In 2004, Scottish archaeologists discovered a lunar calendar of more than ten thousand years old on aerial photos: twelve pits in a meadow in Aberdenshire, in northern Scotland, dug long before the first farmers and five thousand years before the construction of the Stone Circle Stonehenge Hemkalender .
The pits, their positions and size display the moon phases, and made it possible to coordinate lunar calendar and the solar year. For example, the precise date of the Paaise season of salmon in rivers could be determined, crucial information for hunters-gatherers in this harsh corner of Europe.
This can be read in Our moon From science journalist Rebecca Boyle, a popular-scientific book that could easily have been called ‘everything about the moon’. Really everything comes along: from the color and scent of moonstones, the feelings of the astronauts that run around on the moon, the separate moon biori rhythm of corals, sunny and moon extracts, to the origin of the moon in an apocalyptic collision of two protoplanets. If the moon has something to do with it, then Boyle has a chapter about it.
This works well in the historical and archaeological chapters, especially because Boyle himself looks and writes visually. Your mouth occasionally falls open in the chapter about Nebra’s heaven disk, an illegally excavated bronze-with-golden celestial map from the Bronze Age, showing the moon and the Pleiads.
More difficult are the chapters with a lot of natural science, such as those about the origin of the moon. Explaining technical matters clearly is not Boyly’s strong point, while that is really not a luxury on all jobs, periods, heaven movements, alignments and other lunar subtitards. That is why it is a pity that no illustrations have been used anywhere.
Sometimes Boyle gives the impression that they do not fully understand things themselves: galaxies and tanning systems are confused, and somewhere it is about oxygen atoms in moon fabric that are ‘crushed’ (is meant a chemical reaction). Some facts are downright wrong: the moon does not have a quarter of the earth (its mass is 81 times as small).
Boylyes flowery, sometimes roaring language, sometimes gets in the way of here, and it also does not help that the Dutch translation is rather cranky, as is often the case with popular science. The moon is called ‘the only spectral in our heaven’ somewhere. What that means remains a mystery.