Hi Debbie,
Thank you for your very interesting post, my interest is the cultural beliefs and how ancient people used the stars, and if they align to Equinox's and Solstices, Sadly with the stars just marked on a rock, i can't judge that, i wonder if the rock had been moved from where it was found?
I look for how it was dated also with a mirror image on the ground, like a stone monument, however it is interesting as the Belt of Orion seems to align as told in your link.
Sirius and the Belt of Orion often come up in beliefs, aligned to the stars and dates aligned to the Winter Solstice.
However the Orion Correlation Theory is too controversial, and needs a lot more research:-
en.wikipedia.org
A example of how the Winter Solstice has changed date is below:-
Julius Caesar used 25 March as the Vernal Equinox, quote below:-
Date
"When
Julius Caesar established the
Julian calendar in 45 BC, he set 25 March as the date of the spring equinox;
[15] this was already the starting day of the year in the Persian and Indian calendars. Because the Julian year is longer than the
tropical year by about 11.3 minutes on average (or 1 day in 128 years), the calendar "drifted" with respect to the two equinoxes – so that in
300 AD the spring equinox occurred on about 21 March, and by the 1580s AD it had drifted backwards to 11 March.
[16]
This drift induced
Pope Gregory XIII to establish the modern
Gregorian calendar. The Pope wanted to continue to conform with the edicts of the
Council of Nicaea in 325 AD concerning the
date of Easter, which means he wanted to move the vernal equinox to the date on which it fell at that time (21 March is the day allocated to it in the Easter table of the Julian calendar), and to maintain it at around that date in the future, which he achieved by reducing the number of leap years from 100 to 97 every 400 years. However, there remained a small residual variation in the date and time of the vernal equinox of about ±27 hours from its mean position, virtually all because the distribution of 24 hour centurial leap-days causes large jumps (see
Gregorian calendar leap solstice)."
en.wikipedia.org
We would still have 25 March as the Vernal Equinox if the Gregorian Calendar had corrected all the way back to the start of the calendar in 0045BC, however they only took error days out up to the Council of Nicaea, which also means the original date of the Winter Solstice would have been 25th December, an interesting date to think about!