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Excavations at Stonehenge May Answer Questions
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:22 PM
from the not-the-most-up-beat-tourist-attraction dept.
from the not-the-most-up-beat-tourist-attraction dept.
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.'"
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News: Stonehenge As a Royal Family's Burial Site 124 comments
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."
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An alternate interpretation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:5, Funny)
Why are you skeptical? It's pretty well-known that primitive tribes were peace-loving herbivores who lived in harmony with Nature. It wasn't until the white man came and introduced war and slavery that these tribes came to know such things.
Parent
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
It's even worse (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:It's even worse (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding (IANAPA I am not a pre-historic anthropologist) is that current speculation about the Sand Canyon Pueblo history is that there was some evidence of cannibalism by the Sand Canyon people over a long span of time, preying on neighboring tribes. The inference is that the neighbor tribes either finally got strong enough or fed up enough to resist, annihilate the Sand Canyon residents completely, and declare the place evil enough that nobody would ever live there again.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's a "little known" fact, but nazis wanted to exterminate Slavic people along with the Jews. For example, in Belarus alone about 3 million people were killed by nazis.
I included those, yes (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Even in ancient times there are records of people living to 100 and it wasn't that uncommon for many to live into their 50's, 60's and even 70's. It's just that for everyone who lived to 70, several would also die at an age of only 6 months or so.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Heh. Clever what you did there.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(Dark-skinned humans would have suffered vitamin C deficits in colder, darker europe, leading to an evolutionary pressure in favor of light-skinned persons who absorbed more light through their skin & survived longer.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dark-skinned humans would have suffered vitamin C deficits in colder, darker europe
It's actually Vitamin D, (the body can't make vitamin C), but otherwise you're completely correct.
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Advanced medical technology and medicine-man magic do not go together, and I seriously question the interpretation being given on those grounds. Medical experts (for the time) would not have relied on 250-tonne talismen. Now, if someone were to suggest that this was a national hospice or retirement home, where nobody seriously expects to physically recover but where some sort of emotional "recovery" was desired in their final days, that
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:5, Funny)
1000 A.D. - That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 A.D. - That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 A.D. - That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 A.D. - That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.
2000 A.D. - That antibiotic is artificial. Here, eat this root
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trephining [wikipedia.org].
Advanced medical procedures do not = advanced knowledge.
Maybe they drilled the holes to let out the evil spirits affecting the patient...who really knows for sure?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This was back in the seventies, and her anthropology professor had a theory that trepanation allowed blood to flow through the brain like it does through an infan
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:4, Funny)
Or perhaps vampires.
Parent
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:4, Insightful)
Advanced medical technology? Magic? These don't seem to go together...
The ability to precisely cut into the skull, combined with a possibly entirely coincidental therapeutic effect, does not indicate "advanced medical technology." Relieving intracranial pressure can lessen the degree of brain injury, yes -- but there is nothing to suggest that trepannation was carried out because of this understanding. It was most likely carried out in a belief that it allowed evil spirits, gasses, or whatever else, to escape the skull.
In other words, it is a sign of magical belief, not a repudiation of it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd guess the idea of trepanning came from something similar -- the patien
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, that's certainly more bloodthirsty. But it doesn't answer the question of why it was built. That would just answer part of the who.
Re:An alternate interpretation (Score:5, Funny)
I think that was Pete Townshend.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I disagree with you...
But this statement reminds me of things said when we first started investigating ancient writing - that writing was used almost exclusively for religious purposes.
Or so we thought until we started translating the stuff - then we found it was mostly tax records....
It would be cool.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It would be cool.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:It would be cool.... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But more in the spirit of today, we should, as a society, build a <really big monument> as mysterious and long-lasting as possible, just to jerk around our long-off descendants.
Re: (Score:2)
The BBC andTimewatch are running this bigtime (Score:4, Informative)
Just saw... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
as such it is refered to by the private eye [private-eye.co.uk] rather amusingly as "the Grauniad".
In case you are unfamilar with the eye, it is a satirical magazine, at one time owned by Peter Cook, that is best known in the UK for being sued for libel when printing things that later turn out to be completely true about certain politicians
They're going to find the plans (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How Many Date Nuts in a Bowl? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(How this story lasted this long without an Eddie Izzard reference is beyond me)
over time (Score:4, Funny)
Stonehenge is overrated (Score:4, Interesting)
"as a place of healing" (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like they've already made up their minds.
Of course, this could be bias introduced by the uninformed.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"as a place of healing" (Score:4, Insightful)
I think, from what I've seen, that this work is competently done. But to trust an archaeologist much beyond that is asking a lot.
Parent
Re:"as a place of healing" (Score:5, Insightful)
Links? All I can find is that English Heritage moved the site, under controversy (mostly, it seems, by modern "druids" who have no connection to whatever religion or culture built the site, and no idea of it's original purpose), to be preserved instead of allowing the sea to destroy it. It was studied, and the findings were published in Nature [bbc.co.uk]. It's going to be open to the public, preservation work now done, this month in Lynn Museum [bbc.co.uk], near the original site.
So, do you have any proof to this or any other claim, or are you just trolling?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
British Knockoffs of Irish Originals (Score:2)
I say that the British just copied an Irish model, instead of schlepping all that rock across the Irish Sea.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Insufficiently rude about English Heritage (Score:3, Interesting)
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 list