We all know that at the winter solstice the rising sun (if it can penetrate the cloud) shines into the tomb at Newgrange right to the chamber at the end. There have to be other Newgranges and a French glossy magazine devotes nearly twenty pages, with much illustration, to the Mesolothic and Neolithic remains of civilisation on the Orkneys.
"Astronomy was a science in Neolithic times" states the author of the article, and cites the grave at Maes Howe, "perfectly aligned so that the rays of the sun of the winter solstice the shortest day come through to light up the back of the chamber".
Newgrange has too often been crowded. Up in the Orkney there is hardly the same rush.
The article is splendidly illustrated, in colour, of course and shows the impressive interiors of the houses of thousands of years ago.
This is at Skara Brae. The buildings have been preserved by being buried in sand. There are wall cupboards, fine flagstones arranged to make shelves. There are large chests, likewise made up of thin slabs of stone, which were believed to be used as beds. On the ground there are smallish troughs or containers for food, perhaps for water. The space in the houses is not great 36 square metres. Which need not mean that the inhabitants were of no great stature. Or could not build better. For, the writer points out, smallness was a characteristic of dwellings up, to the Middle Ages.
There was a hearth, in the middle and, lacking wood, the fire was made of a mixture of dried animal manure, dried seaweed, heather and bracken and the bones of sea mammals, which were rich in oil. Nights were long in those winters, but what a long day they had at that latitude in summer.
Houses apart, there are seventy two monuments on the islands and this, the article says, argues for a major Neolithic immigration, probably from Scotland.
From the bones in the great monuments to the dead, it is reckoned that the average human died at about twenty years of age. Few hit thirty. In one tomb only seven per cent went above that. The collective tombs were regularly opened to take more, and were used for centuries. Sometimes the bones had to be trampled to make room for more. Animal and bird bones are there too, domestic and sea otter and even foxes.
And in one, an impressive number of the bones of sea eagles.
And, of course, splendid pictures of the great standing stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar. To the non archaeologist this is all good reading and fine viewing. Less professionally to the point than our own Archaeology Ireland, but then it's for a general readership, you'd imagine. L'Archeologue (Archeologue Nouvelle). Editions Errance, Paris. It quotes as sources four books published in English.