Historical science based on OSM: Recovery of ancient solstice routes

Terrarius · 2010-08-08T08:03:32.000Z

Hi everybody, I’m new here and I have a newbie question:
What’s the best way to implement a sort of overlay for OSM, to visualize my already collected geographical data, allowing everybody to add his own findings?

In other words: Let me propose a joint project to recover some interesting roots of European civilization!

Open Street Map provides the scaling functions required to visualize and understand the pre-historical structures covering the European continent, along with the multitude of small landmarks accessible only by in-situ recognition. This allows to reconstruct the ‘largest geometrical structure ever conceived’ from local bits that have survived several millennia to our times!
A few years ago, I have collected such bits in-situ from southern Germany, northern Italy, Burgundy and Frisia.
For a start-up, I may place into an overlay of OSM the several hundred significant objects, I collected so far…

Some background info:

Pre-historical navigation (i.e. without technical means) must have been based on landmarks and reproducible directions.
Europe’s prominent mountains (Mont Blanc, Snowdon, Mount Olympus, Monte Leone, Schneeberg Alsace, Schneeberg Fichtelgebirge, etc.) are such obvious landmarks.
The directions of summer and winter sunrise were well known to every peasant (in central Europe these directions point about +39° and -33° off the East).
Geographical data communication using solstice directions is quite simple (e.g. ‘follow the summer sunrise from Mont Blanc for x days…’)
A multitude of minor lines can be found throughout Europe that complement the ‘master lines’ into a web of geographical data.

The transcontinental lines based on this scheme are strictly defined by the physical and statistical evidence, provided by the objects on them.
(nb: I have a professional background in physics - and I strongly dislike speculations).

A first evidence for this hypothesis: Numerous places of world culture heritage will be found along these lines (e.g. on the ‘Mont Blanc winter sunrise’ line: Vezelay, Chartres, Cashel Abbey… - and Florence, Gargano, Delphi, Eleusis, Athens, Delos…).

Zooming in, a wealth of sanctuaries, cemetaries, fortifications and villages can be located, together with accurately aligned murals and streets.
Solstice lines once may have aggregated cultural activities:

Starting with necessarily sacrosanct geo-line markers, ‘holy places’ and eventually temples and cathedrals emerged.
Casualties of strangers (‘ger-men’ - e.g. St. Germain) gave rise to burial places and veneration of holy graves.
Tribal chiefs controlling the traffic along the lines had better informations, income and hence, more power.

Remarkable were the capabilities, that were needed to span the lines across the open sea and over the alps. The remains of ‘Frozen Fritz’, who was found at an altitude of some 3300m below the Similaun glacier (on the winter-solstice line from the alsacian Schneeberg), give evidence for these.

The name particle ‘ger’ indicating linearity (e.g. Gerade =straight line, Ger =Spear, Gerte, Gracht, Granne) can be found frequently along the lines.
A statistical analysis of the coordinate relations of all villages within Bavaria whose names include ‘ger’ or ‘gar’, shows significant peaks in the summer and winter sunrise directions. Other typical names here denote holyness, ‘sonn’ =sun, ‘rot’ =route, ‘hoch’=high…

‘Lunistice’ directions deviate by some ±5° from the solstice directions. The ‘great lunistice line’ from Mont Blanc joins Paris (St. Ger-main des Prés), Geneva, Genova (5 collinear churches!), Veji, Rome (Monte Sacro, legendary ‘Egeria’), Pompei, Paestum, Rossano, and Palaeochora (=Ancient Sanctuary) on Crete,…

Of course, placement, direction and name of edifices has always been affected by various considerations. Attribution to a solstice line, therefore, requires a probabilistic evaluation of several objects, directed e.g. towards summer sunrise (within a corridor of typically a few ten meters)…

Writing down these lines, I am sitting near the eastern shore of the Lago Maggiore in northern Italy, just some 50 meters away from an important summer solstice line. How can I know? This line emerges from the tiny island of Orta S. Guiglio (once a most important pagan sanctuary - on the winter solstice line from Mount Olympus via Loreto, Bologna, Cremona, Milan, Golaseca…!). Nearly a dozen collinear churches plus ancient cemetaries mark this line throughout the landscape of the Luinese. At the basilica S. Vittore, ancient murals align with the intersecting sunrise directions from Orta and those from Paris (Sainte Chapelle) via the celtic capital Vix towards Ravenna.
Above the western shore of the Lago Maggiore, I can actually see SS. Trinita, an acknowledged object of UNESCO world heritage, with a still existing alley marking the lunistice line from Orta. This line touches two rocks called Malgera (Line Mark) and Malpaga (Pagan Mark) within the lake. It may be followed down to Apulia to a city called Orta Nova…

These relations are real! Let us find more and reveal the basics of our civilization!

Kind regards
Hans-Erdmann (<>Terrarius) Korth

_i · 2010-08-08T09:04:51.000Z

wellcome to OSM Terrarius

Well the visualisation is quite ‘easy’ by using an POI overlay or an own rendered full map overlay
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenLayers_Marker_Example
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering

But well the user contribution is quite difficult. OSM actually is unable express the time in our modell
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_life_cycle_concepts
You might use other technologies like a Mediawiki based approach or a own OSM DB server to which the users contribute.
Someone else did something similar by inventing own technologie: http://www.kleks-online.de

Terrarius · 2010-08-09T07:38:04.000Z

!i!:

wellcome to OSM Terrarius

Thanks for the immediate reply and the links!

There may be a fundamental difference between the typical desire to extend the OSM data base (e.g. to hot dog suppliers) and the idea to use the existing map objects to obtain novel and not so obvious information. To visualize ancient route systems, the original street map objects just need a sort of an additional attribute that marks them as ‘typical’ with respect to name, direction, sun-/moon- related collinearity and cultural relevance (a similar task would be to mark map objects as ‘wheel-chair accessible’).

Regards

_i · 2010-08-13T09:56:51.000Z

I found today: http://www.histosm.org

The problem might be if to much objects get mixed e.g. in a editor and the mappers get confused/annoyed to see things they aren’t interested in.