Heavens' Henge

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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby Boreades » 8:01 pm

Who's got the TME bicycle? As the cashbox is empty again (we have our suspects) it might need to be pedal-power to get us to the British Science Festival in Birmingham on 9th September.

New Stonehenge ground-penetrating radar reveals new things.

Image

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/w ... 52437/?all
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby jon » 9:03 pm

It's an interesting idea this procession theory. Not very likely though.
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby Boreades » 9:24 pm

Looks more like a drainage ditch to me.

As in, the Cursus was surrounded on all sides by raised earthworks. So rainwater has to go somewhere. All the better for spectators to see the 1.5 mile race, or whatever was taking place inside that sports stadium at the time.

Or maybe it was the Start/Finish line?
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby jon » 6:48 pm

Or maybe it was the Start/Finish line?


Maybe its purpose is so deeply intertwined with Stonehenge that the cursi and Stonehenge are interdependent: Perhaps so deeply intertwined that one could not exist without the other? (especially the early phases of Stonehenge).

In which case, any idea whose result was that the cursi are somehow ancillary to Stonehenge would be wrong.
Last edited by jon on 6:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby Boreades » 7:35 pm

They say:

A bigger discovery, Gaffney says, was a “bloody huge” pit about five yards in diameter at the eastern end of the Cursus. Today it lies buried at least three feet below the surface of the ground. Such a pit was much too large for a practical use—for instance, burying trash—because of the labor involved in digging it. In the archaeologists’ minds it could only have ritual implications, as “a marker of some kind,” Gaffney said. What’s more, if you drew a straight line between the pit and the heelstone at Stonehenge, it ran directly along the final section of the Avenue, on the path of the sunrise on the summer solstice.

“We thought, That’s a bit of a coincidence!” Gaffney recalled. “That was the point at which we thought, What’s at the other end? And there’s another pit! Two pits, marking the midsummer sunrise and the midsummer solstice, set within a monument that’s meant to be something to do with the passage of the sun.”

With his hands passing over the map, Gaffney showed how—on the longest days of the year—the pits formed a triangle with Stonehenge marking sunrise and sunset.

But what does that mean?
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby jon » 6:17 am

“In the archaeologists’ minds it could only have ritual implications, as “a marker of some kind,” Gaffney said.”

But what does that mean?


If Gaffney is right about archaeologists being fixated on the 'ritual', it would mean that archaeologists will never be capable of working out what these monuments were for, even if the answer were in plain sight. Given that archaeologists have spent 400 years working on the 'ritual' angle without any success, many must have worked out that it might possibly be a blind alley by now, so I think he's making sweeping, and probably unjustified, generalisations about a whole profession.
.
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby Mick Harper » 10:58 am

archaeologists have spent 400 years working on the 'ritual' angle without any success, many must have worked out that it might possibly be a blind alley by now,

You are far too optimistic, Jon. After all, the greatest intellectuals in Europe spent about 1800 years looking at everything from a ritual angle without noticing it was all a blind alley. Also, it will not be from the ranks of archaeologists that the truth will eventually emerge.
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby jon » 4:20 pm

Could be Mick!

I've started the process of expanding a 'non-ritual' explanation:

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=6412&forum=4
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby Boreades » 8:42 pm

I'm hoping that some creative engineering person will produce the empirical evidence (no pressure Jon). :-)
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Re: Heavens' Henge

Postby Boreades » 10:43 pm

Who else saw "Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath"?

On iPlayer :http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hc5v7

It seemd (to me) to be a very well produced programme, the geo-physics was explained well, and the computer-graphics of models of what they've found was good stuff.

The fly in the ointment? That damned word "Ritual". Ritual this, Ritual that, Ritual the other.
FFS, when will they get round to just saying "We don't know"?
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