Joe appears not to have appeased the whitespace demon on his posting, so
I can only respond to the portion after the lines:

>  into a more
> unified and distinct image of the society which built Stonehenge. I would
> like to share my thoughts with you.

Anyway, having made a pilgrimage to Stonehenge just last month, and having
boned up a bit before hand, I submit the following commentary:

>	To begin with, the layout of Stonehenge, as many scholars know, is
>intimately connected with its location. The stones are placed in a way which
>corresponds with certain alignments of the sun and moon which work only at that
>latitude.
>	A few years ago I read about a community in the United States which had
>an exact replica of Stonehenge cast in concrete and constructed in their town.
>Those people may have been disappointed to find that even though the structure
>may have the correct orientation with respect to true north, the alignments
>of the sun and moon which occur at Stonehenge don't occur at other latitudes.

A reproduction of Stonehenge at a different latitude will not work, but
that *does not mean* that the site of Stonehenge is the only site at which
such an observatory could be built, simply that, had it been built elsewhere,
it would have been built slightly differently.

>	Furthermore, the site of Stonehenge was chosen for its broad open
> planes, for the most part, unobstructed by trees and other irregularities of
> terrain. But there is another complication which most visitors to Stonehenge
> never notice. The land on that site is not exactly flat and level. It slopes
> gently but fatally for any unsophisticated architect.

The site is near Salisbury Plain, but it is not particularly flat.  If a site
was to be chosen for "broad open planes" (sic) it would have been to the south
and west of the actual site, which is in rolling hills.

>	And so if the structure had been built without regard to leveling, the
> alignments would not have worked and the whole project would have failed. 

All of the allignments of which I am aware relate to the positions of celestial
objects as they rise and set.  It is the *edges* and spaces *between* the stones
that are significant, not the hight or levelness.

The therory that Joe advances of the coracle (curragh) in the ditch as a
leveling instrument is ingenious (not to say charmingly bizzare), but the 
motivation he attributes does not seem to hold up.  Besides, it's windy up
there, and any coracle small enough to fit in the ditch with a twelve foot
mast on it would bob around quite a bit, if not blow over completely.

Kevin D. Kissell
Fairchild Research Center
Advanced Processor Development
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"Any closing epigram, regardless of truth or wit, grows galling
 after a number of repetitions"