Roda do Sol: The Stones That Read the Sky

Ellen E. Sutherland by the Beltane stone at Mystery Hill, New Hampshire.

There is a circle of stone on a hilltop in the Brazilian Amazon, and on the morning of the solstice, one of its stones stops casting a shadow.

I've been writing a song about it.

Near the town of Calçoene, in the state of Amapá in northern Brazil, a ring of 127 granite blocks stands on a rise above the Rego Grande river. Some of them reach four metres high. They have stood there for around a thousand years — raised, the carbon-dated pottery tells us, by Indigenous Amazonian people whose descendants still live in the region. The Palikur, an Indigenous nation of Amapá and French Guiana, say their ancestors knew this place. Today it is protected as the Parque Arqueológico do Solstício — the Solstice Archaeological Park — though most people know it by its nickname: the Amazon Stonehenge.

It earns the name. Calçoene sits north of the equator, so its solstice falls in December, and archaeologists who have stood among the stones on the 21st have watched one slender, deliberately angled block lose its shadow entirely when the sun climbs directly overhead at noon. These were astronomers. They read the turning of the year in granite. And they were not only watching the sky — buried within the circle, but archaeologists also found funerary urns and painted vessels, the dead laid to rest with their offerings in the same ring that marked the sun. A calendar and a resting place, all at once.

For a long time, the world told itself that the peoples of the Amazon built nothing that lasted. This circle is one of the quiet, stubborn proofs that the world was wrong.

That is what the archaeologists can tell you. Here is what Jamie would.

In the early days — before she learned the harder, lonelier ways of moving through Time — Jamie Poole travelled by the henges. The ones she most frequented were in New Hampshire (a real place) and on the Isle of Osiris (a fictional place). You had to know your stone, and you had to know your day. The Beltane stone in the green of the year, or the Samhain stone when the dark came down; never just any stone, never just any morning. But stand in the right place on the right day, and wait — and when the sun struck Lumen, the whole earth would shift a half-step under your feet, and the veil would open like a held breath let go. One step, and you were elsewhere. Elsewhen.

Time travel required the proper coordinates, finding the right stone, and standing in the right place at the right moment when the veil thinned. Jamie learned the science.

A circle built to catch the solstice sun is exactly the kind of place Jamie means. I can't help picturing her there, on that Amazon hilltop, at noon on the longest climb of the sun — watching the one stone lose its shadow and feeling the ground go soft beneath her feet.

So "Roda do Sol" — "Circle of the Sun" — is two things at once, the way these songs always seem to be. It is a true thing: a celebration of the people who raised those stones and read that sky, and of their descendants, who are proud of exactly who they are and where they come from. And it is a Jamie thing: the moment the shadow vanishes is the moment the door opens.

I built it as a fusion — Afro-Brazilian samba percussion and the cosmic low end of dubstep — because the song lives in the seam between ancient earth and open sky, and because roda is the word for a samba circle as much as a stone one. When the drop comes in the song, it is the solstice: the sun overhead, the shadow gone, the veil let go.

Para os povos indígenas do Amapá, que ergueram as pedras e leram o céu — a roda ainda gira.

For the Indigenous peoples of Amapá, who raised the stones and read the sky — the circle still turns.