The Great Avebury Challenge is presented in the graphic below:
That graphic above asks whether YOU can decipher an Avebury Stone on your own, using the above basic system. You may want to read our next dozen or so postings first to get into the spirit of things.
According to our own recent decipherment of the Avebury Stones, soon to be published as a forthcoming book, these stones have markings on ALL sides consisting of holes, cupmarks viz. cupules or indentations, lines, figures, and even shading. The entire stones themselves also have special intentionally "designed" viz. "adapted" shapes, as we shall see in subsequent postings.
The Great Avebury Challenge is made to professional and layman alike, professors, teachers at every educational level, students, pupils, and anyone interested in the subject.
Can YOU decipher an Avebury Stone on your own using our knowledge?
It is more difficult than you might expect, but we claim to have done it, so why not YOU. Share in the thrill. Give it a try, using the basic system above.
In that system, we have found that the markings on the stones are astronomical in nature and present marvelous prehistoric art in design -- although one must be aware that not all markings that can be identified or imagined are certain by any means. The key is to get the essence of the markings, although details often offer valuable clues to decipherment.
Much can be made more visibly apparent by tracing the most prominent lines and marks on photographs of the stones via appropriate "zoom-capable" software.
We ourselves subsequently then use the "threshold" menu function in Paint Shop Pro 7 to reduce our tracings to a black and white outlined stone on which we then color apparent figures and assign the applicable corresponding stars.
The "front" of a stone -- for the outermost "circle of Avebury Henge stones -- is the surface facing henge-outward. That front side in our decipherments represents a particular part of the sky in astronomical representation. The left and right sides of that same stone represent stars to the sides of the stars on the front face of the stone. The back of the stone (henge-inward) depicts stars above viz. behind or "opposite" the stars on the front side of the stone.
Stone markings focus not only on one group of stars, but can also include neighboring groups of stars, and can also mark -- in a prehistoric way -- more sophisticated parameters that in modern astronomy are described as Solstices and Equinoxes, Celestial and Ecliptic Poles, the Ecliptic, the Celestial Equator, the Galactic Equator, and corresponding Meridians.
A normal person can be satisfied with just trying to identify depicted stars.
Our subsequent postings will provide you with our own decipherments of the Avebury Stones at Avebury Henge using our above basic system, starting with Avebury Stone #10, the most important stone at Avebury according to our research and decipherment work.
To give everyone a chance to experience the thrill in discovery themselves, we will first publish only our photographs of a particular stone, without further detail or interpretation. You can use those photographs as the basis for making your own tracings and interpretations. If you are a teacher, let your students or pupils trace the most prominent lines and markings on a given stone. How similar do your results turn out to be when compared to ours?
Our copyrighted photographs of the Avebury Stones will be released in those postings for free non-commercial "fair use" by the public. All commercial rights in the photographs are reserved by this author as the copyright owner.
This means that you can -- but need not -- skip postings -- after the initial photographic publication. In those later postings we will be presenting our own decipherments. Since not everyone will be interested in this decipherment challenge per se, some may only want to know our decipherment results.
BUT THERE IS A CATCH 22.
ANYONE negatively commenting, or criticizing our work or having another opinion about the stones MUST produce their OWN tracings and interpretations of the stones for public inspection online. We provide the photographs. YOU, dear critics, now should do the work too, for all to see. Criticism is a piece of cake. Accomplishing something is quite a bit harder.
We no longer communicate with institutions or people whose uninformed, unresearched and often simply ignorant knee-jerk opinions are based on long outdated memes -- and, indeed, a posting follows soon on such memes.
So ... first trace the most prominent lines and markings on a given stone using our photographs, and then tell the world your opinion, not before. We can then compare our tracings with yours, or vice versa, and we will then have a common ground for discussion.
This was the first posting of a series of postings presenting selected aspects of a book soon to be published as The Avebury Stones as Archaeology, Art & Astronomy by Andis Kaulins, CreateSpace, USA, Title ID: 6429513 ISBN-13: 978-1535338028.
The next posting in this series of postings is:
Maps of Avebury Henge - The Discovered Geometric Foundation - The Milky Way