Why Dont You Blog?

Charges were dropped against 6 people who were arrested in July, when they protested at a council meeting against the remains of the 4,000 year-old Rotherwas Ribbon being buried under a road.

The road building is going ahead. Hereford Council has a site with its news. It seems that, after unsuccessfully and half-heartedly trying to pass it off as a natural artefact, the council’s arguments are:

• the roadbuilding uncovered it in the first place;
• they’ve done everything they reasonably could to get it investigated;
• covering it up won’t do it any harm;
• moving the road would damage other nearby sites;
• the cabinet office says go ahead with the road as fast as possible

All reasonable points. It still seems a pity that we have to discard irreplaceable treasures just to make yet another road.

There is interesting information on the Ribbon on the Megalithic Portal written by one of the people in our blogroll at the right, Alun Salt from clioaudio

He says:

Archaeologists believe this major find may have no parallels in Europe, with the closest similar artefact being the 2,000-year-old serpent mounds of the Ohio river valley in America.

It has been a while since I posted some quick edit photographs here, so I will try to make amends. These are two photographs of Stonehenge (World Heritage site in Wiltshire) I took in December when the ground was frosty and the visitors were thin on the ground. I have pushed them through a variety of Photoshop filters to create the additional effects:

On an additional note, in addition to massive visitor numbers, Stonehenge is often inundated by “druids” and new-age hippies in the summer, come the cold weather and they are noticeable by their absence. For some reason the idea that Stonehenge is a “summer” monument.

I can understand, say, 50 years ago, people thinking this but surely almost all modern studies point to any religious significance of this site being focused on the midwinter solstice?

I should point out, there are die-hards who turn up for the midwinter solstice – even if they don’t know what the correct date is – but no where near the scale of the midsummer one.

Maybe modern people just cant take the cold as well….

[tags]Stonehenge, Photographs, Pictures, Images, Photoshop, Image Effects, Black White, Sepia, Megaliths, English Heritage, National Trust, Wiltshire, Druids, Solstice, Midwinter, Midsummer, World Heritage Site, Religion, Stone Age, Cults, Culture, Society[/tags]

Despite my complaints about Technorati recently and MS generally, this is really interesting Blog software. It actually does make it easy to include a variety of things – for example, I am going to search Flickr for some pictures of Stonehenge and so that people can be aware of the place, I have put in an overhead shot from MS Virtual Earth. (Below).

In addition to the overhead shot, in case people don’t know how to get to Stonehenge, I can also add a map

This is pretty cool as you can see – the map works, although confusingly the pushpin is centred on the object, not pointing to it. Instinct would say the bottom of the pin is where the place should be, but this is only the case if you massively zoom in.

As would be expected from a Microsoft package there are some glitches with layout and rendering (especially if you try to use complex CSS in your blog) but for about 90% of the blogs I have read Live Writer is perfect.

I will continue to see what else it does and try and identify where it will go wrong…

del.icio.us tags: Stonehenge, Megaliths, Microsoft, Live Writer, Virtual Earth

I have been playing around with some images, trying to generate good effects. I am still not convinced this is “lomo” but it does produce some stunning pictures and can be done in Fireworks, Gimp or Photoshop pretty easily:

Well, as I said before, I actually quite like this effect. I am happy to listen to what others think or if you have done something similar please let me know.

Well, if there had ever been any doubt, I am obviously going soft as I get older. I am starting to like this months .net magazine! Argh.

Before I seem mad, there are the usual bucket loads of things which really annoy (and simple mistakes are high on the list – this new editor hasn’t actually improved anything in that respect). However, their tutorials are getting better.

In the past, the .net tutorials have gone from patronising to rocket science with no in-between step, and generally were uninsteresting and uninspiring. This month they are actually quite good. As an example, the “lomography” tutorial (using photoshop to put lomo effects onto pictures), is quite interesting and pretty inspiring.

I am not for one second saying the output appears properly “lomo,” however it is a good tutorial for adding effects previously not thought of combining (by me at least). You can see the outcome of a lomo practice on some stonehenge pictures:

Stonehenge Lomo,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

Let me know what you think.

This is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (and the shortest in the Southern Hemisphere). This is as good an excuse as any to go to visit megalithic sites. A few thousand people were at Stonehenge and smaller number at Avebury and, no doubt, people went to many sites around the UK and Europe. Some of these people are so engagingly and entertainingly eccentric that you want to capture them for your own private zoo. Most are just people with a developed sense of history.

It’s hard to quarrel with anything that gets people enjoying visiting prehistoric sites. The automatic association between the summer solstice and megalithic sites is sometimes a little doubtful though. Some sites appear to be better understood as midwinter sites, anyway. I just object to the way that practical considerations rarely enter into our thoughts about these sites. No one considers that they may have been used in any other way than the rituals we project onto their builders, thus distancing us from any sense of their builders as just like ourselves. Which inadvertently opening the conceptual gate for those who think the stones were levitated into place or dropped by aliens.

We happily believe that generations of people would do the enormous amounts of work needed to construct these monuments, just for the sight of the sun coming up in one location on one particular day of the year (if there are no clouds – which is rare in the UK). If this were the sole purpose of these constructions, I suspect a simple sundial would have sufficed.

One of my cavils is with the idea of ceremonies being held on a specific day (the Solstice) and of people having to travel miles to attend them.

We are asked to contemplate people with no clocks or calendars except the likes of Stonehenge. So how do they know they are leaving on the right day, for a journey that may take weeks, until they get there?

You can only solve this problem by imagining a scenario where the religious leaders have to check the sun’s alignment everyday as it approaches midsummer, then have to send out messages to all their potential congregation a couple of weeks or so before the Solstice to tell them the time is close. Otherwise, everyone would have to have their own mini solstice clocks so they could tell when it was 5 to midsummer and start planning their journey.

Yes, this blog is ridiculous. It’s just a challenge to accepting whatever the latest archaeological fashion says is the purpose of these awe-inspiring creations.

This is a one-liner to let our readers know we have added a few more categories.

A few days from the Summer Solstice, it seems the right time of year to consider Stonehenge again. I was ranting on 24 March about the heritage industry and the cavalier treatment of even English Heritage’s major cash cow, Stonehenge, in the name of improving the “visitor’s experience”. (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/03/) I was also a bit disturbed to find out that Avebury is about to undergo “preservation.”

I was going to have a laugh at the expense of the people who will believe anything about these sites as long as they get to wear silly clothes and invent ceremonies. I was also going to rant about those “proper” archaeologists – especially those of the televisually- rewarded persuasion – who destroy sites at will, with no concern for future generations. They pontificate on theories as ludicrous as some of the most abstract neo-pagan tosh. They will happily help to convert living historic landscapes into frozen heritage “experiences” with convenient fast food facilities and any missing bits of monuments rebuilt in concrete and plastics.

I could even have given another airing to my standard argument that pre-Roman human beings were just like human beings now – mainly concerned with making a living and not necessarily more credulous than the standard 21st century person. So why do we always have to look at their relics on the basis that everything in their lives was devoted to ritual?

Instead I am going to air my own crackpot theory. I can probably argue the toss convinvingly on this, if pushed to it. I could even assemble some evidence to support or falsify it, were I strong-willed enough to get off my butt and go to the library. However, I’m not. So I am just going to present the theory in the hope that someone else will falsify it by proxy.

The theory is – Sefton Park in Liverpool contains the relics of a huge prehistoric site.

There, I’ve said it. It’s batty, I know.

I think that there was probably a prehistoric quarry in the area. I believe that there are also signs of largescale prehistoric construction.

Sefton Park is a large shabby park in the southend of Liverpool. A more or less continuous line of parks goes from Princes Park onwards, ending up in Calderstones Park and CampHill (Both attested megalithic sites. The Calderstones were on what is now called Druids’ Cross Road and have novel markings. Sadly they were dug up in the 19th century (?) and the remaining ones are housed in a Calderstones Park greenhouse) Near the parks are objects such as “Robin Hood’s Stone,” also a megalithic standing stone, moved from its original location. A fair quantity of pre-Roman and Romano-British artefacts has been dug up in the course of building and demolishing Liverpool. A megalithic settlement has been excavated in Wavertree, a mile or two from Sefton Park . There is a hillfort still in existence and cared for by English Heritage on the opposite bank of the Mersey (at Helsby Point)

(Devil’s Advocate : This is a sort of misdirection – setting the scene to make you believe it is reasonable to expect to find megalithic or pre-Roman sites in Liverpool . Which it is, but Liverpool has been so frequently built and rebuilt that even 12th century relics can’t be found in reasonable condition.)

The main basis of my evidence is:

• A fenced off cave on Croxteth Road which is at least partly man-made. Some of the stones were obviously put there when the park was built, some bits of the cave are 20th century attempts to shore up the dangerous bits of the structure and some of the stones fit together in a much more ancient way. The layout is on the same sort of plan as West Kennet or Wayland Smithy, except that the chambers are large enough for habitation rather than sticking corpses.
• There is a line of almost buried stone lintels (or vaguely arch-shaped constructions) on one side of the raised earth mound on which the Palm House stands. This bit looks exactly like the entrance to Stoney Littleton or West Kennet except for being buried up to its neck and being on a much greater scale. (Three apparent entrances)
  This bit is my strongest argument. Any of the other stone arches or constrcutions or caves in the park can be attributed to Victorians following their fashion for buiding fake megalithic monuments. However, it seems insane to fake authenticity to the point of building the buggars and then burying them.
• The mound of earth that this is buried in is decorated with a few (3 or 5, I didn’t keep notes sorry) huge stone “thrones” set at intervals. They are obviously arranged as part of the landscaping process but they are ludicrously big for garden ornaments and are made of a heavy, more solid stone (i.e like the sort of stone you find durable megalithic creations built from) rather than the standard pink sandstone of the rest of the park.
• Being a bit of a sandstone wall afficionado, I can roughly judge the era in which sandstone blocks were cut by the markings. There are blocks of sandstone throughout the park, some of which were quarried long before the park was built and some of which are on a monstrous scale.
• (The least convincing argument, granted, but one that may encourage the obligatory megalithic nutters to support the idea.) Intuition. I’ve been to loads of megalithic sites, (only thanks to the kindness of Tas, Sarah, the Megster and the Newb) and feel like I can almost smell one. In my only argument in support of this ludicrous argument, I can say that I once detected that we were on a hillfort while walking with colleagues near Snowdon, in Wales. There was mild sarcasm from my co-hillwalkers. Then we came across a metal sign that said it was indeed the site of a Celtic hillfort, so score 1 for the intuition capacity. :-p)

There’s more but I’ve already put in enough to introduce the idea. I don’t want to throw away all my aces although I have already thrown out my strongest cards. I will get photographs and post them. I may even do the research to find the original plans of the area when they built the park….

There are two alternative explanations. I suspect that they both might have some truth. In fact, I’m hoping they both have some truth, rather than just the one that would falsify this idea. One possibility is that there was a major megalithic site in the area, almost on an Avebury scale. (Devils’ advocate rears its head again:) The other (sadly more likely) possibility is that every seemingly megalithic thing in the whole park is a Victorian lawn ornament. My hope is that the park was built on the relics of prehistoric habitation and that the architects made use of the bits and pieces of stone that were lying around, partly to build interesting megalithic style constructions for bridges.

(Devil’s advocate has the last word.) I know the most far-fetched thing about this crackpot theory is that noone – however expert or unskilled – has ever argued it before, as far as I can see. Liverpool has a University with an Archaeology department and a pretty good Museum. The failure of anyone who knows what they are talking about to have suggested it before does argue for the theory being rubbish.

I will place my faith in the concept of falsifiability. Can anyone please come up with any evidence about the area before the park was built or about original park plans? Otherwise I may be forced to go to the local research part of a library ….. Don’t make me do that.

(I am totally aware of the mind’s pattern-making skills, so don’t bother going there when you try to refute it. I’m way ahead of you.)

Stonehenge,
originally uploaded by Tulna.

Well, as you can see I am still going through flickr.com – a search with the term “english heritage” is very worthwhile.

This shot of stonehenge (I dont know if the colours have been edited at all) is pretty cool. It creates an interesting green sheen over the stones and the lack of people is pretty impressive.

Stonehenge is a good bench mark as it seems to be the most photographed place in England. (From my unscientific view point! )

Again, from reading interesting links on the “Past Thinking” blog site – I came across some links to the megalithic portal. All I can say is “wow.”

The map is amazing, and accurate. I have spent the last 10 minutes marvelling at the photos and sheer volume of information they have available. It has a forum and lots of user-contributed information, which is both good and bad. While I havent had time (yet) to fully explore the site, first impressions are very, very good. All I can say is check it out now!

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/

I can’t describe Avebury megalithic landscape without sounding like a lame sap. So before I take issue with the patently bizarre statement on the National Trust website (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ main/w-vh/w-visits /w-findaplace/w-avebury/) I will have to admit to being a complete Avebury devotee. Avebury is a collection of megalithic sites covering a few square miles in Wiltshire. The outer Avebury stone circle itself is the biggest in the world or one of the biggest in Europe according to which site you consult, with a diameter of 427 metres. That’s 1,017 feet for Americans and people who prefer to think in old money. I can’t picture either, to be honest.

There are ditches around the circles that cover a much bigger area and an incomplete “avenue” of huge stones leading to Silbury Hill ( a miraculous thing in itself) and West Kennet Long Barrow. One amazing thing about Avebury is that there is a village with lots of thatched cottages and wierd Victorian buildings and shops and working farms in the middle of it. The complex is about twenty miles from Stonehenge and Woodhenge and Durrington Walls – which are only the most obvious named prehistoric sites – because you can barely put foot in a field for about many miles around without seeing an embarrassment of tumuli, log barrows, round barrows and iron age hillforts. Avebury is a World Heritage site and actually deserves the ranking. Bits of it are about to undergo the dreaded restoration (but that’s probably just my pessimism about archaeologists and restoration and history cash cows See earlier over-long rant on TV archaeology and the heritage industry) Go there if you possibly can.

The National Trust web page on Avebury says that it was “Voted the country’s third most spiritual place.” Voted for by whom? Which place won anyway? What does spiritual mean?

I find it silly that there should be a “most spiritual sites in the country” competition and incomprehensible that the National Trust would regard a vote like that as a good advertising point. It’s gooey New Agey stuff – like advertising conditioner as having some exotic “natural” ‘erbal ingredient. It gives the impression that Avebury is so uninteresting that visitors have to be enticed by a phoney vote. Are there really people who go to places and rank them for “spirituality”? In these sort of contexts, the word seems synonymous with “gullibility”. You may indeed feel moved by Avebury for any number of reasons but its ranking in a spiritual league table is probably not one of them.

(Etrusia’s own advertising. See the second page of the Megalithic sites article http://www.etrusia.co.uk/megal_2.php. This introduces a handful of the pre-historic sites in Wiltshire) send an email postcard photo of it from http://medieval.etrusia.co.uk/postcard.php.)

Not unlike “Bad Science”, lots of History is pretty bad too. This rant will be mainly about archaeology . Well, even more, mainly about tv archaeology, that being the closest that I get to really knowing anything about archaeology.

Why do archaeologists assume that every prehistoric tribe did everything for ritual purposes? Given a dozen possible explanations for anything, religious ritual always seems to be the favoured purpose.  People who see everything created in prehistory as proof of alien landings are hardly more obsessed than the average tv archaeologist is with finding evidence of religious ritual in any surviving artefacts. Even going on the chance that the average person in prehistory was about half as sceptical as the average medieval peasant, that still leaves a lot of room for secular creativity.

Even medieval peasants were always forming heretical movements and rebelling against the church. How many thousands got excommunicated or burned as witches for not believing exactly what they were told to believe? If anything - without written language or means of mass cultural communication and with a fairly even distribution of access to productive resources - prehistoric people would be less subject to pressures to believe whatever they were told. This suggests that they might have been less likely than most of the current world population to be convinced by religious authority to neglect the hunting, gathering, agriculture and socialising (that must have made up most of their lives) to create monuments to appease the gods.  In any case, might not some of the surviving constructions be relics of homes, markets, meeting halls or food stores? Giant figures carved on hillsides would be adverts or indicators of location today. Why are they always seen as having only ritual significance if they are a few thousand years old? 

Occam’s Razor somehow doesn’t apply to tv archaeologists. Their professional rule is “Never seek the simplest explanation.”

My next gripe is with the reconstructions. The rule is: Never show any archaeology or history without a reconstruction. Some of these reconstructions are really good, as in the Battlefield Britain series. Lots of people have problems with showing rebuilt Saxon villages or using actors to portray Roman legionnaries or Celtic warriors. I don’t find these necessarily  irritating. Only a complete idiot would think that this was real video footage. We all know that actors aren’t real. The use of real people and realistic surroundings can make the past seem more immediate and comprehensible. (Note that was “can”). The compulsion to illustrate with footage can get out of hand, but generally it’s not a bad idea.

Similarly with computer graphics, When they help those viewers with little visual imagination (like me) to picture a scene they can be illuminating.  It’s the graphics that purport to be true that I have problems with.  Have you found a 1 sq cm piece of tile? This must be the corner of a brightly painted 450 metre square temple, complete with pillars, colonnades and a fountain, which your computer graphics team will create using 3DS Max. Is there a bit of bent metal? This must have been the corner of a shield which had a Celtic motif in the centre and gold chasing around its bevelled edges.  So here it is. Found a skull? Our inhouse artists will model the face of its original owner, showing the actual eye and hair colour and hairstyle. This stuff is so manifestly ridiculous that it destroys any belief you might have had in anything else they tell you.

Apart from tv arcchaeology, I have big problems with a lot of Heritage archaeology.  This seems driven by the need to have cash cows. Does your historic monument lack vistor appeal? Maybe walls have been demolished or stones are inconveniently crumbling. Put them back. People always appreciate things looking in good shape. That’s why they restore old houses to live in. Noone can tell the difference anyway, if it’s sensitively done, can they?  Some of these ancient designers had no idea about what would attract the modern paying visitor so its just using our modern skills and knowledge to do what they woudl have done if they know how to.

The current Stonehenge controversy provides an example of millions spent on consultation (with any organisation that claims an interest) about plans which will cost many millions more. There is a major road (amjor, by Wiltshire standards)  quite close to Stonehenge and a minor road that cuts off part of one of the ditches on the site. The plans involve not just moving at least one road but also

• building a tunnel under the site to carry its traffic
• repairing the section of ditch that the road cuts off to “restore” it .

Most people who have been to Stonehenge would see the visitors’ car park and visitor centre – not to mention the demonic fences and paths that keep people from the actual stones  – as the main problems. A paying customer actually sees little more than you can see for free from the road (and quite a lot less than you can see from one part of the main road which presents a panoramic view of the stones in context.) My suspicion is that its the chance of a free view that drives the owners mad.  Stonehenge must be English Heritage’s biggest earner, with relatively little outlay except on clearing rubbish, staff, fencing and providing shopping facilities.

But the new plans involve digging up one of the World’s Heritage landscapes to TUNNEL under it.  Plus rebuilding bits of the site to match the archaeologists’s assumptions.  If part of the site is to rebuilt, why not just stop messing about with it and build a fullscale plaster mockup in a place without traffic? Stonehenge already shows the impact of Victorian archaeologists’ putting stones back where they thought they should be, so its already quite ersatz enough.   The damage was already done when the road was built. Why make it worse?  At least it’s legitimate and relatively innocent damage now. Real people needed a road for purposes that roads are normally used for, so they built one, more or less ignoring the stones. In a few hundred years it will be part of the history of the Stonehenge site – ugly but at least genuine.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood the tunnelling plan.  I suspect that, given a toss-up between digging up ground brimming with 6,000 year-old construction work (the significance of which we really don’t currently have the understanding to grasp) and attracting the tourist pound/euro/dollar or Yen, the need for cash won. The so-called “cursus” was not considered to be anything significant at all, until about 30 years ago. Hence it was left alone, under the relatively benign  protection of a working farmer rather than the apparently unscrupulous hands of the heritage industry.

In this month’s English Heritage newsletter, a tv archaeologist wrote about how atmospheric Stonehenge would have appeared to the pilgrim of 6,000 years ago and how reconstructing the site would allow us to have this experience. This exemplifies the most woolly-minded heritage pesh: -

There were no “pilgrims” before the Christian era, surely. There is no evidence that Stonehenge was the endpoint of prehistoric devotional journeys. Even after thousands of years of casual destruction, there are stunning megalithic monuments throughout the whole of the British Isles. Why would Stonehenge have been any more significant than any other henge at the time it was actually used? Its significance to us is a Victorian legacy. 

The “atmospheric” idea is fine if you think only in terms of the vistor’s enjoyment but it is completely unrelated to any historical or archaeological value of Stonehenge. Prehistoric monuments are not just for holidays. They aren’t just ours. We have no way of knowing what future technologies will uncover if we can just stop ragging all prehistoric sites to death for our own short term goals. Do we have the right to contribute to damaging the heritage of future generations? If the “atmosphere” and the “experience”  are so important, why not build a prehistory theme park – preferably on a site already ravaged by industrial development - with no visible reminders of the twentyfirst century (or any of the other centuries in between the building of Stonehenge and now)? Avebury is inconveniently distant, so that could be added close by. Silbury Hill would provide a convenient backdrop. In fact, why not build replica pyramids nearby so you could compare Silbury with a stone pyramid of about the same era?  I believe the pyramids also have disturbing surroundings that stop you forgetting you are not in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. Angkor Watt is supposed to be really amazing as well, but is so awkwardly inaccessible. That could be there too.

Oh, silly me. I forgot that there is already a Disneyland Europe.