The "Lydenburg Stones" by Rob Milne is available from the Architect Africa Film Unit. Order through Paypal button.

The African continent holds and hides vast cultural treasures dating back to antiquity.  For a number of political, social and practical reasons these treasures remain largely hidden from the public eye.

South Africa, in particular, is host to a number of valuable sites graced with an uncertain future in the face of socio-economic development, relic hunting and vandalism.

The Boomplaas Complex is one such site.

Stretching for kilometers along the Highveld escarpment not far from the town of Lydenburg (Mashishing), Boomplaas has an incredibly rich and fascinating history in modern times but the petroglyphs and stonework from antiquity are by far the most significant aspect of this landscape.

Rob Milne is a South African explorer, historian and author well known for his definitive works on the Anglo-Boer Wars. It was during the course of  battlefield research that Rob Milne began to find rocks and stones of particular cultural and historic significance. In addition to the unusual finds relating to size, shape and engravings, Rob discovered that these rocks and stones would frequently be aligned in a very calculated and ordered way.

Somewhere along the forty odd years of walking the open African veld and sleeping under wide open skies Rob discovered that many of the stone alignments which he had recorded corresponded to particular star alignments visible from the southern hemisphere.

The Constellation of Orion was a particularly popular choice with the ancients and Rob has encountered, mapped, recorded and measured several such alignments in South Africa – Boomplaas being one such case.

Alignments such as these are not unique in the world, of course, and have been the focus of interest for some time. There are many well recorded alignments in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The reasons for these alignments are generally believed to be practical, ceremonial and architectural.

The most practical application of alignments is the calendar. By simply looking around him, ancient man could establish not only the time of day but also the season and related impending events like rains, veld fires and animal migrations.

Ceremonial usage of alignments to reach ‘Tribe’, “Spirit” and the “Beyond” are common throughout the world and closely associated to ritual. The rituals of conception (marriage), birth and death being the most common.

Architectural deployment of alignment is possibly the oldest form of human organization known to Man. In Africa today, architectural alignment is practiced both in the traditional villages and the modern cities alike.
There are compelling reasons for applying star alignments – or “star maps” – to all three forms of man made alignments be they practical, ceremonial or purely architectural. These are likely to remain speculative forever, however. Some of these formations are millions of years old and possibly of a different scale to today’s human dimensional reality.

One should not forget, of course, the theorists who believe that both alignments and inscriptions hold particular significance in recording the history of Mankind – and its origins – which may conceivably have its roots outside our Solar System or even beyond Orion.

The true value of Rob Milne’s field work is not derived from the answers it provides but rather from the questions it poses and the body of evidence which it contributes towards the origins of Mankind debate.

ORION DISCOVERY METHODOLOGY

Whereas Orion alignments are not new to the world, the practical application of this notion in field exploration may well be. By reversing the alignment concept Rob Milne has turned an exploration finding into a tool of discovery.

Find the “Three Sisters” and the stars reveal the rest…