I came to the University of Alberta in September 1958, at age 28, to set up research in Radiation Chemistry and to teach courses in General and Physical Chemistry. Interactions with undergraduate and graduate students were a great pleasure. Undergraduates frequently came to my office to chat, and my graduate students did inspirational work.
The success of new approaches we took in the study of Radiation Chemistry and Physics resulted in invitations around the world. Learning something of other cultures and languages became a fascination. Over the years I played with three dozen languages and two dozen writing systems, and enjoyed many modes of music. In some cultures dance is an integral part of music, not separate from it as in European culture.
So experiences during teaching and research in the Physical Sciences were a good foundation for my later research in the Social Sciences. Original works in Sociology, Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy began during the early 1980s, and grew to occupy a quarter of my working time in the approach to retirement in September 1995. Now, in 2000, Archaeoastronomy and related areas occupy most of my working time.
Interest in Archaeology was seeded early. During the years 1935 to 1939, the wind in Saskatchewan blew dry topsoil off cultivated fields. Stones were left exposed. Among the stones were occasional arrowheads, scrapers and knives made of stone. On summer Sundays my father, Winston, took the family, my mother Aquila, older brother John, younger brother Bob and myself, for drives in the 1932 Chevrolet sedan. When he saw a "blowout", where all the soil had blown away and only stones were left on the clay hardpan, he'd drive off the road and stop. We'd all get out and look for artifacts among the stones. Dad gave us a nickel for each arrowhead we found. At that time a jawbreaker or licorice pipe cost a copper.
Sister Sylvia arrived in 1940.
In 1969 I inherited a quarter of Dad's collection of arrowheads, and a few scrapers, knives and pottery shards. The best of the arrowheads were mounted in a frame, which I hung on a wall.
In the mid 1970s I began wondering what was known about the arrowheads. Archaeologists and Geologists at the University of Alberta, and the Archaeological Survey of Alberta were helpful. After a few years, Al Bryan of our Department of Anthropology and Archaeology asked whether I'd met Jim MacGregor.
Jim was a retired Electrical Engineer. During the late 1950s and early 1960s he and his wife Frances had collected artifacts from fields along the North Saskatchewan River in Alberta. They had also followed early explorers' paths across the prairies, and published a dozen books of Western History. During the summer of 1980 Jim gave us detailed instructions how to find fifteen sites of Ribstones, Medicine Wheels, and a cobble stone outline of a 12-m high man with outstretched arms and an enormous penis. During late August Phyl and I drove 4300 km to visit all the sites. What we had been told about each site seemed satisfying, except for the Majorville Cairn.
Jim had said that the Majorville Cairn was a large pile of stones surrounded by a ring of stones, on a hilltop. But we also found four clusters of stones 50 to 90 metres away from the large cairn on the summit. The directions of the four clusters from the summit cairn were approximately at right angles. All my Majorville photographs from 1980 were from the outlying clusters to the hilltop cairn.
Now, after nearly 20 years of study, about 11,000 photographs, and four books of notes, we know that the Majorville Cairn is a Sun effigy. It is the centerpiece of an enormous Temple of the Sun, Moon and Morningstar. Alignments of stones, ranging in length from 50 m to 4000 m, mark the positions of Sun Rise and Set at the Summer and Winter Solstices, and at the Equalnights. The accuracy of the Solstice lines is better than 0.2°, and of the lines marking the Equalnights is better than 0.3°. A large report is under preparation.
Stonehenge is another Sun Temple. The archaeoastronomy of Stonehenge is controversial, because nobody has previously made accurate measurements of Sun Rises and Sets there. Writers have assumed that Priests at Stonehenge observed Solstitial Sun Rises or Sets, if anyone made such observations at all, while inside the Sarsen Circle, looking outwards through a gap between the upright Sarsens. Errors of Solstitial Sun Rise and Set directions up to 2.5° were assumed.
We wondered whether the people who constructed Stonehenge were as capable to achieve 0.2° accuracy as were the constructors of the Sun Temple near Majorville. They were. Sunwatchers, perhaps Scientists rather than the Priests who worked inside the Sarsen Circle, stood far outside the Circle and looked across it, through narrow gaps, to the distant horizon.
One of our Stonehenge papers is presented in this site.