Stonehenge and the Winter Solstice |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. In a report from Stonehenge, Robin White tells that the winter solstice was probably the most important holiday for the people who built the great English stone circle.
"There's no written record of what Stonehenge was used for. But out in the fields near the 4,000 year old stone circle, expert, Bryan Davison, says if you look at how other cultures use their buildings, you can deduce what might have gone on there.
BD: Tribal gatherings and councils, dynastic marriages, inter-community trading agreements, anything that needed to be done in the face of the leaders of the community and probably witnessed by the gods would be done in the same grand space.
The people who built the massive monument were farmers, dependent on the turn of the seasons for their livelihood. Davison says the most important festival of the year would have come in the darkest days of winter.
BD: In the middle of winter it's getting a bit grim. It's getting wetter and colder, the nights are getting longer, the days are getting shorter, the sunrise and sunset are marching along the horizon. Are you going to go into everlasting night? And there comes a point when the relentless march of the sunrise and the sunset stops and after 2 or 3 days the sun starts moving back along the horizon.
That point is called the solstice. The word means literally 'the sun stands still.' And Davison can tell that that's what Stonehenge was built to celebrate. He says the shamans of the day would have called the most important community leaders to a ritual to celebrate the continuing cycles of nature.
BD: We're going round one more time. There will be a spring. There will be a sowing. There will be a harvest, life will go on."
Robin White is an independent producer from San Francisco. Funding for The Weather Notebook comes from Subaru and the National Science Foundation.