Off your head.

[hvered]

The church of St Dennis in Cornwall is on Carn Hill and the Michael Line passes straight across the St Dennis clay works. This didn't seem particularly significant, or Megalithic anyway, since the china clay works are nineteenth century. But archaeologists have enthused about Neolithic and Bronze Age pottery made of gabbroic clay (from gabbro rock) around Carn Brea which is also a feature on the Michael Line. The clay artefacts are viewed as evidence of trade and, as with smelting, high temperatures would have been attained.

[macausland]

Clay can be used to make a mould and a furnace as these two videos show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut3pXPyMze4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_mTgHj6M1Q

[Boreades]

Pots with clay from Devon and Cornwall are routinely found in archeo digs all over southern Britain. Especially in Dorset, which suggests a lot of material from D&C went to Dorset. Maybe for processing before export across to Gaul and beyond. Experts on pre-Roman coins maintain that the folks in Dorset (Durotrige Celts) were minting coins but the folks in D&C ( Dumnonia Celts) were not. Taken at face value, that suggests D&C folk made their trade on the raw materials (gold, silver, tin, copper), and the Dorset folk made their trade on the added-value of smelting, refining, and end-product producing.

Also, what was true then is still true today, you put your energy-intensive processes nearest the best available energy sources. Getting raw metal ores out the ground and refined into pure metal is one energy-intensive process. Let's call that the "wholesale" process. Recombining and reusing those metals into coins or whatever trinkets you want to produce is another energy-intensive process. Let's call that the "retail" process.

Unless there is an infinite energy power source, regardless of whether the energy source was wood from forests or coal from mines, putting both the wholesale and retail processes in the same place is just stupid. It means people are competing for the energy supply, to mutual disadvantage. So it makes sense to distribute the industry over a wider area, so that more energy sources can be included. Especially as folks in D&C were stripping all the high grounds of forests for timber quite rapidly right up to Roman times. Even if they were doing "conservation" forestry.

[hvered]

Tintagel came up on telly briefly, giving rise to some head-scratching over the fact that the 'castle' is a sham structure, more of a facade than a fortress i.e. no-one actually lived there never mind defended the site, so it must have been a trading post. Why have a trading post at one of the most unwelcoming (ship-wise) parts of the coast?

The most distinctive feature, the 'causeway' linking the headland to the ruined castle, was carefully ignored except to say the rock's been eroded or some similar remark. The presenters didn't mention St Michael's Mount which viewers would perhaps identify more readily though Cornish tin was acknowledged as the county's (or country's) prime asset. The King Arthur myth was their main focus since the sword in the stone symbol is as famous in its way as the Stonehenge lintels. Perhaps because the image has resonances with megaliths not to mention war memorials and market town crosses.

[Boreades]

Re Hattie: " as more sites and structures are uncovered "

Breaking news:

"Huge tomb of Celtic prince unearthed in France: 'Exceptional' 2,500-year-old burial chamber reveals stunning treasures"

The 'exceptional' grave, crammed with Greek and possibly Etruscan artefacts, was discovered in a business zone on the outskirts of Lavau in France's Champagne region.

The prince is buried with his chariot at the centre of a huge mound, 130 feet (40 metres) across, which has been dated to the 5th Century BC.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... sures.html

[Boreades]

This is getting tedious. Why is all our "scientific research" coming from the Daily Mail?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... sures.html

Or is the DM just better at "collating" other people's material?

http://tktk.gawker.com/my-year-ripping- ... 1689453286

[TisILeclerc]

Good to see you have discovered the joys of the Daily Mail Borry.

Following your example I find that they are going on about crows again. Perhaps they think that crows have the intelligence needed to benefit from the Mail's articles.

Anyway it seems that the wicked scientists are once again experimenting with corvid bribery and training them to work slot machines.

'The open source experiment is designed to look further into the brains of corvids.

‘The more people trying different things, the faster we'll all figure out how to work cooperatively with crows,’ hacker and writer Joshua Klein writes on the Crow Box website.

‘Once we’ve got the system optimised for teaching coin collection, we can move to seeing how flexibly they can learn other tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue.’

They have provided a helpful illustration for those of us with a lower intelligence level of the average crow.



I like the bit about 'search and rescue'. Perhaps they're thinking of replacing the helicopters with crows. That would be a bargain.

Or perhaps they've been reading Mr Harper's pirate crow theories and will be putting them to crew our naval ships, or ship, assuming we've got any left.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... anuts.html

[Boreades]

More crows.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1908&start=470

[Boreades]

I had a surprise in the garden last night. While I was putting our hens to bed, there was a sudden commotion in a nearby tree. A Barn Owl was being mobbed by a Crow. Fortunately for the Owl, it did escape by weaving low and fast around the bushes in the garden, and the crow gave up the chase. I've never seen anything like that with a Barn Owl before. Maybe the crow had caught the barn owl in the act of trying to grab a baby crow. Do our resident crow experts have an opinion? Or perhaps I should bother the Spring Watch people?

[hvered]

It's possible the crow was protecting a nestling but crows do seem to have a particular protectiveness. I've seen a pair of crows chasing off a bird of prey from a farm, not a rare occurrence I imagine, so your crow may well have been guarding you.

Corvids can be incredibly noisy when alarmed, impossible to ignore their calls as with geese and peacocks. Hence 'guardian ravens' in folklore and rookeries maintained on manorial estates in real life.