STONEHENGE AND ITS BARROWS

The authoritative historical work for the Stonehenge Barrows is a book by William Long (Esq., M.A., F.S.A) titled Stonehenge and its Barrows, published by Devizes in 1876 from the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. xvi. That book has a survey map of the barrows which surround Stonehenge to a maximum distance of about 2 to 2 1/2 miles around the Stonehenge central stone circle.

These barrows are not scattered randomly throughout the countryside but are clumped together in definite groups, some of which look very much like known asterisms viz. constellations of the stellar heavens, i.e. bright stars that can be grouped together to form a recognizable shape, even though these groupings may not have been exactly the same in ancient days as they are today. At the Stonehenge Barrows, this unmistakeable similarity holds particularly true for the stars of Scorpio, which in prehistoric times marked the line of the Equinoxes.

Andis Kaulins thinks that the Stonehenge Barrows are the key proof for the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge and its environs. Kaulins thinks - quite apart from any other use to which the barrows may have been put by ancient megalithic man in the Neolithic Era (Stone Age)- that the Stonehenge Barrows mark stars of the sky in an organized formation called a planisphere, a hermetic practice evidenced for example among the archaic traditions of Native American Indian tribes and described, for example, in an article by Alice C. Fletcher in the 1902 issue of the American Anthropologist.