Arkaim Settlement

The Arkaim settlement at the junction of Karaganka and Utyaganka Rivers looks like this

The ground of the first terrace above the river bed, which forms a well defined promontory at the river confluence, shows traces of the presence of ancient man. Each spotted structure that you can see very clearly from here, shows anthropogenic soil changes. Systematic lines of small cavities filled by humus are evidences of ancient constructions dating back to somewhere between eighteenth and sixteenth century BC. As you can see there are two concentric circles. These were the foundations of two massive walls. The diameter of the outer wall is one hundred and sixty metre. The walls were made of earth packed into timber frames and reinforced with unburnt clay bricks. The thickness of the walls is between four to five metre and the height five and a half metre. The entire structure is surrounded by a two metre deep moat. Older aerial pictures of this site, taken sometime in the fifties, showed marks of an outermost third wall, but those marks are no longer visible. The radial lines, like spokes of a wheel, correspond to the side walls of houses built against the two circular walls. The layout looks very much like a spoked wheel. Interestingly the spoked wheel was also invented, most likely, in the Southern Urals, in this region, around the same time when these settlements were being constructed. The outer circle has thirty nine to forty dwellings and the inner circle has exactly twenty seven dwellings. Each dwelling is between hundred and ten to hundred and eighty square metre in area. Between the two rows of houses there was a boulevard with concealed drainage. The houses in the outer circle opened into this boulevard. The houses in the inner circle opened in a central courtyard twenty five by twenty seven metre in size. Around fifteen hundred to two thousand people stayed in this settlement covering a total area of twenty thousand square metres. There are signs of irrigation with system of canals and ditches in the north western side of the settlement. Remains of barley and millet seeds have been found.

In Arkaim the ecliptic comes very close to the horizon around autumn and spring equinoxes. During these times it's very easy to map the twenty seven nakshatras, lunar mansions, to the twenty seven houses of the inner circle. Following are the sky maps as seen in Arkaim close to full moons around Spring and Autumn Equinoxes in 2000 BC. It should be remembered that the location of sun on a vernal equinox is same as that of the full moon around autumnal equinox and vice versa.

[The red line is the ecliptic]

Based on these observations the twenty seven lunar mansions can be interpolated and mapped to the twenty seven houses as follows:

On 7th October, 1995, the sky map of Arkaim was like this:

One end of the ecliptic is Pleiades and the other end is the Jupiter, the bright object exactly on the horizon in the south west direction. In between is the moon, roughly in the south east direction and very close to the moon, exactly in the south east direction, is the Saturn.