On 2006-08-29 22:53 Sem wrote

On the other subject in vogue at the moment, I doubt that the idea of time or effort entered the minds of the people moving the stones. This was religion and religion and life were the same to them. Add to this recent studies of hunter-gatherers and you can see they had a huge amount of time available to move stones.

However, it is far from clear that complex monuments, or for that matter involved ritual practices or social stratification, need to be based upon a system of sedentary agriculture with fixed fields and a dependence on staple crops. A brief consideration of North American prehistory should demonstrate this point. In the Late Archaic period (1800-500 BC), a number of large enclosures were built in the lower Mississippi Valley, by communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers. The largest of these, at Poverty Point in Louisiana, consisted of six concentric rings of earthworks covering 150 hectares, and was associated with large quantities of exotic non-utilitarian material culture (Jackson 1991, 266-7). Later, in the early years AD, the massive geometric embanked enclosures of the Ohio Hopewell were constructed by people exploiting a broad spectrum of wild resources and 'cultivating a modest range of garden crops' (Braun 1986, 119). Finally, in the late first millennium AD, the massive monumental complex at Cahokia, on the Mississippi, was the product of a society which practiced maize and squash horticulture in small raised gardens supplemented with many wild species (Dincauze and Hasenstab 1989, 73; Pauketat 1992). Societies like the north-west coast Amerindians had complex ceremonial cycles, yet the only crops which they cultivated were those which were used as sacraments in ritual (McMillan 1988, 183). Hunters and gatherers and those practicing garden horticulture and other simple forms of cultivation often have many hours of spare time not engaged in productive labour (Sahlins 1974). There is thus no reason at all why monument-building or complex ritual should be dependent upon a large agricultural surplus. On the contrary, one might argue that it would be more likely that agricultural intensification to support urban populations in more recent epochs could be held responsible for the impoverishment of the ceremonial lives of traditional societies.

From: Understanding the Neolithic, Julian Thomas, p.23; (emphasis mine)

On 2006-09-01 19:30, sem wrote:
To go back to the beginning of this, are bluestones used in local old buildings? If they were brought by glaciation it is inconceivable that ancient peoples used them all for monuments and there must be some chunks incorporated into farms or at the very least in field walls.

On 2006-08-30 08:04, mishkin wrote:
If you are to believe Meaden, the altar stone is the most important stone - a goddess stone-, he says that it was bought from Wales precisely because of the mica platelets. Given its relationship to the heelstone, which is slightly offcentre of the alignment with the midsummer sun, this is an "eclipse" trick (sun rises but then is obscured by the heelstone). Returning to the altar stone, that "when it is freshly scraped and washed its myriads of tiny mirrors shine red in the light of the rising sun". Of course he is using the same theory of the obelisk at Avebury mating with the goddess stone. So the same happened at Stonehenge between the heel stone and the altar stone.