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In his definitive book. Stonekenge Decoded, astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins catalogues these absurdities and offers the educated estimate that the construction of Stonehenge required at least 4 ote 1 ed + o4ad Pad roa. oa te tat centuries to build. That's ten generations. Ten generations of primitive people who were somehow convinced that it was worth while to arrange a pile of giant stones in a circle on an mow oa English plain. 'For generations the work on Salisbury plain must have absorbed most of the energies - physical, mental, spiritual - and most of the material resources of a whole people," Hawkins observed. There are others, of course, who prefer to believe that the early Britons didn't build Stonehenge at all. To them, it is obviously the work of the Atlanteans or even the wondrous space people. If Stonehenge were the only existing megalithic monument of this type in Britain, Hawkins' work would be more acceptable. Unfortunately, there are several hundred of these stone circles scattered about the British Isles, many of them just as mysterious as Stonehenge. We must therefore assume that all the Stone Age Britons were frantically engaged in monument building for at least a thousand years. If the scientists have dated Stonehenge correctly, then its construction occurred around the same time that the Minoan culture blossomed on distant Crete. The Great Pyramid had already been built or was in the final stages. So far as we can tell, the Indians had not yet appeared in North and South America. Stonehenge, there is another group of giant standing stones arranged in a circle. Called Callanish, this ring consists of thirteen blocks set around a large central stone. It is erected in a desolate, hard-to-reach place, again posing the questions, how and why did the early builders put it there? Since Callanish is somewhat cruder than Stonehenge, Hawkins speculates that perhaps it was built first, and the builders applied what they had learned from that effort to the later construction on the Salisbury plain. But the two sites are separated by a vast distance and expanses of water. In order for the theory to work, we need evidence that the early Britons were also great travellers and had a society developed enough so that they could travel in large groups. The small, wandering tribes couldn't meet these criteria. Astronomers and scientists have been measuring and studying these sites for centuries, and the general conclusion is that the stones were arranged in such a way that they deliberately aligned with certain stars and phases of the moon to form a crude computer which acted as a calendar. Hawkins fed his own calculations into a modern electronic computer and produced numerous charts and tables demonstrating such correlations. In essence, when a man stands in the centre of the Stonehenge circlej specific stars (or the sun or moon) appear directly over specific stones at specific times of the year in a manner which had to be planned by the builders. Hawkins noted: Plainly, the whole thing is quite absurd. 1.5 million man-days of physical labour. He calculates that it took three On Lewis, the northernmost island of the Outer Hebrides, many hundreds of miles north of