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As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited.
However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.
First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.
For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.
But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.
Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.
We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.
All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.
Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?
We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".
I fell down one of those rabbit holes by watching a young adult TV show called "The Children of the Stones" which was filmed at Avebury (a village built around a stone circle, about 25 miles north of Stonehenge) and the book "The Old Straight Track" which claimed all these neolithic sites were linked by Ley lines.
There are a lot of stone circles in Great Britain. I suspect that others located in Europe would have been dismantled for building materials over the past millennia.
Ran into this doing 3D scans of old sites for a hobby project, drone lidar over Avebury shows layers of restoration concrete under the "original" stones. Anastylosis is wild once you see it.
OA makes no mention of Fred Hoyle's 'three hours with a calculator' to check Hawkins figures (and being generally unimpressed). Also nothing about the Thoms (Alexander and Archie) who surveyed many other stone circles, or perhaps a passing reference to John North's chunky book on Stonehenge itself. Latterly Euan MacKie was working out how exactly you could test an hypothesis about ancient observers marking a celestial alignment of some type anywhere in the latitudes of Britain. A multi-route rabbit hole if you are in need of diversion.
IIRC (read the book ages ago when much younger) , the theory was that by using the 56 Aubrey holes to count, say, by moving a pole from one hole to another once a year, an eclipse could be predicted to occur every 18th or 19th year.
I always wondered why this was never simulated, and I guess the answer is that it would not work.
At this rate, I would find it startling if ancient stonework didn't have something to do with the sun, moon, and stars. Everywhere you look some ancient society was predicting these things by tracking them.
You do if you want a durable record of your observations
e.g., for the purposes of showing future generations you could align with spring solstice, or predict phases of moon, or eclipses. That's impressive and maybe even useful.
Technically "Stonehenge" isn't Ylvis, that's just what everyone calls this bit — the actual sketch title is "What Does the Fox Say?" Still, glad the reference landed.
What's interesting is that it may have had multiple changing purposes during construction.
It took 1500 years to be established in its current form. It's pretty likely (to me at least) that the purpose of the year 1 work was different from year 1500.
It honored the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. And it demonstrated French industrial prowess, iron craftsmanship advanced engineering capabilities..
I realize that was tongue in cheek, but what I found more interesting is that is was only to stand for 20 years and was initially set to be demolished in 1909. So your question is even more amusing as the thing was only supposed to be temporary.
The cathedral movement started in 1006 with a quiet goal to redirect resources away from the crusades. It was also from a sort of cultural vacuum after the world didn't end at the turn of the millennium.
It wasn't "for the view," it was, in no particular order, and non-exhaustively:
* To provide work
* To serve as a reminder of the power and authority of the church
* To glorify God
* To make sure all the other nearby kingdoms were aware of how much cooler you are than them
sarcasm (noun) - the use of words that mean the opposite of what one intends to say especially in order to insult, to show irritation, or to be funny : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on ironic and usually bitter and caustic language often directed against an individual or idea.
It seems like it would be a mistake to say things like "it was for science and not religion" or vice versa. Additionally, also seems like it would be very hard to say "it was definitely not for eclipses," given the difficulty in proving the negative? Like, maybe it was and it just didn't work right.
Even if BBC didn't claim it, article leans hard on Hawkins' theory without saying why archaeologists rejected it. Anyone know what actually killed that idea? The alignment math or the tribe-couldn't-do-this snobbery?
Reminds me of legacy systems we've inherited at work — nobody left who knows why it's built that way, so people invent theories after the fact. Bet in 3000 years someone writes a paper on our load balancer configs and the moon.
However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.
First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.
For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.
But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.
Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.
We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.
All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.
Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?
We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".