Stonehenge Research Paper

Words: 557
Pages: 3

Its giant pillars were not just used to mark the summer and winter solstice, but to predict eclipses of the moon and sun. The idea was controversial, but was there anything to it? 24 alignments formed by pairs of stones seem to line up and point to the settings and risings of the sun and moon. This number couldn’t possibly be due to chance because the precision, if it were an accident, would have been an achievement in 1/1000000(which is very unlikely). So it is considered an astronomical observatory. Using evidence of the site, Stonehenge had been used to predict warning times when the builders would have expected eclipses to appear in the sky. This is a very radical notion of suggesting Stonehenge people to be capable of carrying out such a format. …show more content…
Therefore priests would’ve wanted to know eclipses in advance in order to perhaps carry out impressive rituals in where the moon would darken for a few hours at the highpoint in some ritual and reinforce their priestly power in the eyes at the multitude gathered at Stonehenge. The idea that Stonehenge was some kind of stone age observatory was still contradicting to archaeologists as Stonehenge is an approximate side rule to keep track and predict eclipses which seemed totally far-fetched. Stonehenge was, hypothetically, built by the presumed society of ‘Howling Barbarians’, who could not possibly be capable of making advanced astronomical observations. There was no record that Stonehenge people in Britain had a concept of a number system or writing. Their pottery and material goods were sophisticated up to a point, but there’s a notion that they could have had a culture of astronomic priests, predicting eclipses and doing