Stonehenge WASN'T built by ALIENS - Boffins' shock claim
Bone-digging boffins claim to have discovered the true purpose of Stonehenge - to mark the unification of feisty fighting farming communities who decided to lay down their battle-hoes and make peace. Stonehenge Teams from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Southampton, Bournemouth and University College London have …
This topic is closed for new posts.
So...
A monument that took around 1500 years to build in roughly seven stages is supposed to celebrate a single moment of unification?
Re: So...
"A monument that took around 1500 years to build in roughly seven stages is supposed to celebrate a single moment of unification?"
We will never know because a short time later all the farming communities who had come together were ravaged by an economic disaster after they had decided to adopt the groat as a common currency
Re: So...
Rubbish. The last set of stones that were added was a patch for the Y1K bug.
Re: So...
It wouldn't have been so bad if not for those confounded Druids trading in Goat Default Swaps.
At least they didn't fall for that daft Egyptian Pyramid Scheme like the Incas did.
Re: So...
I DONT SEE WHERE IT DOES A DAMN BIT OF GOOD WHY NOT BILLDOZE IT DOWN AND PUT UP A SHOPPING MALL
Re: So...
Yep.. Kind of like the millennium dome. Cept more useful.
And it took so long, because the local builders merchant was out of massive lumps of stone, so they had to go all the way to Wales for it.
In truth
They have absolutely no idea.
It could even have been some ancient practical joker who thought, if he builds it, people will pull their hair out for centuries trying to guess what it was for.
Re: @Big Dumb Guy 555
Poster with obviously weak grasp of Internet culture and history is obvious.
A B1FF is not a troll. Completely different posting practices.
Turns out
So actually it turns out that Stonehenge was the UK's first gyratory system!
Re: Turns out
Sounds to me more like it was the first Tesco superstore
Re: Turns out
In 10,000 years time people will be scratching their heads at a complex arrangement of 'stone' pillars somewhere north of the lost city of Birmingham, marked only by a mysterious tablet reading "M6"....
Balls.
Stonehenge (and Avebury) were built by Neolithic Wiltshiremen to irritate their descendants.
Speaking as a descendant, it worked. Bloody hippies turning up every summer....
Re: Balls.
>>"Speaking as a descendant, it worked. Bloody hippies turning up every summer...."
Indeed.
How selfish of them to keep turning up and buying overpriced new age tat in the various shops.
Though no doubt, many of those shops are run by terrible outsiders who can't even trace their ancestry back before written records began (or beyond living memory, whichever might be earlier).
I mean, it's not as if people in cities have to put up with that kind of happening, since as we all know, they never take any refugees from any perceived problems with rural life.
Re: Balls.
If it weren't for all those hippies propping up the economy with their dreamcatchers and kaftans, Wiltshire would be the Greater London Suburb of Swindon and a few thousand acres of semi-naked yokels munching turnips.
Re: Balls.
There are no tat shops in Avebury and only there's only English Heritage tat at Stonehenge.
You're thinking of Glastonbury.
Re: Balls.
I'm thinking of Wiltshire. That's why I said "Wiltshire". Apologies for any confusion. I'll carve it into a turnip next time.
Sir
There must be more involved than just the equivalent of a 'bring your own beer' BBQ.
Re: Sir
It probably included women dancing around without their knickers on.
Re: Sir
What? To get charred sausages, beer and women with no knickers you need a plain full of megaliths?
Damn. I need a bigger garden.
Boneheads
needed somewhere to do their cock-fighting. Apart from that, the architecture celebrates a massive giga-amp electric discharge that was visible the world over at the time, also recorded in rock art, myths, and geology. So, yep, it would have been a party -- at least while they hopped from hiding place to hiding place to avoid the synchrotron radiation (gyrating electrons partying also).
Re: Sir
women dancing around without their knickers on
Would those be the "battle-hoes" mentioned in the article? No wonder they were laid down, if they kept dancing while upright.
I was always under the impression that it was designed to calculate the winter solstice so they could know when the new year started. And also impress the plebian mass with their magical sacrifices that bring back the sun.
In fact a google search for the paper involved says that, yes, it was designed to mark the winter solstice, not the summer solstice. ALl those hippies turning up in the middle of summer have it completely wrong: they should be dancing around in the nudd in the middle of a snowfield. It'd definitely separate the posers from the genuine believers...
Not calculate!!!
There is no calculation involved. It INDICATES the winter solstice - something incredibly easily found out by observation and moving a stick or two about. Whether this has any real significance we will never know.
In a few thousand years time archaeologists may be speculating that we worshipped the horizon as our houses have view-holes aligned to the horizon and who would go to the trouble of making all those bits of wood collect standing water and rot more quickly unless there was some religious significance in it?
Re: Not calculate!!!
It's useful as a kind of calendar. For example, if it's covered in snow, it's probably winter.
Re: Not calculate!!!
And if wet, it's raining. Genius weather device, that!
Paris, wet when raining.
Re: Not calculate!!!
Well, they tried doing it with a simple stick, but Zog kept knocking it over, so they decided to use some stones big enough not to be knocked over by even the most clumsy villager...
Re: Not calculate!!!
Tom, we can guess at its significance from surviving religious behaviours. In Europe, especially northern and western Europe, a great deal of effort (and food) was expended around the winter solstice and a great many rituals evolved around the idea of bringing back the sun and the fear that it would go away forever. It was considered to be the most dangerous and magical time of year, with the nights growing longer and the days growing shorter, darkness and death and emptiness covering the land. Winter was always thought to be the time of year when the world might end.
So fine, measurement rather than calculation but the reasons for it don't change: they wanted to know when the sun was going to come back.
@Graham
"the days growing shorter," an early demonstration of the physical fact that things contract when cooled.
Act of unification?
"Just the work itself [...] would have been an act of unification." I'm absolutely sure, the slaves who pulled the stones felt very unified...
Btw, what happened to the theory of two pipers blowing their pipes and sonic interference pattern?
Re: Act of unification?
There is no evidence that slave labour was used.
I call Bollocks
Any attempt to interpret a few fragments dug from the ground as evidence of some sort of trade treaty sounds, in the absence of a written text, to be extrapolation beyond the data.
Archaeologists have form in this regard, and this sounds like an idea they had before they started looking.
Go read some of Frances Pryor's extraordinary writings about flag fen and Maxey henge, and you will find that even the most level headed and practical of trowel-wielders can get carried off on flights of fancy.
Re: I call Bollocks
You call bollocks, they call "ritual significance".
What that actually means is; "We haven't got a fucking clue, but that isn't going to stop us making shit up and arguing the toss about it 'til the cows come home.".
Not a lot of difference really.
Re: I call Bollocks
*sigh*
Yes, finding any amount of stone-age remains is hard, especially before the neolithic, and so yes technically there is quite a lot of extrapolation. But do you think that's because archaeologists can't be arsed finding sites? Or that they like to tell a good story, evidence be damned? That they just dick about in wet muddy holes all day for shits and giggles? No. A site is identified - Stonehenge is a fairly obvious one - and a shit-ton of work is done to gather as much data as possible, a tricky proposition when the site is protected to the hilt. And then years of expert opinion and experience is brought to bare, as well as diverse scientific processes and data analysis, and the data is sorted, sifted, and interpreted for the benefit of you Robert E A Harvey, who clearly has not an iota of an idea of what's involved, but still feel interested enough to pen some vacuous rubbish.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of flights of fancy (Alison Sheridan is guilty of this IMO), and (perhaps deliberately) you happen to choose one of the biggest culprits alive today - and he is certainly not level-headed nor practical. But the likes of Prof Parker Pearson are the leading examples in their field of study. So perhaps you ought to go and read some of his stuff, or any of the myriad sound authors (Scarre, Thomas, Richards are some that spring to mind), and then shut the fuck up.
Re: I call Bollocks
If the stones were gathered from different far away places, they have a good case - better than any puny modernist 'written text' aka death words.
Re: I call Bollocks
"some sort of trade treaty ": the Maastricht Treaty was fairly stonily opaque.
And here was me thinking is was built to send "spacey wacey" signals about the pandorica in the underhenge.
****Just realised that this isn't the digitalspy forum
No mention of the Beaker People?
Didn't they build Stonehenge V2.0?
"Mee mee mee mee!"
These 'so called' scientists are going to look awfully stupid when Stonehenge starts to rotate, and then flies off into space on jets of nuclear fire.
It's a matter of taste but...
Of all the henges, it's definitely my favourite.
Re: It's a matter of taste but...
Funnily enough, technically it's not a henge - the ditch and bank are the wrong way round.
Re: It's a matter of taste but...
"Funnily enough, technically it's not a henge - the ditch and bank are the wrong way round."
That's precisely the definition of a henge.
Otherwise it'd be a normal ditch 'n' bank circular defensive rampart/enclosure.
Re: It's a matter of taste but...
No, a henge has its ditch inside its bank, whereas an enclosure has the ditch on the outside - just like Stonehenge. Even wikipedia agrees with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge#Etymology
Stonehenge...
Built by farmers?!?!
WRONG! It was built in ancient times before the dawn of history,
And nobody knows who they are what what they were doing,
But we do know that
It's where the demons dwell, where the banshees live, and they do live well.
It's where a mans a man, and the children dance to the pipes of pan.
Tis a magic place where the moon doth rise with a dragons face.
Where the virgins lay.
It's where the cats meow.
The children also like dancing.
Sadly the little people of Stonehenge are lost, and we will never know what they would say to us.
This topic is closed for new posts.
