Culture and Cosmos is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the history of
astrology and cultural astronomy published by the
Sophia Centre Press in
partnership with the Sophia
Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, Faculty of Humanitiies and the
Performing Arts, at the University
of Wales Trinity Saint David
We are currently seeking submissions for future volumes of Culture and Cosmos.
We are currently seeking submissions for future volumes of Culture and Cosmos.
Volume 18
Prehistoric British Astronomy: Whatever Happened to the Earth and Sun?
Ronald Hutton
Abstract
During the first half of the twentieth century, it was an orthodoxy among British archaeologists that the New Stone Age peoples of the island had worshipped an Earth Goddess, in chambered tombs, and then been conquered by foreigners who ushered in a Bronze Age, characterised by circular temples dedicated to a new religion focused on the heavens. In the second half of the century, belief in this sequence collapsed, and experts more or less abandoned attempts to reconstruct religion during this period of prehistory. At the same time it remains true that many of its monuments have clear alignments on heavenly bodies. What now, then, can be done to bring together this evidence with prevailing scholarly attitudes?
