Why Dont You Blog?

This blog (as a collective being) loves megalithic structures and sites.

So, it was interesting to read on clioaudio’s excellent blog and in an English Heritage press release that Silbury Hill is being excavated.

Ironically,the half-arsed attempts to nose around in Silbury Hill were what is putting it at risk, after about 4000 years of being pretty solid. It’s a pyramid shaped man-made hill so it was inherently steady.

It was dug into by the Duke of Northumberland, in 1777, and by a Professor Atkinson, in the 1960s. The shafts they dug have made the monument unstable. Hence English Heritage is going in to shore it up with concrete. Hmm.

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]

A huge settlement has been dug up at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire (near Stonehenge) according to the BBC. The BBC has footage and a radio summary as well.
This is fascinating. All the same, I can’t resist a rant about the BBC report and the archaeologists’ comments, assuming the BBC quoted them correctly.

• Firstly, the article is entitled “Stonehenge builders’ houses found.” Surely this says that the homes of the Stonehenge builders have been located. Clearly not.
  The body of the article says that the “The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.” Well, this is precise to within 100 years. I didn’t know that we could date Stone Age remains with such precision (but I will assume that some scientific method, such as radio-carbon dating was used, rather than assumptions based on “culture.” ) Giving the researchers the benefit of the doubt that both structures were built in the same 100 year period, where is there any evidence that the people who lived here put in shifts on Stonehenge? I’d love to be proved wrong on this but it seems unlikely.
• If it was the builders’ village, why did they carry out miles of extra walking every night, after a tough day’s megalithic rock shifting? Durrington is “near” Stonehenge, if you are in a car driving along the Salisbury road. It is no mean stretch on foot.
• The text suggests that the archaeologists have identified a huge village. Why do they have to assume that it was mainly a ritual site? Did Stone Age people not bother with the normal business of living ANYWHERE? Do we only care about ritual sites? So, when we find signs of everyday life, they have no value unless they can be tied to a ritual site? (Preferably, one that’s known around the world and would attract preferential funding?)
• Orienting sites to get the most sunshine in the winter must have been a practical necessity before electric light. We build our own houses to get the most light in the kitchen. Does facing the winter sun necessarily suggest some obscure calendrical purpose, what about practical architectural knowledge?
• The claim is that the site wasn’t occupied all year round- hence it was ritual in origin. From my limited understanding of early agricultural societies, I would have thought that some of the year would be spent in semi-nomadic search of food. After wandering around finding the best sources of game and vegetables, a return to permanent winter quarters makes senses. With little else to do in the bleak months, humans create occasions, like Christmas, to fill their time and cement social bonds. This doesn’t mean that rituals are the primary purpose of the winter lay-off, rather that the ceremonies are created during the leisure and social time it provides.
• Another piece of “evidence” for a largely ritual purpose is the large number of burials on the site. It was a large village. People must have been died with regularity. Do our current cities exist for mainly ritual purposes because we bury or cremate our dead within them?

Congratulations on a really important find. This rant is just a complaint that archaeology can be blinkered by ritual-centrism. This stops us from seeing Stone Age peoples as human beings – our own not very remote ancestors – who must have had more urgent things to do than to spend their entire lives focussed on cosmic rituals.

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.

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/