Discovery Of What Could Be “The World’s Oldest Calendar”

With a headline like that, you would be expecting to learn of another landmark discovery in one of the so called “cradles of civilization” such as the Near and Middle East or Greece.  It would undoubtedly come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that in fact this pretty significant find had taken place in a field in Aberdeenshire.

Crathes Castle

The field in question is at Crathes Castle, and takes the form of a series of twelve pits, their layout appearing to follow the phases of the moon and track lunar months. One of the most plausible theories appears to be that the monument was laid out by hunter-gatherers the best part of 10,000 years ago, this at least is the thinking of a team led by the University of Birmingham. The pit alignment, at Warren Field, was first excavated in 2004. It is also possible that there could have been a wooden post as well as the pits.

The findings have been published in the journal, Internet Archaeology, and gives rise to the possibility that what would be called the Mesolithic calendar is thousands of years older than previous known formal time-measuring monuments created in Mesopotamia.

What is also interesting is that the pit alignment appears to line up on the Midwinter sunrise, providing whoever created the monument to have a sort annual "astronomic correction" so that they follow the passage of time and the seasons. Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at Birmingham, has been leading the analysis project.

He 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.
"In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself."

Other involved universities included  St Andrews, Leicester and Bradford. Dr Richard Bates, of the University of St Andrews, said the discovery provided "exciting new evidence" of the early Mesolithic Scotland. He added: "This is the earliest example of such a structure and there is no known comparable site in Britain or Europe for several thousands of years after the monument at Warren Field was constructed."

The discovery of the site is interesting in itself, as it came to light resulting from an investigation into unusual crop marks seen from the air by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).

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."

The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) has care of Crathes Castle and its estate, and between 2004 and 2006 there was an excavation of the site by Murray Archaeological.

NTS archaeologist Dr Shannon Fraser said: "This is a remarkable monument, which is so far unique in Britain. Our excavations revealed a fascinating glimpse into the cultural lives of people some 10,000 years ago - and now this latest discovery further enriches our understanding of their relationship with time and the heavens."