Astronomer Who Wrote On Stonehenge Dies

Gerald Stanley Hawkins, a British-born astronomer who taught at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories and first theorized that Stonehenge was created by Neolithic people to track solar and lunar movements, died May 26 at his farm in Virginia. He was 75.

The news of his death was not widely reported at the time because of his wish not to have a memorial service, according to The New York Times.

Hawkins’ Stonehenge Decoded, his most successful book, compared Stonehenge to an astronomical computer and earned him the title of “Father of Astroarchaeology.”

His book discarded two historical theories of Stonehenge—the first calling it a creation of the wizard Merlin, and the second claiming it was originally a Druidic temple. Instead, he surmised that the Stone Age man would have been grateful “if [he] could be sure of marking one special day every year… He might well take great pains to mark it.”

The theory was published in the prestigious British scientific journal Nature in 1963, supported by mathematical arguments.

He wrote that his work was made possible by the IBM 7090 electronic computer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories, which helped to determine “significant horizon positions for rising and setting of Sun, Moon, stars and planets.”

Research Professor of Astronomy and History of Science Owen Gingerich said he remembered Hawkins from his work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories, where Hawkins was the scientist in charge of the Harvard Radio Meteor Project. Hawkins was “looking for radar echoes off the meteors,” to ascertain their height and velocity and thus be able to find meteor showers in the daytime.

Gingerich said Hawkins had a “classy English-ness about him” and called him “a person with quite wide-ranging interests.”

Hawkins’ studies also included analysis of the Nazca lines in Peru and the Amun Temple of Karnak in Egypt. In 1992, Hawkins gave an interview to Monte Leach of Share International in which he spoke of his research on crop circles and his discoveries that they contained ratios that related to musical major scales and contained undiscovered theorems of Euclidian geometry.

Hawkins, who was born in Great Yarmouth, England, came to the United States in 1954. He received a doctorate from the University of Manchester in astronomical research in 1963 as a result of his work on the Harvard Radio Meteor Project.

Hawkins continued to work part-time at Harvard, according to Gingerich, while he was an astronomy professor and chairman of the department at Boston University. In 1969, Hawkins became dean of Dickinson College, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, until his formal retirement in 1989,

Hawkins is survived by his wife, Julia M. Dobson, whom he married in 1979; two daughters, Lisette La Fortune of San Antonio and Carina White of Southborough, Mass.; and a grandson. His first marriage, to Dorothy Willacy-Barnes, ended in divorce.

Hawkins’ latest book, Stonehenge, Earth and Sky, is now being published in Britain.

—MEGAN C. HARNEY