AN English-born scientist who in 1963 was serving as head of the department of astronomy at Boston University, Gerald Hawkins set the world by its ears that year when his article Stonehenge Decoded, in the journal Nature, suggested that the Neolithic monument on Salisbury Plain was nothing less than a computer that had been used to predict eclipses of the Sun, and other celestial phenomena in those far-off times.
Plotting the functions of more than 150 key stones and numerous holes using a modern computer, Hawkins came to the conclusion that our Stone Age ancestors were a highly sophisticated people, whose astronomical knowledge in some respects would not have disgraced our own era.
The idea that Stonehenge had some fundamental connection with the Sun was not, of course, a new one. In the 18th century the antiquarian William Stukeley had noticed that the monument was aligned on sunrise at the midsummer solstice, and had come to the conclusion that it was a temple for sun worship. In 1901 the astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer had calculated backwards from the midsummer sunrise that year to “establish” the foundation of Stonehenge at 1680BC, and likewise decided that it was a temple.
Neither had gone anything like as far as Hawkins, whose conclusions, amplified in his book Stonehenge Decoded (1966), were the delight of the world’s press and a great impetus to the hippie movement’s interest in the monument, especially at the summer solstice. The science of archaeoastronomy had been born. Most archaeologists, however, dismissed the book as merely the effusions of an enthusiast, lacking in scientific rigour and plausibility. They pointed out that excavation showed that Stonehenge had not been built in one period as a single entity, but had evolved over a period of time, and that Hawkins’s theories were therefore flawed.
Subsequent studies have not confirmed the complex system of solar and lunar alignments alleged by Hawkins, suggesting that the word “computer” was a great exaggeration. Nevertheless, Hawkins’s theories had, for a period, added to the gaiety of nations and enveloped the austere old stone pile in an aura of glamour, which seemed to do neither it nor him any harm.
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As the popular archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes once observed, “every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves — or desires”, pointing out that views of it had ranged over the ages from the medieval conviction that it was a castle for giants, to the New Age belief that it was a spaceport for aliens.
Gerald Hawkins was born in Great Yarmouth in 1928 and educated at Nottingham University where he graduated in physics in 1949. He later completed a doctorate in radio astronomy under Sir Bernard Lovell at Manchester University. In 1963 Manchester awarded him a DSc for astronomical research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories.
By that time he had settled in America where he had gone in 1954 as scientist in charge of the radio meteor programme at Harvard College Observatory. In 1957 he was appointed professor of astronomy at Boston. He held the chair there until 1969 when he went as dean of liberal arts to Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he remained until 1971. Hawkins was also associated with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Bedford, Massachusetts.
After the publication of Stonehenge Decoded, Hawkins pursued many similar researches. Among his research trips were one to the temple of Amun at Karnak in Egypt and another to analyse the Nazca lines in Peru, strange animal and geometric figures inscribed on the desert floor. He also attempted to apply Euclidean geometry and music to a theory describing the formation of crop circles, but none of these preoccupations seized the public interest as the Stonehenge astronomical computer had.
He published Beyond Stonehenge in 1974 and Mindsteps to the Cosmos in 1983, as well as contributing to Pathways to the Gods: The Mystery of the Andes Lines (1978). None of these, likewise, had quite the appeal of his original Stonehenge proposal.
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Hawkins’s first marriage, to Dorothy Willacy-Barnes, was dissolved. In 1979 he married the writer Julia M. Dobson. He is survived by her and by two daughters.
Gerald Hawkins, astronomer, was born on April 20, 1928. He died of a heart attack on May 26, 2003, aged 75.