The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice • Hacker News Board

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#101

Post by nephihaha » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 8:22 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #92

gwbas1c wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as are they everywhere else, presumably! They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up. FWIW: The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence. It wasn't settled until after the last ice age. Pretty much anything old is celebrated because there is so little of anything old.

> It wasn't settled until after the last ice age. The UK wasn’t permanently settled until the mesolithic either. There are older artifacts like axes, but no monuments.

Probably because the UK didn't exist until 1707.

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#102

Post by mistrial9 » Fri, Dec 26, 2025, 1:35 AM UTC

lb1lf wrote: post #40

phinnaeus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local archaeologist? Incredible

Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us. There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything. Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a c…

it seems like you moved to property on "a road called 'Solsteinen' " .. did it occur to anyone that many special local things might be built close to the stable sun stone? I would even guess that no one built a home or horse barn there because they were not allowed to by the community.. this is modern development.. using up the ancient old area for a new sale. That is the appearance from the description above.

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#103

Post by lb1lf » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

mistrial9 wrote: post #102

lb1lf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us. There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything. Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a c…

it seems like you moved to property on "a road called 'Solsteinen' " .. did it occur to anyone that many special local things might be built close to the stable sun stone? I would even guess that no one built a home or horse barn there because they were not allowed to by the community.. this is modern development.. using up the ancient old area for a new sale. That is the appearance from the description above.

The (immediate) area has been farmed for hundreds of years, so I would guess most old burial mounds etc has been recycled centuries ago. The houses there now are mostly built in the seventies, at which point (luckily!) the local council would NOT let you build upon any ancient structures.

Where I live now - same island, but farther from the natural port and, hence, less attractive land in the old days - we still have a few which noone bothered to remove (to till the land underneath or to use the stones for building walls or foundations).

My kids used to love going playing around those mounds, made for excellent inspiration for pretending games, that!

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#104

Post by JoeAltmaier » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38

When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning? Keep the heat out. We jump so quickly to religious significance.

Yeah I had that backward.