Discovering the Invention of Time?
15 July 2013
British archaeology experts have discovered what they believe to be the world’s oldest ‘calendar’ – created by hunter-gatherer societies and dating back to around 8,000 BC.
The Mesolithic monument was originally discovered in a field in Aberdeenshire, appearing as unusual crop marks spotted from the air by the RCAHMS aerial survey team. It was first excavated in by the National Trust for Scotland in 2004, and now analysis by a team led by the University of Birmingham, published today – July 15, 2013 – in the journal of Internet Archaeology, sheds remarkable new light on the monument, which pre-dates the first formal time-measuring devices known to man, found in the Near East, by nearly 5,000 years.
The capacity to measure time is among the most important of human achievements and the issue of when time was ‘created’ by humankind is critical in understanding how society has developed.
Until now the first formal calendars appear to have been created in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago. But during this project, the researchers discovered that a monument created by hunter gatherers in Aberdeenshire nearly 10,000 years ago appears to mimic the phases of the Moon in order to track lunar months over the course of a year.
The site, at Warren Field, Crathes, also aligns on the Midwinter Sunrise, providing an annual astronomic correction in order to maintain the link between the passage of time, indicated by the Moon, the solar year and the associated seasons.
Project leader Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, said, ‘The evidence suggests that hunter gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East.’
Dave Cowley, Aerial Survey projects manager at RCAHMS, said: ‘We have been taking photographs of the Scottish landscape for nearly 40 years, recording thousands of archaeological sites that would never have been detected from the ground. Warren Field stands out as something special, however. It is remarkable to think that our aerial survey may have helped to find the place where time itself was invented.’
Time and a Place: A luni-solar ‘time reckoner’ from 8th millennium BC Scotland is published today in Internet Archaeology
