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Stonehenge As a Royal Family's Burial Site
mikesd81 sends in a report from Newsday about radiocarbon dating of cremated bones excavated from Britain's Stonehenge that, an archeologist said, has solved part of the ancient mystery surrounding the 5,000-year-old site: It was a burial ground for what may have been the country's first royal dynasty. No word on how this work relates to the "Neolithic Lourdes" theory we discussed earlier. "The new dates indicate burials began at least 500 years before the first massive stones were erected at the site and continued after it was completed... The pattern and relatively small number of the graves suggest all were members of a single family. The findings provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least a portion of southern England during this early period. They exerted enough power to mobilize manpower necessary to move the massive stones from as far as 150 miles away and [maintained] that power for at least five centuries, said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, leader of current excavations at the site... His findings will also appear in the June issue of National Geographic and in the television special "Stonehenge Decoded," to be shown Sunday."
south yorkshire
Spinal Tap's stage background!
They were aliens, right? Or time travelers? Or... mutants? COME ON! Give me something here...
I know a better theory. It was built by early transvestites. Watch the excellent commentary of the well known historian Eddie Izzard.
Note to the humorless ninja mods who are already brandishing their mod points at this post threatening to mod it troll or so, the proper mod for this post is funny. Of course that would just waste your mod points since it doesn't affect my karma so if this part of the post applies to you (that is if you are a humorless ninja mod) then don't click on the link (hey! it's slashdot) and mod this post insightful or informative or underrated (see it says "historian" in the link?).
Its always baffled me why Stonehenge gets all the attention, when there's a much more impressive stone circle and causeway monument four times the size only 20 miles away at Avebury - and its hardly been investigated!
I was amused (disappointed?) to see that Stonehenge had to be described as "Britain's Stonehenge". Does Johnny Foreigner have another one we don't know about?
That's what they want you to think. But then when it starts taking down satellites with an ion beam then we'll see what it was built for. Aliens I tell you!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Anything to discount the alien theory
Coal dusters. Avebury coal duster, Cursus coal duster, Durrington Walls coal duster, Long Barrow coal duster, Robin Hood's Ball coal duster, Stonehenge coal duster, Woodhenge coal duster, etc, all being originally simple coal hunting failures. Every one of them were coal exploration sites that did not yield any coal. Take away all of the dressed up cemetery headstone rocks and what have you got? Nothing more than a bunch of coal exploratory ditches and holes, that is what. Afterwards, these ditches and holes were utilised as grave plots, for tired disappointed coal explorers, and their cold disheartened families. Sad but true.
Not much... but it's jaw-dropping nonetheless. You can bet I'll be memecasting it here. -Corky
News for nerds.....all types of nerds are included.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Stonehenge is a binary representation. A pillar represent 1 and two pillars with a horizontal stone connecting them is 0. Going around, it reads 10001010 10011110
"first" - nope - there were thousands of years of these patchy clans and communities going back far before 5,000 BP - the Stonehenge neolithic communities and any political, cultural or religious "leaders" there weren't the "first" anything.
"royal dynasty" - Firstly it wasn't royal - that is a modern definition, and can only be used when it means what it says, I see the FA uses it as well, and it should be rightly criticised for inaccurate reporting. We know little concrete about how stone age societies functioned - far too little to use the word "royal". Secondly there is no evidence that it is a "dynasty" of anything.
Historical accuracy seems to becoming abandoned these days. The media seem to becoming more and more able to get away with just making up anything they want to fit the "angle", particularly with scientific pieces.
So maybe I've read too much Dostoevsky over the years... but I never buy the explanations for what people think these things were.
Visiting some dolmens in France a few years ago the archaeologist explained that it was believed these were religious sites, since visitors had to bow low to enter a womb-like chamber. Sure... or... how about the small entrance is easier to heat, easy to keep dry, easier to defend, and easier to keep out animals like rats etc away from food stores. For all we know the dolmen was the first equivalent of Walmart.
Homo Sapiens is, for the most part, a selfish, greedy species. To ascribe our ancestors with cuddly, noble airs of spirituality, science and mysticism is the stuff of fairy tales, not science. Take a look at your neighborhood; minus the styles, the cars, and the pointless obsession with worthless things like social networking sites, the species is today just and evolved and spiritual as it has ever been. If anything, we've progressed (slightly) in terms of abolishing slavery, women's right etc.
Seriously, the first Walmart is more likely than some solar temple. I'll buy a royal burial site admittedly, that's just naked greed. That's pretty much what we humans are good at, especially the ones at the top of the social order.
this 'burial' theory just ignores the fact that rulers, ruling families, especially the first family of any new kingdom/dynasty etc, had the habit of claiming long standing monuments, legends, traditions as their own, and claiming they were the first, and even order distortion of existing records (if there is any) to that extent.
this can happen and take unbelievable forms even in civilizations that had long standing history, like egypt. it is too common for pharaohs to deface all mentions of previous pharaohs from even temple hieroglyphs, have scribes rewrite the records.
one of the most curious examples is the great pyramid. despite it is supposedly the 3rd true pyramid that is built, and it should have all kinds of glyphs, wall art, statues and carvings to nail the legacy of Khufu at every step inside the pyramid, there are NO mentions of khufu's name everywhere but on a small wall glyph (that contains only his name) over where his casket is placed. the king chamber is also curious, it has no kind of wall art, carvings or anything of the sort. this creates a contrast to long standing egypt tradition (even at that date) of adorning every bit of the burial site with all kinds of art and wall carvings and glyphs.
no sir. experience of mankind through history states that this new find didnt solve any mystery in regard to past of stonehenge.
Read radical news here
I, for one, welcome our Neolithic Lourdes.
Kings!? But according to Spinal Tap, Stonehenge is where the Demons Dwelled!
Oh well, another year, another theory about something that's become a dull-looking tourist trap jammed next to a busy main road. Another "explanation" is bound to be along in 2009. Stonehenge is really just a prism for the subconscious preoccupations of the day. One deduces from the latest idea that the UK is now worried about how long its current royal family will last. Surprising really that the archaeologists haven't uncovered "evidence" that the site was constructed under the supervision of a Stone Age health and safety executive. Perhaps next year they'll uncover the remains of a tree stump and declare that a hollow indentation in it is proof positive of the world's first on-site hard hat.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I believe that Stonehenge as the Royal Family's burial site is a splendid idea. Of course the British with their silly sense of formality will probably screw it up by waiting until the family member's have died....
The current British Royal Family are descendants from a French Invasion of England made in 1066 AD. That would make Stonehenge the burial place of an actual British royal family, and Buckingham Palace as British as the Iraq's 'Green Zone'.
European and American (and thereby worldwide) scientists and historians are fond of labeling artifacts and sites "sacred", as if distant peoples' ideas and practices of "sacred" meant the same as what we mean by it today. All "sacred" means universally is "don't touch unless you're a religious authority". And most religious authorities, especially of longer-lived societies, will not change anything given to them already sanctified.
So "sacred" really is primarily a way for a society to protect something's integrity, even if there's no obvious reason why. The sacred might be a site, like Stonehenge, or it might be a practice, like naming stars and telling stories about their namesakes, or it might be a ritual, like walking up to a mountaintop on a date determined by a site like Stonehenge from the names of some stars. It might just be the way that a town's homes are laid out around an area, or the way a home is laid out around its enclosing walls.
There is no guarantee that something "sacred" was actually believed to be a connection to a "superpowerful person" like a god or a mystic hero as we currently understand them. The sacred is just sanctified in that people's own special way of making obvious something was sacred, and not to be messed with by those who couldn't understand the belief that made it "work". Burying kings in connection with the sacred was one way to ensure that people knew it was sacred, if they knew the king was sacred, and building something sacred at a royal burial place would do it, too.
"Holy" just means that you do something even when you can't understand it. To later civilizations after ours has waned into nonexistence or mutated into something completely obliterating it, plenty of what we do for a reason we can understand is something they won't be able to understand in their different future context. So they'll call it "sacred", and not really get it entirely.
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make install -not war
Before Stonehenge there was Strawhenge and Woodhenge...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It was King Arthur and the Round Table of course, these kings, who were the lost tribe of Israel as explained by the British Israel movement, they had come to the UK by routes which we no longer know about. They were, like, the original inhabitants. They had powers now lost to us and erected the stones by thinking. They were vegan, lined up their stones with the planets and the ley lines. They were like very ecological and in harmony with the environment. Later they painted themselves purple with natural plant extracts. They were priest kings. They were real left or is it right side of the brain people unlike the Romans. Like, whatever.
Are there any more questions?
That all those new agers, wannabe wiccans, shamans and the like, when they thought they were performing their little ceremonies at what they thought was a temple, were actually desecrating a graveyard?
Ouch.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Personally I doubt it, because coal wasn't even important in Britain (or almost anywhere else) before the 1600's-1700's or so.
Even in the iron age, the preferred fuel originally was charcoal. It's only when wood was more important for building whole ship armadas, that coal became the fuel of choice.
In the bronze age, you didn't even need coal at all, as tin and copper can be smelted with wood just as well. They have a lower melting point than iron. Copper: 1084.62 C, Tin: 231.93C, vs Iron: 1538 C. So with a good forge you just need wood to generate the temperatures needed for copper or bronze.
The first stage of Stonehenge dates from 3100 BC, although the stones you see now are from 2200 BC. In 3100 BC Britain wasn't just waay before Iron Age at that point, but was probably before Bronze Age too, if I remember the general timeline right. They were decidedly chalcolithic, i.e., a mixture of copper for weapons and some tools, and still a lot of stuff made of stone or bone.
I.e., the economic demand for coal was somewhere between "not at all" and "buggerall". Assuming that anyone went feverishly poking holes all over the place to find coal, is just... the wrong age for that.
Additionally, Stonehenge 1 from 3100 BC already had a big ditch dug in the middle. So they'd already know if there was any ore or (still worthless) coal underneath. Assuming that they still went and poked the same place with square holes around it for another 1000 years, is kinda silly. There was no further point in probing the same damned place as opposed to going looking somewhere else.
And even if they just buried some poor workers in such holes, noone would drag holes from 300km away from Wales to use as headstones for poor miner families. The poor guys would just get a wooden marker for their grave, not hundreds of people dragging and lifting stones for their grave. Their families wouldn't have been able to pay those.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It wouldn't surprise me if the remains found had their skulls bashed
;-)
in as that was the method of dispatching the "volunteer" during
sacrificial rituals of the teutonic tribes back in those very days.
If so I would love to have man-hating enviroscum like Prince William
("I wish I could come back as a deadly virus") laid to rest in the shade
of these stones... the traditional way of course
Obviously its a homage to pi. The first geek king?
Table-ized A.I.
"His findings will also appear in the June issue of National Geographic and in the television special "Stonehenge Decoded," to be shown Sunday."
What a strange coincidence(?)
An important discovery is announced immediately before the airing of a TV program about Stonehenge featuring the same archeologist's findings.
The mystical power of those stones is awesome!
Because that paragraph didn't make sense to me at all. Now I understand a little better.
Plus 500 years is a very, very long time. That would be at least twenty generations.
Well, it's about time. Science has finally started putting together logical and sane ideas about Stonehenge with evidence to prove their theory. Maybe now we can leave out Stonehenge on the brainless histories mysteries and UFO programs. Although they still discuss crop circles as alien creations even though my friend Mike is responsible for 3 of them.
-The first thing we need to ask the first aliens we meet is weather or not they accept Jesus Christ as thier savior!
I would like to believe it is much, much more than that. Marc Loriau
http://www.garrydenke.com/
It was supposed to read: "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here"...
"Fear is the rootkit of democracy.." Blarkon
Wichsend, Wichsend, Wichsend!