Astroarchaeology

By Alan Anderson

BEYOND STONEHENGE by GERALD HAWKINS 319 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

"If I were given one wish by a genie," writes Gerald Hawkins, "I would ask for a time machine to go back to dates like 1776, 1066 and 2000 B.C." But in a sense Hawkins has already had his wish--with the help of aerial surveys, radiocarbon dating and a computer. As a Boston University astronomer, he has been able to program the orbits of the sun and moon, then order a computer to trace them backward in time.

Thus he has "watched" ancient sun-and moonrises over the far-flung monuments and art works of ancient man. Describing his observations in Beyond Stonehenge, Hawkins comes up with an admirably coherent theory: widespread prehistoric populations seemed to share not only a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy but also a desire "to link by astro-alignment men on earth with the gods in the sky."

Stonehenge is his passion. The author argues that the Stonehengers' astronomical virtuosity--they detected a 56-year lunar cycle unnoticed even by modern astronomers until Hawkins' investigation--sprang from an intense feeling that their lives were intimately connected with celestial rhythms. Lunar eclipses, for example, were times fraught with danger; since the arrangement of posts and boulders at Stonehenge allowed prediction of these dark times, the people of Stone Age Salisbury presumably could prepare for them.

When Hawkins first advanced this theory in 1963, critics denounced it variously as meretricious and pure moonshine. Since then, he has bolstered his argument considerably while extending his inquiries to other works of preliterate man. He peered through temples along the Nile with his guide Gamel, "the quintessence of experts -- an Egyp tian Egyptologist," and roamed the deserts of Peru with Palacio the grave robber. To avert unpleasant dietary sur prises, Hawkins stuck to an "expedition diet: beer, bread and stews boiled and bubbled to sterility." Surprises some times defied even this regime, however. In Cuzco, a tea prescribed for altitude sickness turned out to be brewed from cocaine.

With the help of his trusty "astro-probe" -- Hawkins' term for the com puter-aided ability to re-create past sun and moon behavior -- the author has found a "cosmic orientation" nearly everywhere. The world's largest ancient temple, built on the Nile for Amon-Ra about 1500 B.C., is aligned so the midwinter sunrise strikes the altar in the high room of the sun. More than a dozen Maya sites built around 500 B.C. mark the cycles of the sun, and Chichen Itza, like Stonehenge, clearly shows the extremes of lunar movement. On the banks of the Mississippi near St. Louis, observing posts at the largest city-temple complex built by Indian tribes in the U.S. (circa A.D. 800-1 550) chart the solstices and equinoxes. So far the only baffling exception is the hodgepodge of 2,000-year-old designs, including miles-long triangles and elaborate animal figures, on the great rainless plains of southern Peru.

Hawkins rejects the widespread notion that literacy is the essential mark of a complex civilization. Stonehengers, who have been described as "howling barbarians," apparently did not read or write. But, he argues, they shared with Egyptian, Maya and other cultures something more important than a writ ten language: a sense of time, of per spective, of man's place in the cosmic scheme. . Alan Anderson

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