Almost 5000 years ago, people living just outside what is now Godmanchester, near Cambridge, built an impressive monument of banks, ditches and wooden poles covering some 7 hectares. The construction seems to have been designed primarily to predict the major events of the year-long solar cycle and the 19-year lunar cycle.
The complex-which probably functioned as some sort of temple involved with the worship of the Sun and the Moon-consisted of 24 wooden obelisks flanked by more than half a kilometre of banks and ditches arranged in the form of a giant trapezoid. Archaeologists say the site is unique.
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Preliminary research has shown that pairs of key obelisks were aligned with all 12 major events in the solar and lunar cycles: the major and minor midsummer and midwinter moonrises and moonsets, and the midsummer and midwinter risings and settings of the Sun. Moreover, the temple faces the point on the horizon where the Sun rises on two of the prehistoric world’s great religious festivals, May Day and Harvest Day (1 August).
In later prehistory, these festivals were known as Beltane (thought to be the festival of Belinus, the Sun god) and Lugnasad (the festival of the Celtic god Lug). Beltane marked the return of summer, while Lugnasad signalled the start of the harvest. The entire temple appears to have been constructed astride the line of the solar equinox (90 degrees/270 degrees). The east-west diagonal of the trapezoid is in fact the equinoctial line.
‘Many prehistoric monuments have astronomical alignments-but this site seems to be, astronomically, by far the most elaborate so far found in Western Europe,’ says Aubrey Burl, an archaeologist who has made a special study of such alignments. ‘In terms of astronomical alignments, the Godmanchester complex is substantially more sophisticated and comprehensive than Stonehenge,’ he says. Jon Humble, an archaeologist with English Heritage, has been carrying out preliminary research on the Godmanchester alignments.
Excavations, directed by Fachtna McAvoy of English Heritage’s Central Excavations Unit, have revealed substantial evidence of ritual activity in and around the temple-particularly involving cattle, one of the mainstays of the Neolithic economy. On either side of the temple entrance, prehistoric people had placed pieces of ox head-an ox skull on one side and two ox jaw bones on the other. And under the third obelisk along the northwestern side of the complex, an ox’s leg had been buried.
The ox connection certainly fits into the framework of what is known about the prehistoric May Day festival. Beltane (1 May) was the day on which cattle were put out to summer pasture. Cattle were driven in a procession between two bonfires to guarantee their protection by the gods, and cow horns were blown to welcome the rising of the summer Sun. Remarkably, this latter tradition survived in parts of Britain until the 19th century.
In the West Country, the May Day ‘obby osses’ (hobby horses) celebrated the rising of the summer Sun, and these may have originated not as horses or dragons, as some people suggest, but as sacred cattle. Indeed, the Minehead obby oss originally possessed a cow’s tail. Even the famous maypole had a bovine connection. Until recent centuries, maypoles were traditionally carried ceremoniously onto village greens by teams of cattle.
The Godmanchester temple, however, features evidence not only of ox-related rituals, but also of probable human sacrifice. Just outside the extreme western corner of the complex, archaeologists have unearthed the dismembered skeleton of a person, apparently dating from the period when the temple was in use.
Human sacrifice or burials seems to have been an aspect of Neolithic religious practice. Other remains have been excavated in ritual complexes at Gorsey Bigbury (Somerset), Woodhenge, Avebury and Durrington Walls in Wiltshire, and indeed at Stonehenge itself. There is also another possible parallel with Stonehenge. Behind the Godmanchester temple is an outlying ring ditch and, like a similar ring ditch at Stonehenge, it may have been used to accommodate an important lunar sighting obelisk. The Godmanchester example aligned-through one of the three entrance obelisks-with the minor midwinter moonrise.
Certainly two-thirds of the temple’s main known alignments are lunar, marking the main events of the 19-year lunar cycle. In later times, Pliny describes the Celtic priests, the Druids, as having a 19-year ‘super year’.
But the most distinctive feature of the Godmanchester temple was undoubtedly its great trapezoidal arrangement of 24 wooden obelisks. Although most of these obelisks were only around 60 centimetres in diameter, five were much bigger. The largest, midway along the base of the trapezoid, was a truly massive tree trunk, some 1.2 metres across. Other outsize obelisks were the two on either side of the entrance and the one in the centre of the entrance. A fifth large obelisk was located two-thirds of the way down the northwest side of the trapezoid.
The largest obelisk, located midway along the trapezoid’s base, appears to have been the temple’s focal point. It faces the large obelisk in the middle of the entrance. The alignment of these two wooden pillars pointed towards the place on the horizon where the Sun rose on the May Day festival of Beltane-the ‘birthday’ of the summer Sun.
Could these wooden pillars have been in any way ancestral to traditional English maypoles? Maypoles are not thought to have existed in the country prior to the Anglo-Saxon settlements of the 5th to 7th centuries AD. But May Day was a fertility festival, so it is possible that the Godmanchester obelisks share a common origin with maypoles-long regarded as having originated as phallic symbols.
There are other examples of fertility/phallic pillars associated with the Sun within the Indo-European tradition. In India, on the other periphery of the Indo-European world, Hindu temples feature stone obelisks known as lingams. These represent the divine power of creation and symbolise the phallus in particular and fertility in general. The lingam is associated with the Hindu deity Siva, one of whose three eyes was said to represent the Sun. And the Sun itself is seen as the eye of the gods through which many of the deities of the Hindu pantheon watched over the human race.
The Godmanchester temple lasted only a few decades. Less than a century after its construction, the entire complex was deliberately destroyed, probably by its own priests. It seems likely that the temple was ritually decommissioned. A thousand metres of earthwork banks were pushed back into the ditches from which their gravel and clay construction materials had originally come. And all the obelisks, bar two, were individually destroyed by fire. The heat appears to have been so intense that even parts of the bases of the obelisks, stuck more than metre into the ground, were consumed. Only two pillars were not burnt: the northwest side’s fifth obelisk had been removed at an earlier stage and replaced by a set of deer antlers, and the giant focal-point obelisk continued to stand.
There are parallels for the ritual destruction of sacred and other structures. At the great prehistoric Celtic centres of Tara and Navan in Ireland, temples were ritually burnt. And, interestingly, in Ireland today gypsies still practise the custom of burning their caravans (complete with contents) if one of the occupants dies.
Very soon after the Godmanchester site had been ritually decommissioned, its destroyers appear to have built a great religious monument-an avenue, 90 metres wide, flanked by a bank and ditches on either side. This avenue, perhaps a sort of processional way, was up to 3 kilometres long and may have been funerary in function. There are a number of graves exactly midway between the sides of the avenue, and similar avenues in other parts of Britain are thought to have been used for funeral rituals.
The Godmanchester avenue can be seen chronologically as the immediate successor of the temple complex, for half the filled-in baseline ditch of the trapezoidal temple was redug to form the eastern boundary ditch of the avenue. Also, the temple’s focal point (with its large surviving obelisk) seems to have continued to be important long after the destruction of the temple. Indeed, the avenue’s main bank and ditch (its southern flank) passes straight through the former temple’s focal point, forming an alignment which again points towards the place on the horizon where the Sun rose around the time of Beltane.
The avenue was also deliberately destroyed, its banks being pushed into its ditches only a few decades after its construction. Nevertheless, the vanished temple’s focal point still seems to have persisted as a place of ritual importance, for almost a thousand years later, Bronze Age people dug a series of mysterious pits there and filled them with a curious combination of charcoal, unburnt twigs, animal bones and burnt flints.
Around the same time, an enclosure, possibly a small temple, was built in the extreme northwest corner of the site of the Neolithic trapezoid. Throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages and the Roman period, people seem to have avoided ploughing or otherwise using the area which had once contained the Neolithic complex. Bronze and Iron Age field systems and a Romano-British agricultural estate stop short of what was probably still regarded as a sacred area.
The Romans move in
The Roman estate appears to have been a very sophisticated affair. Excavations have unearthed six major buildings. The largest, a great aisled barn, had 23 corn-drying ovens in it while another barn had nine ovens. A third structure seems to have been a massive granary. Another large building probably acted as a bathhouse. Archaeological excavations have yielded painted wall plaster (the Roman equivalent of wallpaper) and evidence of mosaic floors and fragments of columns.
So the Godmanchester site as a whole covers the Neolithic, Bronze, Iron and Roman periods. The most important component, the Neolithic complex, has no known parallel. In Europe, the only other really sophisticated prehistoric astronomical centre is located in Romania at a 2nd century BC site called Sarmizegetuza. But that complex is purely solar.
At Godmanchester itself, much still awaits discovery. Although most of the site is currently being destroyed by gravel quarrying, the detailed information obtained during excavations will enable archaeologists to discover much more, especially about the temple.
Of the 24 obelisks that once stood in the complex, only 10 appear to feature in obvious solar and lunar alignments. Why the other 14 were erected has not yet become apparent. But archaeologists do know that prehistoric people throughout the Indo-European world took a special interest in other astronomical objects besides the Sun and the Moon-namely Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn.
Linguistic evidence of this survives in the form of the days of the week, whose names in most Indo-European languages, from Sanskrit to French and from German to Welsh, refer to their respective deities associated with the Sun, Moon and those five planets. Further research on Godmanchester may reveal whether the planets featured in the workings of Godmanchester’s prehistoric computer-indicating the full extent of the achievements of Britain’s early astronomer-priests.
David Keys is the archaeology correspondent of The Independent.