I link to this every year. Click the link below to read a lovely piece by Kieran Healy, from which the quoted passage is drawn. It’s about Newgrange, an Irish megalithic tomb, but also about so much more.
A society—a civilization, if you like—is a hard thing to hold together. If you live in an agrarian society, and you have only stone, wood, and bone for tools, and you are on the western edge of Europe, few times are harder than the dead of Winter. The days are at their shortest, the sun is far away, and the Malthusian edge is right in front of you. It’s no wonder so many religious festivals take place around the solstice. Here were a people, more than five millennia ago, able not only to pull through the Winter successfully, but able also to build something like a huge timepiece to remind themselves that they were going to make it.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. See you in 2025.