Here in Suffolk, in a landscape without large hills and mountains, rivers became of 'prime importance' - a hidden meander within the swirling stream could be venerated for a long time (Pryor, 2001) in ways particular to this specific locality. This world view embraced the notion of a relationship with the universe, believed to be a single self-regulating organism and one that required continuous communication and mindfulness of its rhythms and moods in order for it to be sustained, an intimate relationship founded on advanced astronomy. In Suffolk we developed the practise of using moats to replicate the role that megaliths would have taken elsewhere in the country, marking alignments ascribed to specific celestial bodies against the horizon (Wymer, 1984). Sacred mounds and stone markers in this context can be seen as instruments 'where the planetary body interacts with the endless round of celestial events, creating a harmonic fusion between them'. This form of geomancy describes an association with the Earth based on the principles of harmonious living, respecting, even venerating the land as an holy thing in itself (Pennick, 1974). The world in feng shui is perceived as a continuum, where all acts of natural and unconscious origins are seen to be inextricably linked with the web of life. Modern day science has now verified that form and pattern do indeed imbue every facet of being - microscopic algae, the shape of snowflakes, patterns in tidal sands and the surface of turbulent liquids. An intrinsic constant symbolised through form, identifiable through geometry in the Fibonacci series which appears in the foundation of aspects of art, beauty and life.
At least one thousand years before the earliest mathematicians of classical Greece SAM (stone age man) had a competent working knowledge of geometry and was capable of setting out elaborate stone circles in a variety of ellipse shapes based on at least three of the different Pythagorean triangles all with a proficiency only rivalled today by a trained surveyor. Artefacts dating as far back as 35,000 years ago were designed to record the lunar phases of the moon, which places the origins of civilisation obviously even earlier (Marshack, 1972). The reality is though that the more we understand about our ancestors through their temples and artefacts this and the dating for mankind’s capacity and ability to be able to relate to our world on a more complex and sophisticated symbolic level of understanding is increasingly being questioned and pushed further back in time.
>Recently, the BBC, the voice of mainstream global media is reporting that a 400,000 year-old stone object unearthed in Morocco could be the world's oldest attempt at sculpture, and in so doing is attempting to re-write history as artefacts and ‘ooparts’ (out of place artefacts) challenge the existing paradigm governing our evolutionary past. Our ancestor's calendar was known to be a ‘highly developed arrangement involving an exact knowledge of the length of the year' (Thom, 1967) involving observation stations to view the 18 year cycle of the revolution of the lunar nodes. These nodes move slowly backwards through the zodiac every 18.6 years, called a metonic cycle, which the ancients used to count as very significant and it is built into the architectural mathematics of many ancient sites in Britain and worldwide (Jenkins, 1987). This level of understanding contrasts strongly with the version of history that I was taught at school. Baigent (1998) is quick to remind us however that history ‘is rather like statistics: anything can be proved; any fraudulent story of the past can be maintained so long as all unwelcome data is excluded' for there has been found to exist within the scientific community the process of what has been described as 'knowledge filtration' (Cremo & Thompson, 1999) and ‘at the heart of this argument is the incorrect notion that theory overrides evidence’ (Boerner, 2003).
