On 2012-12-18 10:50, jonm wrote:
Thanks George

Seems to be fairly consistent with the idea of chalk being used on a large scale, perhaps even more than those material types which have a good survival rate?

Jon , there are other engravings too ,e.g. at Flagstones . It's difficullt to say as most of the chalk areas have little or no exposed rock surfaces for engraving and as with limesone there must have been a realisation that it degrades , unless buried , so was it avoided for that reason , or were there much more lost to decay .? Chalk is easy to carve so it must have had some appeal for the sculptors

On 2012-12-18 09:26, tiompan wrote:
Ric , We know from ethnography as mentioned a few posts ago ,that hunter -gatherers do use the solstices as a basis for their calenders and feasting dates but like the circumpolar hunter gatherers this interest and understanding was based on recording not building monuments . An interest in the heavens and particularly recording the solar cycle is likely to date to much earlier than Upper Paleolithic cave art , this is not the same as building monuments with alignments to the solstices .
George

On 2012-12-18 10:10, tiompan wrote:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/t/the_folkton_drums.aspx
There's also the chalk plaque from Kings Barrow ridge .

George

On 2012-12-18 09:51, jonm wrote:
It sounds as if all the objects were buried in some fashion, perhaps by chance, which allowed rainwater to be filtered through chalk before it reached the object?

This perhaps indicates that there was a culture of using chalk to carve objects. But irregular pieces of chalk are widely available for utilitarian purposes.

I'm having difficulty seeing why they would be cached if they were widely available. For example, when walking across the Downs, I can find pieces of broken chalk by the dozen. If I were to fashion a piece of chalk into an object, I might consider it to have value, but whilst I might store irregular pieces of chalk as a commodity, I'm unlikely to want to cache it underground because it is more effort to do that than to walk around a bit and pick up some more.


For example, at Stonehenge the sarsen monument appears to have been conceived by someone. The alternative is that it was constructed on the spur as a series of separate ideas.

If it was conceived, then it would probably have been done by someone capable of thinking in three dimensions. I don't know what proportion of the population regularly do this, but it tends to be common amongst engineers and architects (an object is imagined in three dimensions and then rotated or otherwise manipulated in the mind, to look at how it will work, before putting pen to paper.)

It is easy to imagine things in 3-D, but it is not easy to transfer the concept of what a thing will become without using drawings. I imagine that persuading others to erect something such as Stonehenge using words alone would be exceptionally difficult.

So the fact that Stonehenge exists in such detail seems to me to show a high probability that the drawing of concepts existed as a regular occurrence in the neolithic (and was probably not invented for the purpose of constructing Stonehenge).

I don't think - I could be wrong - that anyone was coerced into building stone circles including Stonehenge. It is more likely to have been a devotional act, almost like going on a pilgrimage. Religion had a very strong pull on people and communities in the past, we have lost that sense in the developed world, it is hard for us to imagine what went through these peoples minds.

I can't imagine how they manoeuvered those colossal stones though, without accident - I'd expect to find prone stones which broke up or got caught in bogs and so forth, but there don't appear to be any.

On 2012-12-19 01:31, megalith6 wrote:

Quote:

On 2012-12-18 10:10, tiompan wrote: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/t/the_folkton_drums.aspx There's also the chalk plaque from Kings Barrow ridge . George

Those are possibly owl-like images amongst the incised lines?

Ric

On 2012-12-19 02:01, megalith6 wrote:



I think Stonehenge was the final big statement in stone, of stone, in the Wessex Culture. As awesome as it is, it is also a farewell to stone, that substance which served us so well and for so long. Metallurgy is a rising star on the horizon in the final stage of Stonehenge, the end of an era and the dawning of a new one. However virtuoso the Stonehenge stone masons were - and we couldn't match them today - they were no match for the metal axes and later the Bronze Age rapiers which were coming in and would revolutionise their world. The stone circles were abandoned.

Ric

On 2012-12-19 11:25, tiompan wrote:
Ric ,There are many others stone circles in Africa but closer to Nabta are the Libyan stone circles one major one was discovered by Bagnold in the '30's . Nabta is only 4m in diameter and the alignments are rough but there is enough to accept the solstice one...Of course none of this has any bearing on the the majority of stone circles in Britain /Ireland not being aligned on the solstices and the common misconception that they might be.

On 2012-12-19 12:29, megalith6 wrote:

Quote:

On 2012-12-19 11:25, tiompan wrote: Ric ,There are many others stone circles in Africa but closer to Nabta are the Libyan stone circles one major one was discovered by Bagnold in the '30's . Nabta is only 4m in diameter and the alignments are rough but there is enough to accept the solstice one...Of course none of this has any bearing on the the majority of stone circles in Britain /Ireland not being aligned on the solstices and the common misconception that they might be.

Hi George,

It would be a misconception to believe that all stone circles are directly aligned on the solstices. Particularly also because there were other cardinal points for the sun during the megalithic age.

I think Nabta may have a bearing on the advent of stone circles in northwestern Europe, albeit indirectly. I support the notion that agriculture traveled south to north with respect to Europe and I see the influence of Nabta travelling north as well - in terms of the culture responsible for it, and the transmission of this knowledge by way of trade and the gradual movement or migration of populations. There are even older circles in Turkey but they do not seem to contain astronomical lines of sight, although I wonder if they do or did contain alignments?

There is something here but I cannot vouch for its reliability.

http://www.pr.com/press-release/444892

Ric

On 2012-12-15 15:28, megalith6 wrote:
On 2012-12-15 12:12, jonm wrote:

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What if we were able to find out: Without knowing what was being done, is there any direct benefit to society in knowing what their perception was?

Most certainly yes, there is always a benefit to understanding the past, or anything else, come to that.

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You could argue that revealing the unknown is always of benefit to society, but that's a catch 22 because you don't know what the unknown is. If the unknown knowledge might be of no use, or even damaging, does knowing what that is, for the sake of knowledge itself, outweigh all other considerations?

Yes, knowledge is power, for that reason it needs to be accessible to all, or the few have access to it and may exploit those who do not. That is what is happening in society today, with the closure of public libraries and so forth. Knowledge cannot damage anything however, only people can do that. People have the responsibility to use knowledge sensibly. That if anything is the Catch-22, can we trust ourselves? I think we have to take that gamble, ultimately.

Ric

On 2012-12-20 15:29, Orpbit wrote:

Quote:

On 2012-12-15 15:28, megalith6 wrote: On 2012-12-15 12:12, jonm wrote: Quote: What if we were able to find out: Without knowing what was being done, is there any direct benefit to society in knowing what their perception was? Most certainly yes, there is always a benefit to understanding the past, or anything else, come to that. Quote: You could argue that revealing the unknown is always of benefit to society, but that's a catch 22 because you don't know what the unknown is. If the unknown knowledge might be of no use, or even damaging, does knowing what that is, for the sake of knowledge itself, outweigh all other considerations? Yes, knowledge is power, for that reason it needs to be accessible to all, or the few have access to it and may exploit those who do not. That is what is happening in society today, with the closure of public libraries and so forth. Knowledge cannot damage anything however, only people can do that. People have the responsibility to use knowledge sensibly. That if anything is the Catch-22, can we trust ourselves? I think we have to take that gamble, ultimately. Ric

This is absolutely the key. Knowledge in itself is not damaging. It only becomes so if it is known but is being hidden. Then it is damaging to the "hider", should that knowledge be revealed.

The question then becomes, "What knowledge might there be coded into the alignments of stone circles which can be damaging?" There are only two possibilities - that the alignments code not one , but two cycles, namely the "Year" and "The Great Year". The latter - precession - is the unknown quantity. What did the ancients know about precession and how did they code it?

Current history of astronomy and science theorises that precession was discovered by Hipparchos. The most damaging knowledge that can be revealed, is that which overturns this position of consensus within academia. If precession was to be found to be coded into megalithic structures one can imagine the impact.

This is of course the territory of the "alternative thinkers". And they are dealt with by being branded as "pseudoscientists" at best, but preferably "cranks". Martin Rees branded those who see patterns in the pyramids as "Green-Ink Scribblers" when comparing them with the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The latter claimed his ideas came to him in dreams! Yet the results were regarded as evidence of "preternatural" abilities - i.e. unknown but capable of being rationalised.

Yet alternative thinkers are of course cranks to him - because in decades of attempts, no one has yet demonstrably proven knowledge of precession. Imagine his position if one day some alternative thinker decodes, proveably, that the builders of structures such as Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza, were indeed holding the knowledge of the "Great Year" and its cycle, in great detail!

Imagine then the damage if such successful decoding also exposed an unequivocal fact that there are fraternities in our society who must have known this and have kept it hidden from the rest. To counter this frightening possibility, alternative thinkers have a secondary perception among the public generally as "conspiracy theorists". A branding fiercely pursued not just in the history of astronomy, and science, including archaeology, but also in politics. And so perceptions become strongly polarised.

I wonder to which cardinal direction are members here aligned - The solar year, or the solar "Great Year" or could it be both? In short, did the "ancients" kill two birds with one stone!

Richard

[ This message was edited by: Orpbit on 2012-12-20 15:34 ]

This is absolutely the key. Knowledge in itself is not damaging. It only becomes so if it is known but is being hidden. Then it is damaging to the "hider", should that knowledge be revealed.

On 2012-12-20 16:54, tiompan wrote:
Richard , Ramanajun was formidable mathematician who had worked at his discipline for the necessary thousands of hours to be a genius . The information that cam to him in his dreams was in relation to his subject , he didn’t dream of the structure of benzene , that was another dreamer Kekule , but that was also his subject .Dreaming , hyponogogia ,the periods between sleep and waking , the intuition of experts , can all access information that might not be immediately available to the concentrating or even awake mind . We all do it i.e. sleep on it , stopping thinking about the name and it comes unbidden . The information has to be there in the first place to allow access or create connections .

If precession was understood in prehistory , and it may well have been , why should we expect it to be encoded in a stone circle .
George

On 2012-12-20 17:43, jonm wrote:
[quote] This is absolutely the key. Knowledge in itself is not damaging. It only becomes so if it is known but is being hidden. Then it is damaging to the "hider", should that knowledge be revealed.

My question was intended to be a bit less philosophical and comes from something else I've been asked recently.

If knowledge of Stonehenge or other monuments is hidden, or perhaps coded in some way or other, what benefit to society is there in funding research into it?

This isn't supposed to be a facetious question: Is there a mission statement or something similar which discusses for example why academic research is being undertaken? I'm having difficulty coming up with an answer on my own and I suppose that archaeologists must have a reason which justifies why it is important that they do what they do.

On 2012-12-22 00:24, Orpbit wrote:

Quote:

On 2012-12-20 16:54, tiompan wrote: Richard , Ramanajun was formidable mathematician who had worked at his discipline for the necessary thousands of hours to be a genius . The information that cam to him in his dreams was in relation to his subject , he didn’t dream of the structure of benzene , that was another dreamer Kekule , but that was also his subject .Dreaming , hyponogogia ,the periods between sleep and waking , the intuition of experts , can all access information that might not be immediately available to the concentrating or even awake mind . We all do it i.e. sleep on it , stopping thinking about the name and it comes unbidden . The information has to be there in the first place to allow access or create connections .

That applies to anyone who is devoting time to a research project - it becomes their "subject". Once a person acquires a critical mass of knowledge then the mind can get to work - "in dreams" - if the intention behind the project is genuine and truthful. The point I was making is that it is irrational to say that one person's inspiration can be rationalised, but another person's inspiration is "Green-ink scribbling". It is quite clear to me that Robert Bauval's contention that the three pyramids of Giza represent Orion's belt is perfectly rational and objective, but look at the response he got to that, from the scientific community.

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If precession was understood in prehistory , and it may well have been , why should we expect it to be encoded in a stone circle . George

Because that is clearly one method they chose to communicate their knowledge, be it in a coded fashion so that only initiates understood the meaning, and/or to implement that knowledge in a social engineering sense to hide the true meaning from them 9the non-initiates) and manipulate the masses into a different "truth" that benefits the "hider". Hence why the cover up becomes so important. Decoding is therefore a combination of looking for both scientific rationale as well as cultural manifestations, for example rituals.

Richard

Because society knows that Stonehenge exists and as a World Heritage Site requires answers as to what the site was built for