"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."
-- Proverbs 29:18, King James Bible (KJV)

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Corporate Greed and Offshore Parked Profits

The New York Times Editorial Board has it right in Apple, Congress and the Missing Taxes.

Corporations like Apple, laughing all the way to the bank -- make maximum use of existing expensive government structures -- set up mostly FOR THEIR BENEFIT (e.g. the patent system, the courts, the enforcing federal agencies, etc., which your average citizen never needs or uses) -- yet these firms refuse to pay for them.

The clueless in Congress -- more or less directly responsible for the offsore profit-parking practice -- are just one aspect of a larger problem -- which is the widespread ignorance, endless hype, and extreme gullibility found not only in the centers of American power and influence, but extending far beyond -- to the "dark fields of the republic" (with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the phrase appears in The Great Gatsby).

Greed-based companies like Apple have been raised to fully undeserved celebrity status by hordes of their uninformed and fleeced customers, while these same firms  shamelessly plunder their wallets and the nation's coffers. Each country gets the system it deserves....

Hat tip to CaryGEE.

Friday, August 19, 2016

Megalithic Standing Stones are Astronomy According to a New Scientific Study

We are happy to announce
-- as we have been writing for the last decades --
that megalithic "standing stones" are astronomy,

according to a confirming, just published "scientific study".

At New Atlas, formerly gizmag, David Szondy reports on an article published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports.
See New Atlas at newatlas.com/statistics-stonehenge-computer/44949/.


The full original publication referred to by Szondy can be accessed via the Copyright Clearance Center RightsLink® via https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=ELS&contentID=S2352409X16301808 


At New Atlas
Szondy summarizes the results, inter alia, as follows:

"[A] team of scientists from the University of Adelaide has statistically proven that some of the oldest standing stones in Britain were deliberately constructed to align with solar and lunar movements....

[T]he analysis revealed that these alignments not only included the stones, but the surrounding landscape and horizon as well. This showed that the ancient Britons connected the Earth to the sky in designing their stone circles....
"

As above, so below.

 
Via New Atlas and then ScienceDirect.com,
-- where at the latter one can read the Abstract to the article --
we discovered that:


The Reports of the Journal of Archaeological Science are an Elsevier publication. The study appeared in Volume 9, October 2016, Pages 249–258 under the title Origins of Standing Stone Astronomy in Britain: New quantitative techniques for the study of archaeoastronomy, by Gail Higginbottom and Roger Clay.

Higginbottom is at the Department of Physics, School of Physical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia while Clay is at the School of Archaeology & Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.
The full original publication referred to by Szondy can be accessed via the Copyright Clearance Center RightsLink®.

We imagine that their study is the beginning of an avalanche of research papers over the coming years that will for the most part confirm the correctness of our work over the years in deciphering megaliths and megalithic sites as astronomy.

We urge you to read our newest discoveries about the Avebury Stones of Avebury Henge at the LexiLine Board at ProBoards under that Board title of Avebury at lexiline.proboards.com/.


Also those discoveries will be confirmed, you can be sure. The data is so good that we can say that without a doubt.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Harvard and Stanford Universities Lead the Pack in the 2016 Nature Index of Academic Institutions

Harvard and Stanford universities top the 2016 Nature Index of Academic Institutions in terms of the counts of high-quality research publications in the natural sciences.

The Top 10 are: 1. Harvard 2. Stanford 3. Tokyo 4. MIT 5. Oxford 6. Cambridge 7. Berkeley 8. ETH 9. UC San Diego 10. Michigan.


Our Universe is What Fascinated Prehistoric Man : Cosmic Eye Video Goes Viral

Please see the following video beginning to end, as it goes out, then back and then in, and back again.

Cosmic Eye: Video by Perth astrophysicist Danail Obreschkow goes viral

Archaeologists please note -- it is our cosmic universe, the universe in which we live that fascinated prehistoric mankind to the extreme and gave rise to modern civilization -- NOT POTS.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Andis Kaulins and the Ancient World Blog

The Ancient World Blog is written by Andis Kaulins, a joint EU and USA citizen, born in Germany in 1946. He is a J.D. (Doctor of Jurisprudence), Stanford University Law School (1971).

Kaulins (pronounced Collins) is an alumnus associate of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, an international law firm headquartered in New York City and known as "Paul, Weiss" viz. "Paul|Weiss" in the trade.

As of 2016, all three of the ladies on the U.S. Supreme Court were former (summer) associates at Paul, Weiss.

Kaulins is the former FFA Law Lecturer in Anglo-American Law, University of Trier, Germany. He is the author of books on the history of civilization, ancient scripts and languages, as well as megalithic cultures (see the list below).

Kaulins is also co-author of the world's leading Langenscheidt Routledge German-English, English-German Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance, now in its 4th print edition, including modern media editions for handhelds, where Kaulins covers law, patents and intellectual property (IP), information technology (IT), Internet, telecommunications, and new media.

As a college student, Kaulins did summer work for the Nebraska State Surveyor's Office, doing land survey in the field.


Anyone who thinks we do not get "out in the field", like a good "digger", had better look at our Glacier Climbing in Svellnosbreen in Norway in 1977.

The Ancient World Blog, as its name, implies, covers the ancient world.

Why do the above-mentioned specialties serve as a strong basis for analyzing history? There are actually simple answers for that.

LAW is a discipline based on LAW, FACTS and their INTERPRETATION and people who study law learn to analyze and use EVIDENCE. No other academic discipline has courses on Evidence. The law does.


Thinking like a lawyer is called "critical thinking", a type of thinking absent in much published historical work by other mainstream disciplines.

"Critical thinking" does not mean considering one or two alternative solutions to a problem. "Critical thinking" means considering ALL the possible solutions imaginable and the reasons for them. Top "critical thinkers" do that, and they are the best lawyers, best CEOs, best political leaders, best scientists, etc.


TRANSLATION and MULTI-LANGUAGE DICTIONARY WRITING is the professional skill of CONVERTING INFORMATION, i.e. converting one form of communication into another.
 

People in the archaeological and archaeologically-related professions are trained in none of these, and their work shows glaring deficits in those areas.

LAND SURVEY is the basis for the organization of all modern civilizations. The communities of man asserted territories, and those territories had to be land(marked) in some manner. Many people in the archaeological and archaeologically-related professions have no idea about land survey or territory in the sense of Robert Ardrey's Territorial Imperative.


One can not understand the ancient world without the understanding that LAND was more important than POTS. How many people in archaeologically-related professions recognize that?

We cover modern patents in our work. In ancient days, HUMAN INVENTIVENESS and CREATIVITY were equally important for survival as also for social rank and organization.


INVENTIONS go back a long time and form an integral part of the development of the human civilization, both now and in the past.

It must be noted in this connection that there is a greatly mistaken prevailing assumption in many quarters of academia and elsewhere that "Archaeology and related fields" are the disciplines rightly responsible for reconstructing the history of mankind, whereas, in fact, something quite different is actually true, as e.g. modern  genetic research of genomics is showing us.

In an Edge conversation, The Genomic Ancient DNA Revolution: A New Way to Investigate the Past, David Reich of the Harvard Medical School is quoted as follows: "This is what ancient DNA does for us. When you look at the data, it doesn’t always just play into one person’s theory or the other; it doesn’t just play into the Indo-European steppe hypothesis or the Anatolian hypothesis. Sometimes it raises something completely new, like the Denisovan finger bone and the interbreeding of a gene flow from Denisovans into Australians and New Guineans." There are many conflicts between prevailing mainstream archaeological "theories" and genetic evidence.

Archaeologists are trained to dig things out of the ground, fine, that is their role. But over the years they have extended their alleged role far beyond their training and expertise.

For example, little in their training has prepared them to properly analyze prehistoric standing stones above the ground. Mainstream academic attempts to analyze megaliths and megalithic sites have thus far been quite ineffective.
 

We are in part remedying that problem through our publications of megalithic decipherments, which are all mostly astronomical in nature, and show the "art" of prehistoric man.

We refer here also to our forum topic titled Archaeological Research Basics from Pauketat, which we recommend to all who wish to get a more balanced look at current Archaeology in general.
 

People who think that Archaeology and related disciplines are "exact" sciences are just kidding themselves.

Post-processual archaeology in fact challenges pretty much everything that previous archaeology generations have produced as "human history", quoting the Wikipedia: "Post-processualism was heavily critical of a key tenet of processualism, namely its assertion that archaeological interpretations could, if the scientific method was applied, come to completely objective conclusions. Post-processualists also criticized previous archaeological work for overemphasizing materialist interpretations of the past and being ethically and politically irresponsible."

It is not without reason that Ian Hodder, Dunlevie Family Professor and Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, asks on his home page "Do ‘pots’ equate with ‘people’?".
We quoted Hodder some years ago in a posting at LexiLine Journal 539. We wrote:

"Göbekli Tepe is featured at Newsweek online in an article from the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine. At History in the Remaking: A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution, Patrick Symmes writes: "

"The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is 'unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,' according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the 'huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art' at Göbekli, Hodder -- "who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites" -- says: 'Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong." [emphasis added]

"All our theories were wrong." Consider that virtually absolute and timely statement coming from one of the leading personages in modern Archaeology.
Hodder is not just "anybody" out there in archaeology spouting off his opinion. Rather, he is a LEADING archaeologist. Take a look at his Stanford University profile.

We are far more critical than Hodder about many things in the archaeological and related professions. We say:

  • There is no training in archaeology and related disciplines in the use of "probative evidence" and its proper assessment, which is properly the role of people trained in law, but not archaeology. Our cardinal case is the case of Moses and Exodus, for which read the front page of LexiLine.com.
  • There is little appreciation in archaeology and related disciplines of the importance of astronomy in prehistoric cultures, and even less astronomical knowledge is taught or available in the field.
  • The role of ancient sculpting arts in prehistory as a major means of communication is often totally ignored, as can be seen in archaeological interpretations of prehistoric cave paintings, which fail to see that the rock faces or stones BEHIND the paintings are often ALSO carved into shapes, and were so carved before ancient man started to apply "rock art paintings" on top of the carvings instead. Carving and sculpting preceded "cave" and "rock" painting, folks. How can something that simplistically obvious not be universally recognized in Archaeology. It is astounding!
  • There is little archaeological training in "art appreciation" and how to examine and interpret the art of prehistoric and ancient cultures and civilizations. Much of the ancient world is art, so that training in art is essential.

    Why, for example, did the minimalistic "relief sculpture" dominate early stone carvings?

    Because it was a darn sight easier than carving the whole stone!

    Contemporary researchers who have grown up viewing the obvious plasticity of Auguste Rodin sculptures or an Andy Warhol iconic pop art are not likely to easily recognize dimly scratched relief-type art on megalithic standing stones from 5000 years ago.

    The ancients could still track the faint spur of a hunted animal's track in the savanna or forest, and knew their stars, for terrestrial and water navigation.

    Today, we hunt down our game in the local supermarket and navigate in a labyrinth of glass, steel & concrete.

    The ancient world was a different world.
We thus have good reason to claim that much in mainstream thinking is wrong
and to assert that the Ancient World Blog, now being incorporated into the LexiLine forum at ProBoards, has some very good suggested "corrections" to mainstream thinking.

Short list of books published by Andis Kaulins:

Crossposted from the LexiLine forum at ProBoards.com.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Experts are Inferior to Algorithms: That's What the EMPIRICAL Evidence Tells Us: Experts Like Complexity: Algorithms Prefer Simplicity : Simple Combinations of Features Are Better

In Statistics vs. Judgment at DelanceyPlace.com, August 11, 2016, Richard Vague focuses on the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman,
summarizing an excerpted section that deals with the work of Paul Meehl.

Vague writes:
"In today's encore selection -- from Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Statistics versus judgment. In his book Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence, psychoanalyst Paul Meehl gave evidence that statistical models almost always yield better predictions and diagnoses than the judgment of trained professionals. In fact, experts frequently give different answers when presented with the same information within a matter of a few minutes...."


How Did the Current World Get to Be the Way That It Is? The New Lexiline Forum at ProBoards

If you want to understand the current status of the world, you should have some basic understanding of how it got to be that way. - Andis Kaulins

The New Lexiline Forum at ProBoards.com

We are in the process of moving our LexiLine, History of Civilization Yahoo! Group (at Yahoo! Groups since the year 1999)  to our new forum at ProBoards.com, a free online board portal to our liking.

The Lexiline ProBoards forum has been started at ProBoards at the URL http://lexiline.proboards.com titled as Lexiline : Civilization : Arts : Sciences : Archaeology : Technology : Astronomy : Anthropology.


For a sample page see the following page as a guest:
Avebury Maps | Lexiline : Civilization : Arts : Sciences : Archaeology : Technology : Astronomy : Anthropology

The "public", i.e. guests, are free to view the board but only members of the Lexiline forum can post. Requests to become a member of the group must be approved by the Lexiline forum administration. Membership must be restricted to retain control over spam and flamers, who can be removed and/or banned, so please, apply for membership only if you have a serious interest in the topics discussed on the forum, i.e. the history of civilization, arts & sciences, archaeology & anthropology, technology e.g. astronomy, including archaeoastronomy, and related disciplines -- all from a prehistorical viz. historical perspective.

Future members should read the help files at ProBoards to get acquainted with the system. Looks like a lot of fun!

ProBoards gives forum members a greater opportunity for interactive participation. We intend to take a step back at this new forum from full responsibility and will be looking for additional moderators among the members. Let us know if you are interested. We see the forum as a long-term project. It all depends on how many people join and how high the interest level proves to be.

Right now we are using the free version of ProBoards. If it proves to be successful, we could move to the monthly payment scheme, which would eliminate the ads. But this remains to be seen. Enjoy!

Here is the link again.
LexiLine at ProBoards
http://lexiline.proboards.com/

Sunday, August 07, 2016

Avebury Stone #10 Front Side Black/White Tracing plus Constellations Compared with Modern Sky Map

The Great Avebury Challenge - Avebury Stone #10  Front Side Black/White Tracing plus Constellations Compared with Modern Sky Map -- 5000 Years Apart in Astronomical Technology

This image compares the black/white tracing result for Avebury Stone #10 with the corresponding stars in a modern sky map. Both mark the same stellar region, 5000 years apart in astronomical technology. The sky map on the right is a partial clip from the superb astronomy software program Starry Night Pro http://astronomy.starrynight.com. We have moved labels around so that the image comparison is easier to view here. Click the pic to see a larger image.
 

The top of Avebury Stone #10 marks the Celestial Meridian. When you look at that top of the stone, you see that the ancients split Ursa Major into two halves that marked the heads of the two large figures, a man and a woman. The necks of the heads mark the Galactic Meridian. The child in their laps is marked by Leo, with Leo Minor marking either more children of the family or dolls of the large child. The man wears boots and one can see the shape of the shoe in the Milky Way with a jagged cut. The woman's dress extends to the bottom of the image, although the right lower half of the stone also might represent a sperm whale's head below the Celestial Equator, which is marked by Hydra at the middle of the intentionally sheared megalith. Also an octopus or squid is marked in the watery regions, at the lower left and a whale at the lower right below the funerary sled. The bottom of the stone marks the Galactic Equator. The center of the Stone marks the Summer Solstice. The North Galactic Pole at Coma Berenices is marked by what could be a phallic symbol.

As we interpret the figures on stone, the upper half of the stone represents the realm of the living on Earth whereas the lower half  is the realm of the deceased, marked by several figures that can be interpreted as those who have passed away, including one on a sled, which must have transported the deceased into the watery underworld. Puppis in the right corner is drawn as the similarly named Apophis (Apep), the giant serpent of the deep who was thought in early ancient times to consume the dead.

Crux, the Southern Cross, is in the left lower corner and may have served in prehistoric days, as in modern eras, as a symbol of passage.

Antlia is a modern constellation, very faintly marked here by what appears to be an animal of some kind. It was seen as a hunting boomerang by aboriginals in Oceania, a normally irrelevant connection, except for a figure we found dimly marked on the right hand side of the stone that could appear to be throwing something like a hunting boomerang could be. Interesting.

Avebury Stone #10 Front Side Color Trace Compared with Sky Map Star Correspondence

The Great Avebury Challenge - Avebury Stone #10 Front Side Color Trace and Sky Map Star Comparison 5000 Years Apart in Astronomical Technology

This image compares the color tracing result for Avebury Stone #10 with the corresponding stars in a modern sky map. Both mark the same stellar region, 5000 years apart in astronomical technology. The sky map on the right is a partial clip from the superb astronomy software program Starry Night Pro http://astronomy.starrynight.com. We have moved labels around so that the image comparison is easier to view here. Click the pic to see a larger image.
 

The top of Avebury Stone #10 marks the Celestial Meridian. When you look at that top of the stone, you see that the ancients split Ursa Major into two halves that marked the heads of the two large figures, a man and a woman. The necks of the heads mark the Galactic Meridian. The child in their laps is marked by Leo, with Leo Minor marking either more children of the family or dolls of the large child. The man wears boots and one can see the shape of the shoe in the Milky Way with a jagged cut. The woman's dress extends to the bottom of the image, although the right lower half of the stone also might represent a sperm whale's head below the Celestial Equator, which is marked by Hydra at the middle of the intentionally sheared megalith. Also an octopus or squid is marked in the watery regions, at the lower left and a whale at the lower right below the funerary sled. The bottom of the stone marks the Galactic Equator. The center of the Stone marks the Summer Solstice. The North Galactic Pole at Coma Berenices is marked by what could be a phallic symbol.

As we interpret the figures on stone, the upper half of the stone represents the realm of the living on Earth whereas the lower half  is the realm of the deceased, marked by several figures that can be interpreted as those who have passed away, including one on a sled, which must have transported the deceased into the watery underworld. Puppis in the right corner is drawn as the similarly named Apophis (Apep), the giant serpent of the deep who was thought in early ancient times to consume the dead.

Crux, the Southern Cross, is in the left lower corner and may have served in prehistoric days, as in modern eras, as a symbol of passage.

Antlia is a modern constellation, very faintly marked here by what appears to be an animal of some kind. It was seen as a hunting boomerang by aboriginals in Oceania, a normally irrelevant connection, except for a figure we found dimly marked on the right hand side of the stone that could appear to be throwing something like a hunting boomerang could be. Interesting.

The next posting shows a black white tracing with constellations drawn into it in a comparison with the same Starry Night Pro sky map as here.

Saturday, August 06, 2016

Criminal Law, the U.S. Supreme Court, Utah v Strieff, The Exclusionary Rule, The Attenuation Doctrine and The Consent of the Governed

The "law and order" pendulum appears currently to be in a shift from its extreme left swing to a swing in the other, right-oriented, direction.

At the ABA Journal, in Chemerinsky: Has the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Fourth Amendment?, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Utah v. Strieff and the attenuation doctrine there -- in our opinion -- rightly applied.

In our modern systems of government, citizens surrender various rights in exchange for obtaining greater government-enforced protection and security for themselves and others. Protection of the citizens -- ALL citizens --  is the chief role of government. Not criminals, but honest law-abiding citizens are the ones who are to be protected first as a matter of priority, not vice versa.

When laws or interpretations of laws defeat that protective security promise for the bulk of citizenry, they need to be revised in order to restore the protection and security for which the citizens initially granted their "consent of the governed".

We appear to be in such an era of history where this is necessary now, and Utah v. Strieff moves in the right direction.

Thursday, August 04, 2016

Outdated Memes

Outdated Memes

As a Stanford University Law School graduate, the present author was pleased to read in the Scientific American at Science Research Needs an Overhaul, that John P. A. Ioannidis has co-founded a new center at Stanford University called METRICS (Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford) to deal with the costly problem that much mainstream research is wasted.

Ioannidis cites to The Lancet, which avers this applies even to 85% of medical research, a "hard" science.

So how bad are things in the soft sciences?

Ioannidis writes that the METRICS center:
"[W]ill seek to study research practices and how these can be optimized. It will examine the best means of designing research protocols and agendas to ensure that the results are not dead ends but rather that they pave a path forward. The center will do so by exploring what are the best ways to make scientific investigation more reliable and efficient."
We enthusiastically applaud this development.

We have been confronted for years by gullible, uninformed, and opinionated people in and out of science proclaiming the near infallibility of mainstream ideas and research methods and we really have little patience for it.

Having taught research ourselves at the university level, we know from experience that exactly the opposite is true: most of what is researched in science and is peer-review published as a result is a costly waste of time and often leads science in the wrong directions. It serves people's vanities.

One main reason for these follies of "scientific research", as we have written time and time again, is that science in the past has been predominantly "authority-based", i.e. it is not "what" but rather "who" determines the truth, whereas we think that "evidence-based" research must be given priority.

Outdated memes must be abandoned. That is our quest.

Meme is a term coined by Richard Dawkins, emeritus Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in England.

Memes are by his definition: "replicated ideas, symbols or practices".

We view memes as describing the state of mainstream science at any given time. Indeed, memes explain many of the aberrations of science.

A meme is defined at the Wikipedia as:
"[A]n idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.... The word meme was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ... as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given [in The Selfish Gene] included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches."
In our view, what is normally called a "school of thought" in academia is more accurately defined as being a "meme", because "thought" often has nothing to do with it.

Ideas -- whether right or wrong -- become entrenched in various disciplines of science and propagate themselves as if they had a life of their own.

The same is true for politics and religion.
Truth is not at all at issue.
Unfounded belief is everything.

As written at the Wikipedia in Memetics:
"Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution.... Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.... As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host."
In other words, and contrary to the notion that "truth" is the objective in science or elsewhere, people thus actually adhere to a given idea, school of thought, cultural practice or religion because the adherent of a particular meme perceives it as providing the holder of that meme with advantages.

That essential understanding helps to explain many of the backward ideas that are maintained in science. Presumably "rational" people are holding fast to long-outdated ideas and ways of looking at things, often at odds with the available probative evidence.

We look to the probative evidence. Science must look forward.

The next posting in this series of postings is:

The Great Avebury Challenge - Introducing the Avebury Stones of Avebury Henge and Circle

Maps of Avebury Henge - The Discovered Geometric Foundation - The Milky Way

This posting presents two very necessary maps of Avebury Henge and Circles and the numbered Avebury Stones, which numbers we use throughout our Great Avebury Challenge postings. The first map shows the layout of the stones and the second map is our discovery of the geometric foundation.

Map of the Avebury Groundplan
(We number the Avebury Stones – which we also call Avebury Megaliths – based on this map.)


The above Avebury groundplan and numbered stone location map is an independent illustration by Andis Kaulins based on the English Heritage map of “the Avebury Circles” found in Caroline Malone, The Prehistoric Monuments of Avebury, English Heritage, London, 1994, reprinted 2001, https://www.amazon.com/Prehistoric-Monuments-Avebury-Caroline-Malone/dp/1850742537.

Markings here are larger and the buildings have been removed. “North” is up and “South” is down. The upper right-hand corner KEY designates a map-numbered filled black dot as a standing stone, a filled black elongated horizontal symbol as a fallen stone, an empty black dot as a stonehole (plinth marker) and an empty horizontal symbol as a stonehole (location estimated). Stone I is not on the English Heritage map but is included here. Those keys are a bit changed from what is used by English Heritage as we think that our amended version is more easily understandable.

Please not that we are not convinced that circle-essential stones belonging to the present circle of stones once filled the markers now marked with plinths. The reason for that will become self-evident as the stones are deciphered.

Map of the Avebury Groundplan with
Right-Angled Construction Lines Added
(This geometric architectural plan of Avebury was discovered by Andis Kaulins, June, 2016.)


Early in the decipherment process we discovered that Avebury Stone #10 marked the Summer Solstice point in the stars. Please note that this is not the same as "Solstice risings".

Pinpointing the likely astronomical significance of Avebury Stone #10 was of eminent importance for the process of understanding the original construction of Avebury Henge and its Circles.

We drew a 45-degree line from Stone #10 through the Obelisk, leading to Avebury Stone #73, presuming it marked the Winter Solstice in the stars. Examination of angles and linear relationships showed that straight lines and simple 45° and 90° angles greatly explained much henge construction, tying together most of the important aspects of construction with just a few lines.

One consequence of this geometric formation was the hypothesis that the earthwork part of the henge represented the Milky Way, seen as two adjoining strands with differing length ends, as in the sky (as above, so below) with the large opening to the West marking the Milky Way's thinnest, most open, part.

That analysis further suggested that Avebury Stone #24 might mark Crux, the Southern Cross, which led this author ultimately to locate a seminal work by Nicholas R. Mann: Avebury Cosmos: The Neolithic World of Avebury henge, Silbury Hill, West Kennet long barrow, the Sanctuary & the Longstones Cove.

Mann suggests that the Milky Way was an essential part of the stellar model that led to the construction of Avebury Henge, and we say that he is right.

His main point is that the ancients had become aware of axial precession, which was "lowering" the sky, and, indeed, at the time of the construction of Avebury Henge, was dropping the stars of Crux, previously fully visible, slowly out of sight.

A Milky Way that was previously fully visible to the ancients for thousands of years was now in part disappearing into the more southern world beyond the horizon. We recall here with more significance now a legend about the otherwise fearless ancient Old Norse that the only thing that they feared was "that the sky was falling". In truth, it was.
 
In our decipherment of the Avebury megaliths, Avebury Stone #24 marks Crux.

The next posting in this series of postings is:

Outdated Memes

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

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Mainstream Thinking and its Major Failing

In advance of postings that are coming....

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2016

"Orderism" and the Proper Role of Governments

At the New York Times, Jochen Bittner writes on The New Ideology of the New Cold War, calling it "Orderism" vs. liberal Democracy.

Our own view is that:

"Citizens give up certain rights to governments and political "systems" in exchange for the protection of their interests and safety. When governments and political systems fail to deliver, they should be replaced. Law and order as the foundations of modern civilization must ultimately rule the playing field." - AK

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Sky Earth Native America -- in Two Volumes
Native American Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds
Deciphered as Land Survey & Astronomy by Andis Kaulins

paperbacks in color print
Volume 1, 2nd Edition, 266 pages

ISBN: 1517396816 / 9781517396817
Volume 2, 2nd Edition, 262 pages
ISBN: 1517396832 / 9781517396831

Sky Earth Native America Volume 1-----------Sky Earth Native America Volume 2
by Andis Kaulins J.D. Stanford                                         
by Andis Kaulins J.D. Stanford
(front cover(s))  
 
  ------

(back cover with a photograph of the author and book absract text)