The fact that the ayantu ignore the sun in determining the time of year seems surprising until we realize the implications of their location close to the equator. Here, the sun’s behavior changes little through the year: the length of the day is effectively the same all year round, and the annual swing in the sun’s rising or setting position between the solstices is relatively small. On the other hand, the vertical motion of the celestial bodies at night makes it natural to notice which stars are level with the moon, especially just after the moon has risen or before it sets.
See also:
Lunar and Luni-Solar Calendars. Mursi Calendar; Namoratung’a. Lunar Phase Cycle; Solstices.
References and further reading
Bassi, Marco. “On the Borana Calendrical System.” Current Anthropology 29 (1988), 619–624. Legesse, Asmerom. Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Ruggles, Clive. “The Borana Calendar: Some Observations.” Archaeoastronomy 11 (1987), S35–53. ———, ed. Archaeoastronomy in the 1990s, 117–122. Loughborough, UK: Group D Publications, 1993. Tablino, Paul. “The Reckoning of Time by the Borana Hayyantu.” Rassagna di Studi Ethiopici 38 (1996), 191–205.
Boyne Valley Tombs
The northern banks of the river Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, at a spot called the Bend of the Boyne, are the site of a remarkable concentration of Neolithic tombs dating to the late fourth millennium B.C.E. These include three large passage tombs: Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth.
At Newgrange a single 19-meter (60-foot) passage leads in from an entrance on the southeast side of a huge mound (some 80 meters [260 feet] across), famously oriented so that the sun shines directly along it, lighting up the central chamber, just after dawn on days around the winter solstice. Each of the other major tombs has two passages. Those at Knowth run deep into the interior from entrances opposite each other, facing more or less due east and west respectively. Dowth has passages of different lengths, both in its southwestern quarter. The longer one runs in from an entrance in the west-southwest, the shorter one from the southwest.
Apart from Newgrange, only the shorter passage at Dowth could conceivably be interpreted as aligned upon the solstitial sun, and the target here is winter solstice sunset rather than sunrise. However, it has also been pointed out that the three monuments, taken together, might have a broader calendrical significance. Each of their five passages is oriented close to sunrise or sunset on a solstice, equinox, or mid-quarter day: that is, upon one of the dates obtained by dividing the year into eight exactly equal parts starting at either of the solstices. This division is reflected in the traditional Celtic calendrical festivals, which fall close to these dates. It is also reflected in the precise alignments upon sunrise or sunset on these dates at many British megalithic sites that were claimed by Alexander Thom in the mid-twentieth century and seemed to imply that a calendar dividing the year into eight equal parts had been in extensive use throughout Neolithic Britain.
However, as later reassessments showed, the archaeological and statistical evidence simply does not support Thom’s “megalithic” calendar, and the idea of any all-pervasive Celtic calendar in later, Iron Age times has proven highly questionable. Astronomical and calendrical practices throughout later prehistory were much more variable and localized. Furthermore, the supposedly calendrical alignments of the Boyne valley tomb passages (Newgrange aside) are not exact. All this suggests that the Boyne valley tombs may have done no more than to fit within a broad general pattern of orientation practice that prevailed locally and perhaps extended to Irish passage tombs further afield. This much would accord with what one finds among local groups of later prehistoric tombs and temples throughout western Europe. Indeed, we need look no further than the sixteen smaller passage tombs that surrounded Knowth in order to see a broad range of passage orientations varying from northeast around through east and south to southwest, but avoiding the northwest and north.
Yet it remains possible that more particular practices relating to the seasons and the skies may show up archaeologically in other ways, as “one-off” phenomena, such as the solstitial hierophany at Newgrange itself. Thus, one of the decorated kerbstones at Knowth resembles a sundial, while another contains a cyclic arrangement of twenty-nine circles and crescents that could be a representation of the phase cycle of the moon.
See also:
Celtic Calendar; Equinoxes; “Megalithic” Calendar; Mid-Quarter Days; Sol
stitial Directions; Thom, Alexander (1894–1985).
Newgrange; Prehistoric Tombs and Temples in Europe.
Obliquity of the Ecliptic; Solstices.
References and further reading
Eogan, George. Knowth and the Passage-Tombs of Ireland. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986.
O’Kelly, Michael. Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982. Prendergast, Frank, and Tom Ray. “Ancient Astronomical Alignments: Fact or Fiction?” Archaeology Ireland 16 [2], 60 (2002), 32–35. Ruggles, Clive. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, 129. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Stout, Geraldine. Newgrange and the Bend of the Boyne, 40–57. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. Waddell, John. The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland, 59–65. Galway: Galway University Press, 1998. Whittle, Alasdair. Europe in the Neolithic, 244–248. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Brainport Bay
The landscape of much of the western highlands of Scotland is one of mountains dissected by long narrow lakes, similar to Norwegian fjords, extending inland from the coast. Loch Fyne in Argyll is one of the longest of these, stretching for more than 50 kilometers (30 miles). On its shores, about halfway along, is one of the most convincing candidates for a prehistoric solar observation platform.
The site known as Brainport Bay or Minard occupies a spectacular setting on a low eminence jutting out into the lake. It achieved notoriety in the late 1970s when, following excavations by the local archaeological society, a curious alignment of artificial structures came to light, dating to the Bronze Age in the mid second millennium B.C.E. It includes a back platform, a flat area built around a natural rock outcrop; two large boulders standing on end, known as the observation boulders, with a flat cobbled area between; and a main platform, again artificially enhanced. The main platform contains what appears to have been an extraordinary sighting device. Two slender standing stones a little over 1 meter (3 feet) tall stood upright in clefts between rocks (they had fallen and been moved but were re-erected after the excavations had located the stone-holes). As viewed from the observation boulders, these stones would have lined up, with the precision of a rifle barrel, upon a notch between two mountains on the only distant horizon visible from the site, some 45 kilometers (30 miles) along the lake to the northeast.
In the Bronze Age, the midsummer sunrise would have occurred just a little to the left of this notch. As the sun moved steadily upwards and to the right, it would have crossed the exact alignment, passing just above the notch, a few minutes later. Furthermore, the appearance of the sun in the alignment would not have been confined to the solstice itself, but would have been equally impressive for a period of several days, like the famous midwinter alignment at Newgrange. This means that unreliable weather is unlikely to have prevented at least one successful sighting of the event in most years.