 Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming today and thank you, Douglas, for organising the session. So, today we're going to look at the findings of what we choose to call the Western Scotland Megalithic Landscape Project. The aim of this project has always been to understand why people built standing stones in the locations that we find them. Or, as Shannon Fraser from Scotland puts it, to work out why this particular part of the landscape became integrated into the appropriation of spiritual resources and not some other place. Once I've gone through quite a bit of evidential information about standing stones, I will ultimately explain why I feel that they had an individual place within the society in which they were created and how and why they might have been seen as individuals of those communities and in this sense were anthropomorphised. So, from the late Neolithic onwards in the British Isles and parts of Europe, a form of megalithic structure that was essentially fully exposed and open to public view appeared. They were constructed really over a much far longer time frame than any other megalithic monument type in the British Isles, highlighting their continual relevance for Neolithic cultures, as we see here in Scotland. This is Stennis and Kalanish, right into the Bronze Age cultures, right to the very end and the beginning almost of the Iron Age. Here are some examples of some more simple standing stones. This is a slab. So, from the beginning, standing stone structures appeared on their own, all with other monuments such as megalithic tombs, cans, kists, and earthworks. And more recently, buildings like at the Ness of Brodgar, we actually have standing stones within that temple site. As far back as 1872, Ferguson related that in the British Isles, say out of 200 stone circles alone, they found that at least half had yielded sepulchral deposits. With the coming of the Late Bronze Age, we see a large number of simpler standing stone monuments in Scotland being created, like almost en masse, within about a thousand years. But they still found a connection with the dead, either with burial cans or within view of cans or tombs and or very, very often partial cremation remains were placed in the foundation deposits of the standing stone. All they were deposited separately up against the socket. The earliest known great circles in Scotland do have cremated bones in their central hearts. For example, as here at Stennis, that little square in the centre is actually the hearth. And others may have contained burial mounds in the quarters of the stone circles, like they did at Kalanesh. And then later at Kalanesh, in the Bronze Age, they actually built a Neolithic cruciform tomb in the corner, like in the edge of that. And if the early stages of Stonehenge really included megaliths rather than say wooden posts, then the same can be seen here too, at this great southern monument. You can see the large number of cremation burials in red, and that's just the excavated area. So now I'm going to turn really to the findings of the Western Scottish megalithic project, which I've worked with a number of people, including Vincent Mom, who's here with me today. And this is primarily a landscape archaeology approach. And I really wanted to discover, along with my colleagues, why they even existed. So this is the study area of Western Scotland. All those little dots, which are 125 standing stone sites, there are actually over 350, but these are the ones that were included in my initial study. We've added on others within Moell, when I say we, sorry, Vincent and myself. So the very first things that we did, I'm going to go through this quickly, because we need to talk about interpretation. I had a look at really whether or not there was clustering even in alignments. Is this true or not? What did the other people's statistical analysis tell us? So what I discovered was, in fact, that the orientations of megalithic standing stones in Western Scotland were far more geographically spread across this area, and we have very strong support with that. I also looked at the relationships of the surrounding landscape and skyscrapes as astronomical phenomena. Let's take a look at that. Let's just jump to here first. So what we have here, I've got some statistical results. Don't worry about the detail. I'll just point to the good bits. On Moell, the most interesting astronomical phenomena was looking at the rising and setting of the moon at its most northern rising and setting points on the horizon. This only ever happens every 18.6 years, and that was also interested in similar rising and settings in the south, but not as such a strong signature in Argyle, which includes all this area here. They were very keen also on this distant points of the moon, rising and setting points in the north. But some evidence, weak evidence for winter solstice. In this area here, we have an interesting interest and the only interest that we've seen statistically in the mid solstice points. This doesn't mean that there isn't more interest in astronomy in other areas because later when we did further work, we have found that all of the points of the rising and setting of the moon and the sun were of interest. So let's go back and take a look. And there are 14 points on the horizon that are of interest. This is the moon's most northern rising point. This is its most northern setting point, for example. This nice orange line is the sun rising at the summer solstice and goes up, comes around here and sets here to go to the other side, the rising of the winter sun, and then setting. The last one I'll show you is the moon in the south. It's most southern rising and setting points. Again, as I remember, I said that only happens every 18.6 years. So here we have these discoveries of orientations that are really focused on all of these points across the horizon. What we did after that is that we, you can see I've got a great model here. This particular model was actually created by software called Horizon and it uses elevation data from the Ordnance Survey and he uses, it's a 2D but we use 3D rendering techniques to make it feel like it's 3D. And what we discovered when we used this, as you might notice now, is look at the shape of that horizon. It's low and distant in the south and it's high and close in the north. Now I know it's close because I also have other data that supports that. So we found in fact then that half of the sites had this shape horizon. The other horizons, just rushing through just to show you, were the opposite. So here we have the north, see how flat that is. Look at the south. That was the other 50%. Moving along. So this is just to show you these are two separate sites. See how similar they are in shape. We now have statistical evidence to show us that these horizon shapes were not occurring by chance across the Isle of Mull, for example, comparing with random sites. I'm going to move on quite quickly. So the other thing that's very important is to say that they've set them up though. What's really important is that they've set them up here so that the sitchel sun will rise out of these highest peaks or highest mountains and set in the other side of the highest ones. That's really important. And the moon every 18 years will come out of near the top or the slope of the highest point in the northeast and set in the slope of the northwest. And there will be water in the south. So that's the kind of things I was setting up. And that's what we observed. Now what we did then is that we inserted these horizon profiles and panoramic photographs into something called Stellarium. Stellarium is a software that allows you to put in your date and your location 4000 BC, whatever, where you're located and will animate a video of the night sky in real time. You can sit there and watch it for 24 hours if you want to. Or you can speed up that day and look for things. And what we discovered were very specific things that were occurring at every site that we've looked at so far. Let's have a look. So basically what will happen, I've just got stills first. The stills are, the sun has just set at the summer solstice behind the largest hill in the northwest. At around 930 after it is set, the sun glows around that mountain only, nowhere else. And it really highlights that mountain. Then at midnight, the sun glows dead north. This happens at every single site. Also at midnight, you'll find that Ursa Major, but obviously I'm not saying that they looked at it as Ursa Major, like a shepherd's crook, will suddenly become, becomes horizontal and the second star is always over dead north. Capella starts rising out of the most important one in the northeast and Arcturus comes and sets in here. This is the winter solstice. What kinds of horizons were setting up, sorry, what kind of events did you see with horizons that were high in the south? So here in the winter solstice, the sun is almost completely blocked out for the entire day and this was not uncommon. And so this actually is not even the sun. This is the glow of the sun. The sun appears a little bit here and then it disappears, gone completely and then just flashes as it sets. So in the night, on the darkest night, what happens? What we have here, you can see these little bodies, that's that same hill. In fact, for the entire night, you'll find most of the major or really obvious planets will come rolling over this hill and set down here. So first we have, I need my glasses. I'm going to say Jeepter and Venus coming over there. And as they set, another group come up over here. And here they are rolling along that hill and setting. So these are the kinds of things that we're seeing. So now I need to get straight into the interpretation from fall to new. During the predictable phases, both the moon and the earthly bodies almost disappear as they're reduced to white outlines of themselves. These associations are brought together with the erection of standing stones oriented to the moon and the depositions of cremated human bones in their packing material. Such combinations are consistent, meaningful and powerful. Significantly, these are neolithic or stone age, sorry bronze age monuments and the association with human bone is consistent. They are used in a sense to accelerate, I think cremation is actually used to accelerate half of this transformative cycle, that of reduction. It also is considered an initiation rights of sorts where fire must be used to transform the body in order for it to take on those transformative powers of the moon. That is to take on its regenerative powers. So through cremation the body is the new moon and is part of the greater cosmic order of cycles and change. Therefore the process of recreation can begin more quickly. I'm just going to skip through some of the interpretation because it will take too long. Right, so as I've written in another paper, I think in the sense you've got some kind of, you have these standing stones who are now also now witnesses of this cosmic order that they're looking at. And I think that the power of the witness is to connect all that is earthly to the sky and may be seen as a way to hopefully ensure the return to an, well in a sense of earthly order. And I think that was only done by putting the cremated bodies for example in the packing stones of the standing stones. And it's the job of the witnesses, these eternal features infused by the life of earth magic created perhaps at the new or full moon at the time of the solstice really ensures the safety of the, in a sense of the cosmos continuing. And as I have written it is through the construction of stone, water, the land, the cremated dead, small white stones and specific astronomical phenomena that these builders of monuments produced a dramatic bounded visual events in time that are played out using a speculative or a spectacular show based on light and darkness and manipulating these through positioning. They demonstrate the significance of the sun and the moon and the connection to life and death. So large magic was afoot and here we do not see the small containment or unwrapping of local spiritual forces but a need to maintain cosmological order which can only be done through the order of the creation of a witness. Thank you.