ASTRONOMY also see Is it a Coincidence

     How do we know the American Indian architects of the Newark Earthworks actually intended to build their monuments in alignment with the risings and settings of the moon?  Are modern scientists reading too much into a haphazard arrangement of mounds and walls?

     In fact, when scientists Ray Hively and Robert Horn first came to Newark, they were convinced that claims of this sort that had been made for Stonehenge and other sites were unfounded.  They surveyed the Octagon convinced they would find alignments to the summer or winter solstice sunrises (or sunsets) that would be explainable by chance alone.  In other words, when you have so many walls and gateways aligned to so many points on the horizon, it stands to reason that some of them, whether the builders intended it or not, will align with important astronomical events.  What surprised Hively and Horn was that could not find a single wall or gateway at Newark that was aligned to any important sunrise or sunset.

    This was perplexing, until it dawned on them that there were no solar alignments because the walls were aligned to something else – the moon.  They found that the architecture of the Octagon Earthworks incorporated alignments to all of the eight major moonrises and moonsets that define a repeating 18.6-year lunar cycle.
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Copyrighted December 2005 by Michael E. Mickelson, taken 2005-Dec-16 at 18:12 EST