The Great Avebury Challenge - Can YOU Decipher an Avebury Stone Using Our Knowledge?

The Great Avebury Challenge

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

Archaeology, Art & Astronomy: The Great Avebury Challenge - How Did the World Actually Look in Ancient Days?

This posting introduces a series of postings deciphering the Avebury Stones.

Before you read any further about the Great Avebury Challenge, make sure you read an article by Timothy R. Pauketat, Questioning the Past in North America, in The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology, Edited by Timothy R. Pauketat, February, 2012, DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195380118.013.0001 at http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195380118.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195380118-e-1

It is the best archaeological piece we have read in decades and it provides a balanced perspective on how to view studies of the human past.
__________

What follows below is our own take on how to view the past for our work.

Many thousands of years ago, before the appearance of modern-day religions and sects, and before the advent of modern lighting, humans sat around their evening campfires and gazed up at the vast expanse of the starry night sky.

The few lucky persons living today who have seen the stars at night at a desert location free of city lighting know just how spectacular the Milky Way can appear as it spans the heavens. In an age where the term "awesome" is overused .... the MILKY WAY IS AWESOME, and was even more AWESOME for our distant ancestors, who did not have our modern astronomical knowledge.

• What DID they know about the sky above?
• How did they view their heavens?
• How did they integrate that knowledge into their culture?

In ancient eras, the talk around the campfire surely centered at times on topics that are still manifested in news events today as the product of mankind's search to sensibly answer the following questions:

• Who are we?
• Where are we?
• When are we?
• What is our purpose on this Earth?
• Who created all this? if it was created at all?

A good argument can be made that the ancients had better answers than we do in our contemporary world, given their prehistoric state of knowledge.

As we also do today, the ancients sought answers in the heavens true to the hermeticism of Hermes Trismegistus, "as above, so below". The sky was the presumed abode of the gods in ancient eras. Nothing much has changed in the interim. For modern monotheistic religions, "God" also resides "up there". We allege that such an "astronomical" belief goes back into prehistoric times.

• How did our forefathers see the sky of stars in detail?

We are so used to living in a world dominated by the written word that we have lost sight of what it must have been like for prehistoric humans to confront their world without the tools of alphabetic or syllabic writing.

Imagine at the ancient campfires how the ancients pondered:

• What is it that we see above at night (not knowing what the stars were)?
• How does the night sky relate to the day sky?
• Why does the night sky rotate, and
• Why do the Sun, Moon AND Stars show numerous "regularities"?

We can see in our minds eye the shadows of ancient humans tracing figures in the ground with sticks as they discussed their various ideas about who they were, where they were, and what the sky above them was, and how it worked.

Humankind is never at a lack for answers -- be they right or wrong -- and so it was that some theories and ideas about the sky soon prevailed, all based on observations made with the naked eye (though there is evidence that the ancients may early have discovered the principle of lenses while glassmaking). Such theories fulfilled a need, even if they were less sophisticated than today.

• What astronomical events did they observe?
• How did they interpret what they saw?
• How was this knowledge communicated to their peers or community?

At first, such "knowledge" was passed on orally, but explaining things with a stick surely led to "picture writing", to carvings on stone, and to rock art.

"Picture writing" was to the ancients what "alphabetic writing" is to moderns.

We will in future postings be discussing the art at Avebury Henge and Circles. Prehistoric art at Avebury, however, is not what is commonly called "folk art". Rather, we might compare prehistoric megalithic stone carving viz. "sculpture" and "painted" rock art to a modern form of art called Naïve art (viz. naïf art) described at the Tate as:

"simple, unaffected and unsophisticated ... characterised by childlike simplicity of execution and vision".

At the Wikipedia we find that:

"Naïve art does not necessarily evidence a distinct cultural context or tradition.

Naïve art is recognized, and often imitated, for its childlike simplicity and frankness.

[Naïve art has] a flat rendering style with a rudimentary expression of perspective. When ... emulated by a trained artist, the result is sometimes called primitivism, pseudo-naïve art, or faux naïve art."

The above descriptions in fact reflect well our traced, colored astronomical decipherments of the Avebury Stones as they appear in subsequent postings.

We do our best to accurately portray the prehistoric style of art we have found, which draws figures within figures within figures in a simple manner.

Please be aware that the style of art on the Avebury Stones portrayed in our postings is by no means "our creation" as such. Rather, to the best of our ability, the style seen is intended to reflect the art of the ancients.

To remove further doubt, we had an exhibition of our own art works quite some years ago, and our own paintings are quite distant from naive art.

Our next posting is:

The Great Avebury Challenge - Can YOU Decipher an Avebury Stone Using Our Knowledge?

The Pitfall of Mainstream Thinking

In advance of postings that are coming....

A giant chasm between theory and reality can not be bridged by wishful thinking. - Andis Kaulins