Stonehenge
Already in the 18th The century British bookseller William Stukeley had noticed that the horseshoe of great trilithons and the horseshoe of 19 blue stones in Stonehenge opened in the direction of the midsummer sunrise. It was quickly assumed that the monument must be specifically designed and planned so that the height of summer in the morning the sun directly over the Heel Stone and the first rays appeared in the middle of the monument between the open arms of the horseshoe arrangement.
This discovery has enormous impact on how Stonehenge was interpreted. For Stukeley from the 18th Century, and Sir Norman Lockyer in the first years of the 20th Century, this orientation implied a ritual associated with sun worship, and it was generally concluded that Stonehenge was seen as a temple of the sun. Recently, though, the astronomers Gerald Hawkins has argued that Stonehenge is not only on solar and lunar astronomical events, but can be used to predict other events such as eclipses. In other words, Stonehenge was more than a temple, it was an astronomical computer.
The alignment also made it clear that those who had built Stonehenge precise astronomical knowledge of the path of the sun, and beyond would need to know that before construction began exactly where the sun rose at dawn the morning during high summer on the site the future of the monument. This point must be made, because I suspect, with Stonehenge and many other monuments, it was the city, a special place in the landscape, which was important only later were these areas marked in some of the more lasting from digging ditches and banks and (or instead of) the establishment of wood or stone.
