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Excavations at Stonehenge May Answer Questions
Smivs writes "The BBC are getting set to fund a dig at
Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. The two-week dig will try to establish, once and for all,
some precise dating for the creation of the monument. An article from the BBC news website explains how the dig will investigate the significance of the smaller bluestones that stand inside the giant sarsen pillars. 'Researchers believe these rocks, brought all the way from Wales, hold the secret to the real purpose of Stonehenge as a place of healing. The researchers leading the project are two of the UK's leading Stonehenge experts — Professor Tim Darvill, of the University of Bournemouth, and Professor Geoff Wainwright, of the Society of Antiquaries. They are convinced that the dominating feature on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire was akin to a "Neolithic Lourdes" — a place where people went on a pilgrimage to get cured. Modern techniques have established that many of these people had clearly traveled huge distances to get to south-west England, suggesting they were seeking supernatural help for their ills.'"
...sacred circle at the monument is dominated by bluestone chippings... Theses were war trophies, brought home and shattered to destroy their magic.Talk about digging at the past Is this first post ...??
It would be cool if the BBC could get Spinal Tap to do the soundtrack for the program!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Things done by loudmouthed drunk British morons:
Crop circles: check
Football hooligans: check
Blue Woads: check
Stonehenge: ???
Occam's razor, people.
I know, it's the evil site, but you'll find every link I could find from the Timewatch team and the BBC. The Timewatch website gets daily podcats from the dig and hourly news bulletins, so this is no minor event.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Drawn on an ancient napkin...
I didn't know you could actually get the 'exact date' it was built. I bet they built it on a thursday. Not monday, because nobody wants to do any serious work after the weekend. I know I don't. Not tuesday because that's Take Your Kid to Work day, so they can only make little Stonehenges. Maybe Woodhenges. Then they spend all wednesday cleaning up after the kids and deciding never to do that again (even though they always have another one). On friday, everyone leaves early so they can't get yelled at all weekend by their bosses and clubbed to death. And nobody works on Saturday and Sunday. Only crazy people. That just leaves thursday because they eventually get guilty about not doing any work and decide to do something.
isn't this a bit simplistic? I imagine that over the thousands of years, it was used for many purposes, built, rebuilt, rearranged, burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swamp. wait where was I?
I lived in Amesbury for a short while (I'd say a stonesthrow away from Stonehenge), Avebury circle is much more interesting, plus it has a pub in the middle with a haunted well. After getting drunk, you can stagger down the road to Silbury hill and fall asleep at the top.
Task Mangler
Sounds like they've already made up their minds.
Of course, this could be bias introduced by the uninformed.
http://outcampaign.org/
Yes, but were there any ancient Ponies discovered?
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
In actuality, the regional chieftan's wife just wanted a new stone table for the kitchen nook. She drew up a picture for a local mason contractor, but she accidentally jotted down the height as 20' instead of 20". The contractor decided to go ahead with the project as drawn, figuring that questioning the plans would achieve little other than reducing his potential compensation for construction costs (which the chieftan would have to cover in any event to save face). The rest is history.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's ~1136 book _History of the Kings of Britain_ says that Merlin brought Stonehenge from Ireland.
I say that the British just copied an Irish model, instead of schlepping all that rock across the Irish Sea.
--
make install -not war
Has anyone ever thought that this could be the interior of one of the burial mounds that they have found around the same area???
Post and lentil {soup} to support a framework for a roof, slab the royalty and cover with dirt. Instant tomb.
worth a try.
Last Credible Article of the Night? I wonder.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
If they do isotope dating, there might possibly be enough material to get to within a few years. In other cases, although they don't know what year Silsbury Hill was made, they do know it was made in August (due to a specific larval stage in insects found in the chalk.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Was climate/seasonal differences accounted for when deciding on August?
I am seriously curious about this.
Interesting info, thanks!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I don't believe so, no. The larvae had wings, and the only month that insect has wings is August, but in all the studying of archaeological texts and English Heritage books, I have not seen any mention of whether climate or seasonal variations could change this. The fact that it doesn't get mentioned suggests either that has been shown not to be a factor - or that you're the first to think of it. My best recommendation is to e-mail English Heritage and find out if they've any record on what studies were done.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
August 8th, 2500 B.C.? No way! That's the day my great, great.....(some very long time later)...great granddad's brother was born?
Are you serious?
You must be new here.
Also, remember this kiddies:
In Soviet Russia, hypothesis tests YOU!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
You mean you've never met a Christian or otherwise religious doctor?
Stonehenge is simply a monument to Pi. Just look at it. They had trouble with the squiggle, however. Squiggles made the stone fall off, and thus only the non-squiggle ones remain.
Table-ized A.I.
Here is a video I found on youtube a while back showing how Stonehenge could be built by only one person.
Youtube Video
A bit early maybe?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Ok lets say they fund the operation, a few weeks later after much digging, money and man-power spent, they find the answer.
Now what? they change the little info plate at the site, someone edits wikipedia and everyone else goes home.
What exactly did the world gain with this?
The Grauniad has an excellent description of the dig and what they expect to find. Knowing they are making such a small dig and that holes are involved likely means they used GPR to sweep the area and find sections of ground that were clearly disturbed in ancient times and were about the right size and depth.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Of course, if you talk to archaeologists, they will tell you that the best evidence about Stonehenge is to be found in the Aubrey Holes. Unfortunately, many of these were destroyed when English Heritage and their 'culture as tourism' friends built the new car park and the underground tunnel. Given the way that the BBC behaves these days, we can expect minimal real research work, with maximal hype. This is a damn shame. Yet more Wiki-Science...
- ...
- And the druids! Long robes, long beards, (early transvestites, didn't get their shaving together).
- They built Stonehenge, one of the biggest henges in the world.
- No one's built a henge like that ever since.
- No one knows what the fuck a henge is.
- Before Stonehenge there was Woodhenge and Strawhenge.
- ...
- Eddie Izzard, Dress to KillIt must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Comment removed based on user account deletion
English heritage is the thing we have that, had it existed at the time, would have prevented every single one of our ancient monuments from being built. They also employ people who, not to put too fine a point on it, lie about buildings and monuments in order to get them included in the scope of English Heritage. These are the plonkers who waited till Michael Eavis (he of Pilton Festival fame) had restored the Pilton Tithe Barn, then Grade A listed it, then tried to have the (local craftsmen built) facade of his house pulled down because it was no longer in keeping with their Grade A listed area. These are the low grade semi morons whose ridiculously over the top attempts to get pork barrel funding for the Stonehenge site redevelopment have prevented the relatively minor fixes to the roads around Stonehenge that would do much to ease the congestion. The worst thing about Stonehenge, in fact, is the nasty wire fence around it which is poorly maintained and does much to spoil the look of the site. The next worst thing is the awful visitor centre, which is only next worst because it is less visible from the road.
I'm afraid that, given the background of English Heritage and the dumbing down of the BBC, this is just a joke claim to try and get some funding for somebody's idiot project. Really we should get them to build a concrete model of Stonehenge - perhaps twice the size because most tourists comment on how small it is - near the Olympic site, then have the whole lot of them and their horrible visitor centre bugger off to London and leave Stonehenge to the locals. It is, after all, a Wiltshire monument, and people from London should stop trying to take over the entire country.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Why dig? I'll tell you what was there. Stonehenge used to be a replica of LHC in a parallel universe... Before they powered it on, that is.
Yea, great how he moved those blocks around on a flat concrete surface. That wouldn't work in a muddy field hi's little stone underneath would just sink into the ground and it wouldn't help bring the rocks over mountains, hill, valleys, rivers, hundreds of miles from the quarry in Wales.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
where's the tag?
It's even worse. Massacring buffaloes, well, I guess some animal rights people would be appalled, but it's really no worse than a modern slaughterhouse. (Though, granted, it does disprove the myth of the enlightened herbivore living in harmony with nature.)
The worse thing is: we have plenty of proof that they massacred each other just as well.
E.g., there are remains of a village in Sand Canyon Pueblo which was, effectively, exterminated by some attackers in the 13'th century. (I.e., centuries before those guys saw a white man at all.) The attackers literally slaughtered everyone where they could catch them, smashed whatever they could smash, and burned the village down. It was never re-occupied.
While that's admittedly a rather extreme example, simple raids to steal each other's food and women were a lot more common. As little as 13% of the tribes could count as "peaceful", in that they only raided their neighbours no more than once a year. So they killed a few, had a few of their own killed, life went on.
Plus, here's an interesting thought for the noble savage proponents: if those tribes were so peaceful and living in harmony, how'd they get a warrior culture in the first place? You don't get a seafaring culture if you're on a mountain top, and you don't get a warrior culture if you're a peaceful confederation of tribes.
Or long before Stonehenge or any contact with the white man, in Nubia there's a 12,000 year old cemetery where half the people had died of violence. It would be another 8 millennia or so until their conquest by Egypt, or 7 until Egypt itself got united by force, so it's hard to blame it on learning violence from the Egyptians.
Just about the only "bright" side is that there's little evidence of neolithic slavery. They just killed male prisoners. If you were lucky, they'd kill you quickly and eat you. If not, they'd slowly torture you to death. (The Iroquois, for example, among many others, were pretty good at it.)
Women were usually bounty of war, though, so I guess by modern standards it would count as sexual slavery. That practice continued all through the bronze age and early iron age (i..e., as late as ancient Greece and early Rome), by which time though it was properly filed as slavery. (Though still considered perfectly normal and civilized warfare.) Of course, the places which had remained tribal and largely stone age, continued it well after the fall of Rome.
The history of Europe and Middle East is funny too in that aspect, in that we have the iron age catastrophe. We still don't know exactly what happened there, but whole cities were razed (and some never recovered or were abandoned and never rebuilt), whole populations displaced or enslaved, and generally it's destruction on an unprecedented scale. Europe rushed into the iron age arguably prematurely (bronze was still tougher than early iron) because, whatever happened there, thoroughly disrupted the tin trade, and created a bronze shortage.
And for a parting thought, here's a funny one: population losses in modern warfare are measured in single digit percent. The USA lost some 0.32% of its population in WW2, the UK 0.94%, Germany lost a whopping 10.47%, and the big hit was the USSR with a whole 13.71%. (And in the USSR, probably half of them were due to Stalin's catastrophic leadership, so they could have been avoided.) The average for all countries involved is 3.70%.
Well that's peanuts compared to tribal warfare. By tribal warfare standards, anywhere between 25% and 60% of the population would be killed in the nearly continuous raids and fighting. Roll that around in your head. You'd be anywhere between 2 and 5 times more likely to die in a war as a member of some "noble savage" tribe, than in the USSR during WW2.
Heck, even Leningrad in 3 years of siege, famine and bombing, lost about a third of its population. And we see that as a major tragedy. (And rightfully so.) Now think this: in many tribes you'd be more likely to be killed in tribal war, than if you happened to be in Leningrad in WW2. Now that's a scary thought.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Woodhenge is about an half-hour to hour walk (past the barrows) roughly to the NE from Stonehenge. There is no wood left (obviously), but brown-painted concrete posts have been placed to replicate the original locations. more...
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Have you tried biology texts?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm being serious. I can't tell. Was this supposed to be dated April 1st?
sigfault (core dumped)
Honestly, you CAN cram that much theory into a fact smaller than a Pooh Meson. You're just not trying, dude!
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Just from reading the article, it seems that the people who are doing the study have a preconceived notion of what they want to find or will find. And in just two weeks. Is this a science-like fluff piece by the BBC or is this supposed to be a true scientific dig that will be documented by the BBC?
blah
Of course there was no wood left. Woodhenge suffered the same fate as Strawhenge. Big bad wolf blew them down and three little piggies were relocated into the projects.
(How this story lasted this long without an Eddie Izzard reference is beyond me)
Last I've seen some numbers, it was closer to 50-50 between civillians and soldiers. That's including the 5 to 8 million USSR civillians killed in the Holocaust. Well, ok, maybe closer to 60-40, but still, the military deaths do come relatively close AFAIK. Still, I see your point.
But more importantly, you illustrate an aspect that I failed to: that it took some senseless mass murders of epic proportion to come even to 13.71% number. If that senseless extermination policy on one side and Stalin's own terror on the other, didn't exist, the casualties of modern war would look even more tame compared to tribal warfare. Without all that senseless genocide, i.e., what it would have been if it were just the war alone, the toll of that war would probably have been more like 6% for the USSR. By contrast, your average chance to die by arrow, spear or tomahawk in tribal warfare instead of old age in your tent, could be as high as 60%. That's ten times higher. Mind boggles.
But again, even including a mass-murder of such proportions that it scared the world, we still arrive at merely a 1/5 of your chance to die in a tribal conflict, for some tribes.
That's the point I was trying to make. That compared to the stone-age tribesmen, even the most brutal modern war we've had, is actually less of a massacre. Even the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, or the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, don't come even close to the percentage of people killed with stone axes and stone-tipped arrows in tribal conflicts. I find that a scary thought.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You have to understand that astronomy is central to agriculture. If you get your calendar wrong, you have problems growing things. Hence most ancient agrarian people tended to put a lot of emphasis on astronomy. In Egypt, the year was measured from the rising of Sirius at dusk because this was a good predictive measure of when the Nile would flood.
The next bit has to do with the sorts of gods one would believe in. Well, if you are agriculturally centric, you have weather, land, the sun, and possibly the stars. Hence one tends to have gods of rain and storm, fertility gods an goddesses, divinification of the sun, and the whole thing tied into the stars.
My guess is that Stonehenge was an astronomical monument which was also a place of worship relating to the celestial forces relating to agriculture (weather, sun, stars) and possibly a place of worship as relates to the whole agrarian concept of natural order in totality (hence including the fertility/land gods and goddesses.
Could this relate to an early idea of healing? I suppose. Is that its central focus? I doubt it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"Modern techniques have established that many of these people had clearly traveled huge distances to get to south-west England, suggesting they were seeking supernatural help for their ills.'"
Why is this clear? People travel to Stonehenge from all over even today, they can't all be expecting to be healed by the visit.
-Darkshadow (There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.)
I went to Stonehenge. The tour guide was a crackpot. He tried to tell us about the magical powers of dowsing he had. I think the mystical energy of the henge fried his brain.
Many of yesterday's finds are believed to have been the remains left from a 1920s excavation, making establishing context hard. They have also found one piece of possibly shaped blue granite and evidence of flint knapping. Flint knapping may go along with the idea of a medical centre, as shaped flint (as others have pointed out in this discussion) is comparable to surgical steel and easy to sterilize. I'm not seeing any mention of quern stones, which is interesting. (Quern stones are heat-crazed, superheated pebbles that were dropped in water or food to heat it. Very common around settlements and camps.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I know what year Solsbury Hill was made, er, recorded: 1976. But it wasn't released until 1977. Oh, Silsbury Hill. Never mind.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Due to the adjustments in the Gregorian calendar, I think you'll find you're 14 days off.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you've tried your hand at flint knapping, you probably know something of human ingenuity. I crushed up around ten kilos of obsidian before I gave up trying to make a tool. I bled a bit on that job, and probably owe a lot to the polycarbonate goggles I wore. I started a fire once using friction, I hope I never do that again. It took me a week of hard work. I used store bought tools and twine to make my bow. Tool Steel depends on the natural ability of some alloys to hold a finer edge. The sharpness is part of the steel's property, and the true credit belongs to the work of generations of humans who have observed and utilised the properties of metallurgy and mechanics to devise these tools.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.