Though it being a large town/city does fit with the current theory on Stonehenge, that it was built as a place to unify the tribes of Britain and therefore would have been a place to draw people/have commerce/etc. like modern capitols do.
That is ONE of the theories. Which is hampered by problems like, we don't know of any unusually large concentrations of population in the area (compared to the rest of the country). There are no real increases in the finds of "trade goods" in the area (yes, they are there ; but they're also everywhere else in the country ; when you try to contour the intensity of such finds, you don't really see anything apart from the activity of 18th and 19th century "antiquaries" moving things to London). And, of course, we don't know the tribal structure of the area (well, we have Roman reports, but relying on evidence like that would have Britain today being governed by competing tribes of Syrians (Roman auxiliary troops stationed in Britain 2000 years ago), Italians (the Romans themselves) and simultaneously, Danes and Germans ; the groups would overlap in time.
You're describing a detailed supposition which goes far, far beyond the evidence that we have in the ground. Do you get you ideas from TV programmes bent on sensationalism, or from the archaeological literature?
I don't think they've really dug enough in the area to find much in the first place, but even this doesn't preclude the possibility, the actual craftsmanship may have been done further away, the area could simply have been a place of trade
If you look at Prof Gaffney's CV you'll see that he's a "landscape archaeologist" ; i.e. he specialises in looking at sites in their context of the whole landscape, which in the Stonehenge Landscape Project is an area around 30 miles across, not even centred on Stonehenge, because it's not by a long margin the biggest monument in the area (that title would probably go to Silbury Hill, which doesn't give way in effort-to-build to anything short of the Pyramids ; though the "processional way" between Avebury and Silbury Hill is probably a close contender). In fact, late-comer monuments like Stonehenge may have been built specifically because they required less effort than the earlier monuments.
There has been a huge amount of work and recording done in this area over the last 350 years - not all of it high-quality modern archaeology. Dozens of Roman villas, many of them built on the relics of older settlements (500 to a thousand years older. Hundreds of round barrows and long barrows and (as the song goes, "bell-shaped barrows". Thousands of crop marks field-walked and subject to varying degrees of investigation. There isn't much that happens in the landscape to provide raw materials (that are archaeologically observable) for unusual trade. Metal mining in the Mendips (50 miles to the west) didn't really get going as far as we know until Roman times. Flint mining is better known from the South Downs (100 miles SE) and East Anglia (Grimes Graves, ~150 miles to the ENE), though undoubtedly there were others which have disappeared into the landscape. Wood carving doesn't leave much of an archaeological footprint, but from pollen analysis on hundreds of samples, there wasn't anything growing in this area which was remarkably different from other areas of Southern England. Indeed, from the archaeology of the huge henge and multiple wooden monuments at Durrington Walls, the question has to be raised of was this area indeed significantly different from any other part of England, except that they built their monuments from archaologically durable stone instead of labile wood. As a different verse of the same song adds, "We used to have a Woodhenge here / But it rotted..."
You're projecting modern experience onto a landscape and society which is very different. In the word that we live in, trade is important. In a subsistence agriculture society, the amount of trade is far, far lower. If you need something for your farming, you make it yourself. There are trade goods, and networks of traded items. Stone axes from dolerites from Ulster are found all over Britain (Ulster is 350 miles from Stonehenge) ; copper from the huge mines of North Wales makes it's way into mainland Europe. There is a lot of work done on tracing the provenance of such items (actually, one of my university classmates works as a mineralogist in precisely this work), and we do know a lot about the trade networks of the time.
Stonehenge is not a significant producer in such networks. Certainly there was high-status goods coming into the area (the dolerite axe heads, for example) from elsewhere, but nothing remarkably more than surrounding areas.
You've missed the point. In a dyke and rampart structure, as you describe, the villagers on the inside (where there are remains of round houses, hearth, sometimes workshops, fenced corrals with elevated soil phosphate from all the shit, and lots more evidence of occupation) can indeed climb to the tops of the rampart and hurl abuse at the attackers down in the ditch. But if the same people lived in the middle of henge (without leaving evidence of settlement such as that detailed above), then on attack they'd have gone to the inside edge of the ditch and then waved up at the attackers who had walked up to the top of the rampart from the outside, and invisible from the village. What happens at the indefensible "gateways" (typically 4 of them, with no postholes to support gateworks or any other defensive works.
We do not know what people built "henges" for - or the various other structures, such as the multiple timber circles in the henge at Durrington Walls - but they are repeated events (around 100 identified) with a consistent form and they differ from the defensive ditch and rampart structures built in the same area at the same time.
Attempting to fit defensive stories onto structures like this is like trying to describe a Mississippi valley mound like Cahokia as a water-treatment plant. Not a good fit.
Incidentally, 5000 would have been the largest city in Britain at the time, and quite likely in the whole of Europe. A typical settlement of Neolithic times would have been dozens to around a hundred.
Carnac - at least the menhirs and alignments are mostly centuries to a millennium or so later than this. But that whole "Atlantic Coast Culture" concept still has some good legs.
could it just as easily support an alternative theory, that, say, there were continent renowned craftspeople
Most workshops leave an archaeological trace - knapped chips from flint, wood shavings, hearths. To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been found in the the area that is inconsistent with normal (i.e. subsistence farming) inhabitation.
On the other hand, the mounds of pig's right forelimbs (and no other parts of their bodies) do speak of something structured, organized, consistent... and quite bizarre. In other words, "ritual".
Can you explain the rules of football, as deduced from the archaeological record of that collection of rituals? Including, of course the bizarre aberration of some countries to perform the ritual of "football" with an oval ball instead of a spherical one.
So given that the history you say is portrayed in a TV show and agree is problematic is the same as that professed by academia, literature, and the web, where exactly do I find this real history of which you speak?
Six months into the first five years of your PhD in Egyptology.
Just read the first thousand papers that come to hand. That'll give you a good start on the subject.
"Ritual" is archaeologist's English for "they were doing something, and they were doing it in an organized and consistent way, and it wasn't farming, or fighting, but we really don't have any real idea what they were actually doing. It's an expression of archaeologist's ignorance as much as anything else.
(And any archaeologist you cared to ask would have told you this. It's no secret.)
Actually, the living areas were built a millennium or so AFTER this line of stones. This is under the well-known Durrington Walls site. (The "Walls" part of the place name is unrelated to what is being so airily and incorrectly described as a defensive structure up-thread.)
ditches have two effects, first sudden drop offs in terrain force attackers to either slow down or risk injury
This would be true if there were ditches designed for defence. But they're not ditched defences, they're henges. Archaeologists use the term "henge" to describe one structure, and "ditch and rampart" to describe a different structure. ditches and ramparts, exactly as you describe them, greet the person attacking from the OUTSIDE of the structure with a drop into a ditch (up to 20ft deep and 30-40 ft wide), then the attacker has to climb out of the ditch, up a loose rocky slope, to the top of a bank of debris cut from the ditch, and then finally deal with the defenders at the top, who typically had erected a several-metre-tall wooden pallisade at the top. An effective defensive structure, found in multiple rings around hundreds of "hill forts" in the country, with narrow, complex gate areas where attackers are funnelled into what are called "kill zones", because they are zones designed for killing people. Plainly the Neolithic builders understood defensive construction as well as you do.
"Henges" on the other hand, are different structures. The bank is on the OUTSIDE. They're not on hills. They have wide entrances next to sections of ditch which were never dug. Exactly how they were used, we don't know. but defensive structures they were not.
By the way, has anyone come up with a good description of how those Mounds in various of the US states were used?
This was built something like 2000 years before the Druids. OK, we'll allow the Druids significant existence before the Romans mentioned the : 1500 years before the Druids.
In American (well, I'm not very familiar with American archaeology), this would be in excess of two millennia before the first Maya empire, closer to three thousand years before the Mound Builders. Close to 4 millennia before Americans started speaking English (after a fashion).
Eh? I thought that at least major manufacturers had a MAC range assigned, and carried out their own internal processes between models and individual products to at least give a fighting chance of uniqueness.
From Wikipedia, "The first three octets (in transmission order) identify the organization that issued the identifier and are known as the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI).[5] The following three (MAC-48 and EUI-48) or five (EUI-64) octets are assigned by that organization in nearly any manner they please, subject to the constraint of uniqueness." So, very significantly non-random then.
The only way to change a cager's pespective, is to put his ass on two wheels for awhile. Only then does he actually become aware of cyclists, whether motorized or not.
As someone who has long advocated that driving licenses should be issued for 5 or 10 years and then revoked, to only be regained after re-passing the full driving test, I have also long advocated that part of the driving test MUST be several hours (preferably several days, but I'd settle for several 10s of miles in urban traffic, validated by a GPS tracker) on a bike.
Fucking cagers are a lethal menace to cyclists ; when I drive, I drive thinking like a cyclist. I've been bimbling along at 15mph, waiting for an opportunity to safely overtake a cyclist and had a fucking idiot cager overtake me in the face of oncoming traffic, then almost knock the cyclist off as the cager swerved in front of me.
I'm really going to have to get a dash cam. We could have lost that idiot his licence.
There's no way in hell the harpoon alone is going to withstand 10G of accel without pulling out.
You need to go and visit your local ice-climbing goods store. The tool you're looking for is called a "deadman" (or the mini-version, the "deadboy"). Nobody makes them commercially bigger than about 25cm on edge, because that can, even in loose powder snow, provide the couple of tonnes force needed for fall arrest.
A derived system was actually deployed on Philae as one of the redundant attachment systems. That the comet's material turned out to be far harder than expected points out the main problem : we don't know what the range of comet surface properties is, or how to determine the surface strength using remote sensing.
It's an interesting idea, but I agree that it's unlikely to work. At least, not to the point of bringing the probe up to contact with the comet. It could provide a helluva delta-v to the probe though.
It's a wireless NAS - it's insecure in it's very conception, as well as insane.
OK, slightly less insane - with capacities limited to 500GB, they're only going to take a day or so to fill or empty, depending on how much other traffic you have on your WiFi network. But for fucks sake, if you're going to spend even a femtosecond on thinking about security, then you're going to dump the WiFi for wired.
Oh they have. I was first loading film into cassettes in the mid-70s and was still using the same darkroom in the mid-90s. The human eye is considerably more sensitive than still photographic film of those eras, so a darkroom that was perfectly good for working with 400 or even 800 ASA film (27-30 DIN) could have sufficient light leaks that you'd be able to tell where the door was, and frequently where the door lock's striker plate was because that would have a brighter leak around it.
You wouldn't leave your film (exposed or unexposed) laying on the work bench for hours on end, but you could perfectly safely spend a couple of minutes "walking" a roll of exposed film into a developing spiral before putting the film into the developing tank (an effectively opaque cylinder itself) and starting on the next film. My father and I put such techniques into play routinely doing the B/W photography for family weddings etc, and had got our "shot to print" time down to under 2 hours by team work, and it really pissed off the professional photographers that we'd be at the reception giving away lots of enprints and modest numbers of 8x10s when they would be a week away from delivering anything to the people who'd just paid them a week's wages. I had other friends since who did newsroom photography for newspapers in the 70s to 90s, and they really pushed the boat out - chemicals in 30% methanol ; flaming the films to dry them quicker ; skipping the enprint or proof sheet stage to choose the print negatives directly...
[Shrug] you've never had to wipe your parent's shit off their bum?
Don't worry, you too are eligible for this joy. Because you may have no children whose shit you'll have to wipe up, but you sure as hell have had parents, and there's a good chance that you are going to live long enough to see them in their incontinence.
Paying some one less rich than you to wipe up your parent's shit is simply transferring your problem to someone else.
You're assuming that your "light-proof envelope" is a light-proof envelope, and that your darkroom is completely dark. The envelope is hard to check, but I've never been in a darkroom that was completely dark (though I've never been in a commercial darkroom ; only ones built by amateurs). After an hour or two, you can see the light seeping around the door frames, the key hole cover, etc. A dark room doesn't need to be completely dark, just dark enough to not significantly affect your film or papers. Of course, you keep your materials in black heavy-duty polythene bags inside heavy cardboard boxes, themselves normally in a closed cupboard. And even that won't keep the cosmic rays out - which will eventually fog your film (or paper).
I'd expect that commercial dark rooms do exactly as caves do : lots of right angle turns between daylight and the victim, and thick walls of stone. Close-fitting doors and black paint in the angles help, but you still need several sets of right angles to get to the point that you need your full half-hour or so of dark adaptation to be able to see the leaks.
Most people probably haven't experienced total darkness. I experienced it while working late at a campsite (astronomy camp).
Speaking as a person who has been a student on astronomy camps, a photographer back in the days when you loaded your own film into the cassettes in the dark, and a caver : you didn't experience total darkness then.
For a start, it would have taken your eyes 20 minutes to a half hour to achieve dull "dark adaptation" to reach full sensitivity to light.
I think that it's that he's willing to use himself as a test subject before inflicting it on others, fairly rare today.
While that is fairly uncommon today, that's not the case here. Isolation experiments have been carried out in various forms for a long period of time. Some have used volunteers (e.g. the ones I describe above), some have involved literal torture, but the field is definitely not short of prior experimentation. The precise question which this researcher wants to answer may not have been addressed, but the broad limits of reasonable volunteer safety are reasonably established.
Slashdot Mirror
That is ONE of the theories. Which is hampered by problems like, we don't know of any unusually large concentrations of population in the area (compared to the rest of the country). There are no real increases in the finds of "trade goods" in the area (yes, they are there ; but they're also everywhere else in the country ; when you try to contour the intensity of such finds, you don't really see anything apart from the activity of 18th and 19th century "antiquaries" moving things to London). And, of course, we don't know the tribal structure of the area (well, we have Roman reports, but relying on evidence like that would have Britain today being governed by competing tribes of Syrians (Roman auxiliary troops stationed in Britain 2000 years ago), Italians (the Romans themselves) and simultaneously, Danes and Germans ; the groups would overlap in time.
You're describing a detailed supposition which goes far, far beyond the evidence that we have in the ground. Do you get you ideas from TV programmes bent on sensationalism, or from the archaeological literature?
If you look at Prof Gaffney's CV you'll see that he's a "landscape archaeologist" ; i.e. he specialises in looking at sites in their context of the whole landscape, which in the Stonehenge Landscape Project is an area around 30 miles across, not even centred on Stonehenge, because it's not by a long margin the biggest monument in the area (that title would probably go to Silbury Hill, which doesn't give way in effort-to-build to anything short of the Pyramids ; though the "processional way" between Avebury and Silbury Hill is probably a close contender). In fact, late-comer monuments like Stonehenge may have been built specifically because they required less effort than the earlier monuments.
There has been a huge amount of work and recording done in this area over the last 350 years - not all of it high-quality modern archaeology. Dozens of Roman villas, many of them built on the relics of older settlements (500 to a thousand years older. Hundreds of round barrows and long barrows and (as the song goes, "bell-shaped barrows". Thousands of crop marks field-walked and subject to varying degrees of investigation. There isn't much that happens in the landscape to provide raw materials (that are archaeologically observable) for unusual trade. Metal mining in the Mendips (50 miles to the west) didn't really get going as far as we know until Roman times. Flint mining is better known from the South Downs (100 miles SE) and East Anglia (Grimes Graves, ~150 miles to the ENE), though undoubtedly there were others which have disappeared into the landscape. Wood carving doesn't leave much of an archaeological footprint, but from pollen analysis on hundreds of samples, there wasn't anything growing in this area which was remarkably different from other areas of Southern England. Indeed, from the archaeology of the huge henge and multiple wooden monuments at Durrington Walls, the question has to be raised of was this area indeed significantly different from any other part of England, except that they built their monuments from archaologically durable stone instead of labile wood. As a different verse of the same song adds, "We used to have a Woodhenge here / But it rotted ..."
You're projecting modern experience onto a landscape and society which is very different. In the word that we live in, trade is important. In a subsistence agriculture society, the amount of trade is far, far lower. If you need something for your farming, you make it yourself. There are trade goods, and networks of traded items. Stone axes from dolerites from Ulster are found all over Britain (Ulster is 350 miles from Stonehenge) ; copper from the huge mines of North Wales makes it's way into mainland Europe. There is a lot of work done on tracing the provenance of such items (actually, one of my university classmates works as a mineralogist in precisely this work), and we do know a lot about the trade networks of the time.
Stonehenge is not a significant producer in such networks. Certainly there was high-status goods coming into the area (the dolerite axe heads, for example) from elsewhere, but nothing remarkably more than surrounding areas.
We do not know what people built "henges" for - or the various other structures, such as the multiple timber circles in the henge at Durrington Walls - but they are repeated events (around 100 identified) with a consistent form and they differ from the defensive ditch and rampart structures built in the same area at the same time.
Attempting to fit defensive stories onto structures like this is like trying to describe a Mississippi valley mound like Cahokia as a water-treatment plant. Not a good fit.
Incidentally, 5000 would have been the largest city in Britain at the time, and quite likely in the whole of Europe. A typical settlement of Neolithic times would have been dozens to around a hundred.
Carnac - at least the menhirs and alignments are mostly centuries to a millennium or so later than this. But that whole "Atlantic Coast Culture" concept still has some good legs.
Most workshops leave an archaeological trace - knapped chips from flint, wood shavings, hearths. To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been found in the the area that is inconsistent with normal (i.e. subsistence farming) inhabitation.
On the other hand, the mounds of pig's right forelimbs (and no other parts of their bodies) do speak of something structured, organized, consistent ... and quite bizarre. In other words, "ritual".
Can you explain the rules of football, as deduced from the archaeological record of that collection of rituals? Including, of course the bizarre aberration of some countries to perform the ritual of "football" with an oval ball instead of a spherical one.
Six months into the first five years of your PhD in Egyptology.
Just read the first thousand papers that come to hand. That'll give you a good start on the subject.
(And any archaeologist you cared to ask would have told you this. It's no secret.)
Actually, the living areas were built a millennium or so AFTER this line of stones. This is under the well-known Durrington Walls site. (The "Walls" part of the place name is unrelated to what is being so airily and incorrectly described as a defensive structure up-thread.)
You plainly have never seen a drystone dyke.
This would be true if there were ditches designed for defence. But they're not ditched defences, they're henges. Archaeologists use the term "henge" to describe one structure, and "ditch and rampart" to describe a different structure. ditches and ramparts, exactly as you describe them, greet the person attacking from the OUTSIDE of the structure with a drop into a ditch (up to 20ft deep and 30-40 ft wide), then the attacker has to climb out of the ditch, up a loose rocky slope, to the top of a bank of debris cut from the ditch, and then finally deal with the defenders at the top, who typically had erected a several-metre-tall wooden pallisade at the top. An effective defensive structure, found in multiple rings around hundreds of "hill forts" in the country, with narrow, complex gate areas where attackers are funnelled into what are called "kill zones", because they are zones designed for killing people. Plainly the Neolithic builders understood defensive construction as well as you do.
"Henges" on the other hand, are different structures. The bank is on the OUTSIDE. They're not on hills. They have wide entrances next to sections of ditch which were never dug. Exactly how they were used, we don't know. but defensive structures they were not.
By the way, has anyone come up with a good description of how those Mounds in various of the US states were used?
In American (well, I'm not very familiar with American archaeology), this would be in excess of two millennia before the first Maya empire, closer to three thousand years before the Mound Builders. Close to 4 millennia before Americans started speaking English (after a fashion).
Eh? I thought that at least major manufacturers had a MAC range assigned, and carried out their own internal processes between models and individual products to at least give a fighting chance of uniqueness.
From Wikipedia, "The first three octets (in transmission order) identify the organization that issued the identifier and are known as the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI).[5] The following three (MAC-48 and EUI-48) or five (EUI-64) octets are assigned by that organization in nearly any manner they please, subject to the constraint of uniqueness." So, very significantly non-random then.
As someone who has long advocated that driving licenses should be issued for 5 or 10 years and then revoked, to only be regained after re-passing the full driving test, I have also long advocated that part of the driving test MUST be several hours (preferably several days, but I'd settle for several 10s of miles in urban traffic, validated by a GPS tracker) on a bike.
Fucking cagers are a lethal menace to cyclists ; when I drive, I drive thinking like a cyclist. I've been bimbling along at 15mph, waiting for an opportunity to safely overtake a cyclist and had a fucking idiot cager overtake me in the face of oncoming traffic, then almost knock the cyclist off as the cager swerved in front of me.
I'm really going to have to get a dash cam. We could have lost that idiot his licence.
How not to be fucked-up capitalists.
Why drive when you can fly?
You need to go and visit your local ice-climbing goods store. The tool you're looking for is called a "deadman" (or the mini-version, the "deadboy"). Nobody makes them commercially bigger than about 25cm on edge, because that can, even in loose powder snow, provide the couple of tonnes force needed for fall arrest.
A derived system was actually deployed on Philae as one of the redundant attachment systems. That the comet's material turned out to be far harder than expected points out the main problem : we don't know what the range of comet surface properties is, or how to determine the surface strength using remote sensing.
It's an interesting idea, but I agree that it's unlikely to work. At least, not to the point of bringing the probe up to contact with the comet. It could provide a helluva delta-v to the probe though.
It's a wireless NAS - it's insecure in it's very conception, as well as insane.
OK, slightly less insane - with capacities limited to 500GB, they're only going to take a day or so to fill or empty, depending on how much other traffic you have on your WiFi network. But for fucks sake, if you're going to spend even a femtosecond on thinking about security, then you're going to dump the WiFi for wired.
Errr, that admiral had actually done something wrong. Well, arguably wrong.
You wouldn't leave your film (exposed or unexposed) laying on the work bench for hours on end, but you could perfectly safely spend a couple of minutes "walking" a roll of exposed film into a developing spiral before putting the film into the developing tank (an effectively opaque cylinder itself) and starting on the next film. My father and I put such techniques into play routinely doing the B/W photography for family weddings etc, and had got our "shot to print" time down to under 2 hours by team work, and it really pissed off the professional photographers that we'd be at the reception giving away lots of enprints and modest numbers of 8x10s when they would be a week away from delivering anything to the people who'd just paid them a week's wages. I had other friends since who did newsroom photography for newspapers in the 70s to 90s, and they really pushed the boat out - chemicals in 30% methanol ; flaming the films to dry them quicker ; skipping the enprint or proof sheet stage to choose the print negatives directly ...
Ah, lost skills.
Those muscles are under nervous control. It may be subconscious or unconscious control, but it's control nonetheless.
the theory is about re-setting the control system, not the muscles.
It was kittens. They'd have their eyes stitched up before the age at which they'd normally open. Several different excuses given.
[Shrug] you've never had to wipe your parent's shit off their bum?
Don't worry, you too are eligible for this joy. Because you may have no children whose shit you'll have to wipe up, but you sure as hell have had parents, and there's a good chance that you are going to live long enough to see them in their incontinence.
Paying some one less rich than you to wipe up your parent's shit is simply transferring your problem to someone else.
I'd expect that commercial dark rooms do exactly as caves do : lots of right angle turns between daylight and the victim, and thick walls of stone. Close-fitting doors and black paint in the angles help, but you still need several sets of right angles to get to the point that you need your full half-hour or so of dark adaptation to be able to see the leaks.
Speaking as a person who has been a student on astronomy camps, a photographer back in the days when you loaded your own film into the cassettes in the dark, and a caver : you didn't experience total darkness then.
For a start, it would have taken your eyes 20 minutes to a half hour to achieve dull "dark adaptation" to reach full sensitivity to light.
While that is fairly uncommon today, that's not the case here. Isolation experiments have been carried out in various forms for a long period of time. Some have used volunteers (e.g. the ones I describe above), some have involved literal torture, but the field is definitely not short of prior experimentation. The precise question which this researcher wants to answer may not have been addressed, but the broad limits of reasonable volunteer safety are reasonably established.