John Hammond

University of Kent, UK

Abstract

Gold cups and ring ditches: cosmology, astronomy and sacred geometry at the time of Stonehenge

There has been much debate and controversy over many decades regarding the nature of apparent astronomical and geometric aspects of Stonehenge. One of the most contentious claims is that the monument's actual location on the earth's surface - at approximately 51 degrees north - was chosen with deliberation. Only within a relatively narrow band at this latitude is it possible to create significant alignments on the sun and moon in such a way that the sightlines cross at 90 degrees.

Research on a recently discovered henge in south-east England has produced data which seems to support the hypothesis that ancient people were indeed using knowledge of the earth's circumference and its rotational qualities to create monuments with such astronomical characteristics. Furthermore, this Kentish henge is connected through the discovery of a gold cup to a similarly located site in south-west England, opening up the intriguing possibility that, together with Stonehenge, they were part of a network that ritually marked the sun's transit across southern England from dawn to dusk on particular days in the year. In turn, the Ringlemere and Rillington cups may also be linked to other gold objects dating to the same period, including the Nebra Sky Disc, found in Germany in 2002.

If true, this could imply that a common cosmology was in place, at least in southern England and quite possibly across a large part of north western Europe, during the late third and early second millennia BC - perhaps administered by a "professional" priesthood or an influential cognoscenti  class.

Biographical Details

John Hammond is an associate lecturer in archaeology at the University of Kent, specialising in the Neolithic and Bronze Age of temperate north-western Europe. He is a non-executive director of Canterbury Archaeological Trust and a former member of the Lemba Research Centre, Cyprus. He won the University of Kent's Alumni Research Scholarship in 2005, which allowed him to undertake PhD research entitled: "In Search of the People of La Manche: a comparative study of the treatment of the dead in the Transmanche region during the period 2500-1500 BC." He has made a recent study of Beaker sites in Kent, Flanders and north-eastern France. In the context of this paper, highly relevent fieldwork experience includes working on the Ringlemere, near Sandwich, excavations, where a gold cup dated to approximately 1700 BC was found. He is presently engaged in an international project to reconstruct the Dover Bronze Age Boat.