So...
A monument that took around 1500 years to build in roughly seven stages is supposed to celebrate a single moment of unification?
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 …
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Monday 25th June 2012 11:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
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
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Monday 25th June 2012 12:05 GMT david wilson
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.
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Monday 25th June 2012 16:08 GMT Luther Blissett
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).
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Monday 25th June 2012 12:03 GMT Graham Dawson
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...
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Monday 25th June 2012 12:13 GMT Tom 7
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?
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Monday 25th June 2012 17:52 GMT Graham Dawson
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.
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Monday 25th June 2012 12:11 GMT Robert E A Harvey
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.
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Monday 25th June 2012 12:46 GMT Helena Handcart
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.
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Monday 25th June 2012 12:51 GMT Bush_rat
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.
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Tuesday 26th June 2012 02:44 GMT P. Lee
Re: Stonehenge...
and they would continue, "You can tell us in either, because our school system teaches youngsters their 12 times table, rather than relying on counting fingers and toes as your metric system seems to do."
"We also use precise astronomy to determine our seasonal boundaries. We're quite surprised you've lost the ability to do the same."
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Monday 25th June 2012 13:11 GMT 1Rafayal
This is all nonsense.
As everybody knows, Stonehenge was built by the Lizard people as a landing pad for their intergalactic star ships.
Nowadays, it is used as a navigational aid for their black helicopters.
What a lot of people dont know is that in prehistoric times, Stonehenge was surrounded by water. This island was in fact protected by manatees, with frickin lasers on their heads.
The water was drained away when the Lizard people learned how to put lasers on the heads of dolphins. This, in turn prompted a minor scuffle between the ousted manatees and the dolphins which has lead to the world wide decline in the manatee population.
Of course, having an ocean full of mammalian sea dwellers was far more useful to the lizard people that simple manatees. The conflict hasnt ended, the descendants of early manatees still carry on fight, in a much more successful manner. The modern descendants of the manatee are in fact the Japanese, who think nothing of harpooning the odd dolphin in the name of scientific research.
This is all true, it can be found on wikipedia (in about an hour from now.).
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Monday 25th June 2012 13:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Giants
Possibly more likely is that giants built stonehenge. There is plenty of historic evidence of giants actually existing and in many places around the world the skeletons of very large people 3 metres and much higher have been unearthed. Having them lump large rocks around would make far more logical sense.
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Monday 25th June 2012 19:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
RE: Nigel Tufnel.....
Except that thousands of years ago the utopian collective of once-peaceful farming villages was bankrupted and reverted to internecine conflict because Stonehenge was built in its current glory only through a tragic mix-up between feet and inches!
"Bloody Hell! You spent the collective's entire budget for the next 4 years building this?!! How are we supposed to pay for bloody food this winter?!!? I mean, the thing is as big around as my field!! Look at this drawing, does that look like it was meant to be built in feet!!? And sure, Ian the Midget was almost killed during the construction! He was in danger of being crushed by one of those barmy oversized rocks!!"
The past is prolouge......Stone-enge!!!!!
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Monday 25th June 2012 13:24 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
"Ritual significance"
It is a catch phrase (probably often correct, maybe wrong as often).
I once had a tour of the "Cave of the Shaman" in southern France. It is named after a VERY male figure scratched in the rock, complete with a huge erection. There were also scratched drawings of women with exaggerated "features". There was a lengthy explanation of fertility rites etc. My suggestion these might simply be stone-age variants of scribbles found on doors of modern day toilets frequented by adolescent males of all ages did not go down well.
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Tuesday 26th June 2012 10:34 GMT Rogan Paneer
Re: "Ritual significance"
French archaeologists seem to have this conceptual predisposition- any piece of worked stone, wood, or bone that is significantly longer in one dimension than the other is immediately categorized as a cult or ritual object, or a phallic object. Even when there's a simpler explanation (Occam's razor style), they'll go for some elaborate cultural theory drawing on Foucault or Bordieu.
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Monday 25th June 2012 14:38 GMT Romanopict
Henge's would have been cattle corrals: those with standing stones would have been defensive: they would have been built by early seafaring incomers to Britain who imported their corn, but required their beef to be reared here. Cursus monuments would have been for trapping wild beef and venison before the henge system of protecting domestic cattle came into use; neolithic agriculture is nonsense: before the incomers, there would have been no agriculture in Britain: it would have been a native British stone age people that was the foe of the incomer henge builders. Stonehenge would have been firstly a defensive henge with only the blue stones set in the Aubrey holes; it would then have been chosen for the site of an abattoir to process the domestic cattle, with the sarcens forming the main structure. The blue stones would then have been moved to build Blue Stonehenge: a pen for fasting cattle before slaughter; other blue stones would have been utilised inside the abattoir for laying cow hides over when they were being scraped clean.
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Monday 25th June 2012 16:11 GMT Romanopict
The bank of a henge is on the outside because it presents two obstacles to attackers; standing stones provide cover for archers and slingers defending against anyone trying to cross the rampart and ditch: the ditch would trap them; a ditch on the outside of the rampart would only act as a place from where a foe could charge from.
Yes its a fair distance from the sea: but this would be a time when cattle were being reared on open range; avebury would have been built when new range was required to provide beef for the growing populations near the coast; the abattoir would have also have been built for this reason.
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Monday 25th June 2012 17:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
MEPs anyone
Next we'll be hearing that Carnak in Brittany, being larger at 3000 standing stones (and French!) was the site of the first European Parliament, 4000 years BB (before Brussels).
Seriously, the idea that Minoans, who were known to travel a lot, either built Stonehenge to show the flag, or acted as a Neolithic version of Wimpey and provided the stone-moving equipment, is about as provable, and no more far-fetched.
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Monday 25th June 2012 17:25 GMT Furbian
Further invasive examination of these 'stones' is needed.
If Stargate is to be believed, a hoard of treasure lies under Glastonbury Tor, with some alien technology to boot... so it follows that we must pull out these stones and see what's under them! There could be even be inscriptions on the underside of the stones, telling us how to a make a 'Contact' style alien device, in 12 easy to follow steps, though there is more likely be an ancient version of 'Kilroy was here' scrawled on there instead......
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Tuesday 26th June 2012 03:17 GMT Allan George Dyer
Which eight stones?
Can you, at least, put all the relevant information in the article? You report, "the eight stones stand for different groups of Britain's earliest farming communities", but I'm damn sure there are more than eight there (unless the black helicopters have meddled with my memory), so which ones are THE eight, and why are those thought to be so significant?
Now, go away and bring back some good information, so I can get back to the normal commentard activity of making stupid jokes.
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Tuesday 26th June 2012 08:05 GMT Tzephtan
Stonehenge rebuilt by one man with sticks and ropes
Or maybe Stonehenge has been rebuilt by one guy using basic materials that could have been found back in that time? (Alright, he made the rocks out of concrete, but the moving part was out of basic materials.) Aliens? Who needs them?
I'm shocked you guys haven't heard about this guy!
http://www.theforgottentechnology.com
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Sunday 8th July 2012 13:22 GMT Don Jefe
Farmers
I don't know who built Stonehenge, but I know who didn't: Farmers. There is no way farmers would be bothered to build such a thing. They are some of the most practical people in the world and I'm fairly certain it was no different during construction. They had/have better things to do, like farm...
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