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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.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.........
So what you're saying is that Stonehenge is the British equivalent of the US space program?
How we know is more important than what we know.
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/
You mean you've never met a Christian or otherwise religious doctor?
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)
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."
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.
The Irish are not British. Talk that way gets you blown up and your family kneecapped.
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make install -not war
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.