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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.'"
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
You were modded funny but you bring up a really good point about the myth of the noble savage. There are mass kill sites all over North America where various American Indian tribes stampeded thousands of buffalo over cliffs in order to get a few hundred pounds of meat. I doubt very much that there was much in the way of ancient, mystic, natural magic going on. The average life span of a Neolithic man was somewhere in the range of 29 years.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Surgeons have experimented with flint scalpels made by modern flint knappers and found them as sharp as surgical steel, easy to sterilize and better at holding their edge. I don't have a cite, but I remember from many years ago reading about a flint knapper who ended up having tools he made used for his own cardiac surgery. Yes, it's quite possible for neolithic medicine men to have better surgical tools than anything less than the best modern steel, even if their understanding of the human body left something to be desired.
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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.
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