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_Before The Stones: Stonehenge I As A Cometary Catastrophe Predictor?_

_Duncan Steel_

_Spaceguard Australia, P.O. Box 3303, Rundle Mall, Adelaide SA 5000,
Australia.
Email: dis at a011.aone.net.au_

Astronomical hypotheses for the purpose(s) of megalithic monuments
have mostly been implicitly based upon an assumption that the
designers witnessed the same phenomena as those we observe in the sky
today. This assumption is not well-based for phenomena having
time-constants of order centuries or millennia, such as the
populations of comets and meteoroids in the inner solar system and the
ephemeral meteor showers and storms which they produce on the Earth.
IRAS observations have indicated that Comet Encke has a trail (not
tail) of debris some tens of millions of kilometres long, presumably
produced since its latest period of activity began about 200 years
ago. One may further presume that the Taurid meteor showers we observe
in this epoch are the result of the dispersal of trails produced in
previous activity cycles which must stretch back to about 20,000 yr
ago. When the comet, accompanied by such a trail, has a node close to
1 AU, one expects intense meteor storms to occur, perhaps accompanied
by multiple Tunguska-type events if the disintegrating comet spawns
massive lumps of debris. Determination of the epochs of such events
from backwards integrations is impossible due to (i) Chaotic orbital
evolution; and (ii) Non-gravitational forces, but pairs of
intersections (one at the ascending node, the other descending) are to
be expected a few centuries apart and separated by 2500-3000 years. It
is suggested here that one such pair occurred in 3600-3500 and
3200-3100 BC, provoking the construction of the Great Cursus and
Stonehenge I. From Stonehenge I, apparently the first construction at
the famous site, as the comet neared the Earth it would have appeared
to rise in the evening with a huge bright stripe crossing much of the
sky, originating in the north-east. Passage through the trail would
then result in celestial fireworks (and maybe worse); afterwards the
comet and trail would have passed in the direction of the Sun,
partially blocking sunlight for a few days. In order for terrestrial
intersection to have occurred in that epoch (late fourth millennium
BC) the mean orbital period of the comet over the past 5,000 years
would need to have been slightly less than at present, and might then
be expected to have produced a 19 year periodicity in meteor storm
events (six cometary periods). It is suggested that Stonehenge I was
built by the Windmill Hill people to allow the prediction of such
events, from which they hid in the shelters we now call long- and
round-barrows, and that the later developments at Stonehenge (phases
II and II) by the Beaker people were a result of a misinterpretation
of the original purpose of the site in terms of lunar and solar
observations, a misinterpretation which was re-discovered by Newham,
Hawkins and Hoyle in the 1960's.
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DUNCAN STEEL is director of Spaceguard Australia and Vice-President of
The Spaceguard Foundation. Steel took B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the
University of London, studying at various colleges, and then moved to
the University of Colorado where he worked on NASA's Pioneer Venus
Orbiter program. He then moved to New Zealand, where he took his Ph.D.
degree at the University of Canterbury for work on radar observations
of meteors. He continued this work from 1985-96 at the University of
Adelaide, Australia, spending 1987 as an ESA Fellow at the University
of Lund, Sweden. From 1990 until its termination in 1996 he directed
the only southern hemisphere program for the discovery and tracking of
near-Earth asteroids, based at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. In
connection with this he has served on various international
committees, including NASA's Spaceguard committee in 1991-92 and the
International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Near-Earth Objects
since 1991, and Working Group on the Prevention of Interplanetary
Pollution since 1988. He is the author of over a hundred scientific
papers, and the book Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets" (Wiley,
Chichester and New York, 1995). In addition, he has appeared in
numerous TV and radio documentary programs concerned with the impact
hazard.
_________________________________________________________________

Presented at the SIS Conference: [1]Natural Catastrophes during Bronze
Age Civilisations.

References

1. file://localhost/www/sat/cambconf.htm