10,000-year-old calendar said discovered in Scottish field, possibly world's oldest

Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world's oldest 'calendar' in a field in Scotland.
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Researchers found that the monument pits align during the Midwinter sunrise, which researchers say would provide an annual 'astronomic correction' to maintain the link between the passage of time indicated by the moon, the solar year and the seasons.
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The project was led by Vince Gaffney, professor of landscape archaeology at the University of Birmingham.

He said: 'The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the near east.

'In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself.'
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The Warren Field site was first discovered as unusual crop marks spotted from the air by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).

Dave Cowley, aerial survey projects manager at RCAHMS, said: "We have been taking photographs of the Scottish landscape for nearly 40 years, recording thousands of archaeological sites that would never have been detected from the ground.

"Warren Field stands out as something special, however. It is remarkable to think that our aerial survey may have helped to find the place where time itself was invented."
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