Stonehenge May Have been a Timekeeping System to Keep Track of a Solar Year

There had been so many questions about one of the world's most famous prehistoric monuments - the Stonehenge. It has been a source of mystery for most people as to what it was actually used for. Even Charles Darwin paid a visit to the unique 5000-year-old stone circle some time in 1880s.

It was not fully understood until now how the Stonehenge may have originally been used as an ancient timekeeping system to keep track of a solar year (365 and a quarter days). Archaeologist and professor Timothy Darvill from Bournemouth University in the UK said the site was designed to help people keep track of the days, weeks and months.

A new finding based on careful analysis of the number and the positioning of the stones explains how the different rings the monument is comprised of may have related to a calendar, ScienceAlert reveals.

Architecture of the Stonehenge

Archeologists have already long been suspecting that Stonehenge was a calendar of sorts due to the positioning and alignment of the stones with the solstices, but there had been not much weight to exactly how this might have worked.

Darvill says it does work "in a very straightforward way."

"Each of the 30 stones in the Sarsen Circle represents a day within a month, itself divided into three weeks each of 10 days," he explains. "The intercalary month, probably dedicated to the deities of the site, is represented by the five trilithons in the center of the site. The four Station Stones outside the Sarsen Circle provide markers to notch-up until a leap day."

Darvill is sure that the architecture of Stonehenge has been split into two halves to match the two solstices - winter and summer - viewed through the same pairs of stones each year.

"This would have acted as a way of checking errors," Darvill suggests. "If the Sun were ever in the wrong place on the solstices, then the ancient people of Wiltshire would have known that they'd gone wrong somewhere in calculating the year."

Keeping time through the iconic stones of Stonehenge

During a time period known as the Old Kingdom, similar solar calendars have been recorded in Egypt, "developed in the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries after 3000 BCE, was adopted in Egypt as the Civil Calendar around 2700 BCE, and was widely used at the start of the Old Kingdom about 2600 BCE," says Darvill in the Independent UK.

It remains unclear whether the knowledge of solar calendars had reached south of England at the age of Old Kingdom. Nonetheless, archaeologists believe that Stonehenge is "after all rather unique in its design and construction", and may have been developed entirely by the local population.

The new study published online by Cambridge University Press suggests that indigenous development of such a calendar in north-western Europe is possible, but an Eastern Mediterranean origin is also considered. The adoption of such timekeeping system is also associated with the spread of solar cosmologies during the third millennium BC and provides a picture of people of the time lived and celebrated.