The Secrets of the World’s Oldest Calendar Revealed: The Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherer Time Keepers
Channel: Celtic History Decoded
Date: 2022-08-14

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The Secrets of the World’s Oldest Calendar Revealed: The Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherer Time Keepers

If I was to ask you where the oldest calendar in the world was found, where would you say? Some may say somewhere exotic like ancient Babylon or ancient Egypt; others might say don’t know, don’t care – if that that’s you, I’ll see you later;  how many would say Scotland however?

Today, I’ve come Warren Field in Aberdeenshire, the site of the oldest calendar in the world. Dating back 10,000 years ago to around 8,000 BC, this Mesolithic monument predates what was previously thought to have been the world’s oldest calendar by around 5,000 years, which was found in Mesopotamia. 

The calendar is a series of 12 pits in the shape of a general arc that mimic the phases of the Moon and track the lunar months. There are also three smaller, undated, postholes adjacent to the central, and largest pit (pit number 5). This lunar calendar was also aligned with the Midwinter Sunrise, which worked to calibrate the calendar. Without this calibration, the lunar calendar which inevitably fall out of sync with the seasons as a lunar calendar alone is not an accurate tracker of seasons without some correction

As Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Birmingham Gaffney and his colleagues write in Time and a Place: A luni-solar 'time-reckoner' from 8th millennium BC Scotland, published in the Internet Archaeology in 2013:

Sources:

Gaffney, V., Fitch, S., Ramsey, E., Yorston, R., Ch'ng, E., Baldwin, E., Bates, R., Gaffney, C., Ruggles, C., Sparrow, T., McMillan, A., Cowley, D., Fraser, S., Murray, C., Murray, H., Hopla, E. and Howard, A. 2013 Time and a Place: A luni-solar 'time-reckoner' from 8th millennium BC Scotland, Internet Archaeology 34. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.34.1 Internet Archaeol. 34. Gaffney et al. Time and a Place: A luni-solar 'time-reckoner' from 8th millennium BC Scotland (intarch.ac.uk) 

University of Birmingham, The Beginning of Time? https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2013/the-beginning-of-time-2 

Warren Field, Wikipedia - Warren Field - Wikipedia 

BBC News - 'World's oldest calendar' discovered in Scottish field 'World's oldest calendar' discovered in Scottish field - BBC News 

National Geographic, World's Oldest Calendar Discovered in U.K. World's Oldest Calendar Discovered in U.K. (nationalgeographic.com) 

Creative Commons Imagery:

Figure 4: Warren Field during excavation in 2005 and showing pits 20 to 5 (see Figure 3 for details). Photograph by Moira Greig (©Aberdeenshire Council Archaeology Service Ref AAS-05-02-CT75). Internet Archaeol. 34. Gaffney at al. Figure 4 (intarch.ac.uk) Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY) Unported licence Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 
in Gaffney, V., Fitch, S., Ramsey, E., Yorston, R., Ch'ng, E., Baldwin, E., Bates, R., Gaffney, C., Ruggles, C., Sparrow, T., McMillan, A., Cowley, D., Fraser, S., Murray, C., Murray, H., Hopla, E. and Howard, A. 2013 Time and a Place: A luni-solar 'time-reckoner' from 8th millennium BC Scotland, Internet Archaeology 34. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.34.1 Internet Archaeol. 34. Gaffney et al. Time and a Place: A luni-solar 'time-reckoner' from 8th millennium BC Scotland (intarch.ac.uk) 

Figure 5: Pits 5 and 6 during excavation. Post-pits 2 to 4 are in the foreground (© Charles Murray) Internet Archaeol. 34. Gaffney at al. Figure 5 (intarch.ac.uk) 

Figure 10: The plan of the Warren Field pit alignment below the symbolic arrangement of the pits in relation to the Slug Road pass. Green indicates a later recut and greyed features are of uncertain character. The backdrop has been exaggerated for display purposes (© Google Earth, Plan based on Murray et al. 2009, fig. 3). Internet Archaeol. 34. Gaffney at al. Figure 10 (intarch.ac.uk)

Figure 15: Areas in yellow provide clear views of the midwinter solstice within the frame of the Slug Road pass. Diamonds indicate the position of lithic scatters. Internet Archaeol. 34. Gaffney at al. Figure 15 (intarch.ac.uk) 

#scotland #history #archaeology