Row as Irish experts block ancient tomb
Paul Colgan

ARCHEOLOGISTS employed to restore a prehistoric burial chamber have been accused of destroying it. The specialists sealed off one side of a tunnel within a 5,000-year-old site at Knowth, Co Meath. The entrance to the passage was blocked because the archeologists wanted to protect some of the tomb's early Christian structures. Objectors say they acted hastily. The Knowth mound, similar to Newgrange in its circular shape, has two passages. The western one lights up at sunset on the spring and autumn equinoxes, when day and night are of equal length. The excavation team found no evidence of direct solar alignments at the eastern passage, and blocked off its entrance.




Critics, including Hank Harrison, the father of rock singer Courtney Love, claim to have witnessed the illumination of the tunnel. "I do not want flying saucer nitwits or pagan, naked dancing people descending on the site," said Harrison, a former researcher at London's Warburg Institute and author of The Stones of Ancient Ireland, a book about the country's neolithic treasures. "This is far more important. We should take a close look at what is really going on here."

Professor George Eogan, who led the 38-year excavation project at Knowth, said the wall was built to protect structures called souterraines at the entrance to the eastern passage. The formations - small tunnels, possibly used for storage - provided a valuable insight into early Christian society in Ireland, he said.

"It was a very important site during the early centuries AD, served by very skilled craftspeople," said Eogan. "The features of the early Christian settlement are very much part of the overall site - they must all be looked at as part of the monument." Scientific studies found that Knowth did not have the kind of spectacular solar phenomena seen at Newgrange each year on the winter solstice. This event occurs when the sun pierces a window box at the entrance, flooding the burial chamber at the end of the tunnel with light. Visitors to the Knowth site are told by their tour guides, however, that the two passages are illuminated on the equinoxes each year.

"At sunset on the equinoxes, a bit of light goes into the western passage, but it's not a great deal," said Eogan. "The alignments are not bang on, as is the case at Newgrange. I'm not trying to cover up, but I think it's a bit imaginary." "It has been very insensitive," said Gillies Macbain, editor of The Pulse, a quarterly journal focusing on the Boyne Valley passage graves. "The early Christian structure was just for storing things in the ground, but the passage is a world-class sacred site."

Harrison believes the alignment of Knowth's passages may not be based on the movements of the sun, but on the moon. "This whole thing was a planned, plotted, engineered phenomenon. They put things into the stones so that others would be able to share them for thousands of years afterwards." Last year, Philip Stooke, a planetary cartographer from the University of Western Ontario, established that some of the engravings at Knowth were maps of the moon. They were carved onto rocks about 3,500 years before Leonardo da Vinci's moon maps of 1505, which were previously thought to be the earliest of their kind. Stooke also concluded that another stone, known as Kerbstone 52, was a complex lunar calendar, marking the phases of the moon.

The burial mound at Knowth will itself soon be open to tourists, but only archeologists will be allowed into the passages. The stones at Newgrange have been severely damaged by a constant stream of sightseers coming into the chamber. Professor T P Ray from the department of cosmic physics at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, who tested the alignment theory at Knowth three years ago with Frank Prendergast from the Dublin Institute of Technology, said any suggestions of alignments could be dismissed. "Any passage with a clear view of the horizon in Ireland has roughly a 50% chance of being 'aligned' with sunset or sunrise on someday of the year, since the position of sunrise and sunset changes so much," said Ray. "So from a statistical perspective such 'alignments' as the one in Knowth are of no astronomical significance."