Who Built The Stones?

[Boreades]

Komorikid has said many excellent things - and I wish he would say more - but (here's the thing) - why would The Sea People build megalithic stone places many miles from the sea?

Despite all the posts on TME, it still perplexes me.

[Boreades]

Wiltshire, home of Stonehenge and Avebury, is also famous for its White Horses. Our mention of White Horses in another thread might just have given us a clue.

From http://www.lablit.com/article/341

Figures in myth and landscape

One of the constellations commonly connected with Perseus in Greek legend is of course Pegasus, the winged horse. To the Celts this was the horse of Llyr, the sea god, a beautiful white beast that figured in many Celtic myths and still has marine associations (we call the whitecaps of waves whitehorses). In the ancient Celtic world the constellation of Pegasus (coupled to Andromeda on its back) represented the goddess Epona riding her white horse and is probably symbolized in the British landscape by the great chalk figure of the white horse at Uffington.

The chalk downs of Wiltshire would surely be an auspicious place for the Sea People to mark their place, well above flood plains.

[TisILeclerc]

Borry

'... why would The Sea People build megalithic stone places many miles from the sea?'

Perhaps they didn't?

We assume that there was one unified society but perhaps there were a series of different societies living on the islands?

Current thinking tells us that refugees from the ice moved north from the Pyrenees and other refuges in southern Europe. If we just take the people of the Pyrenees it is clear that there would have been sea going communities who would make use of their boats. In this way they would be able to follow the coast north and west as it followed the coast of southern Britain and Ireland, both being joined at the time and joined, via Doggerland, to Europe.

The other community would presumably followed the herds north keeping to the land. We know from the cave paintings in France and Spain that these people were not the skin clad savages we have always been told about. They were very skilful and perceptive. It's unfortunate that we transfer our own ignorance on to them. 'They must have been ignorant savages because we know nothing about them.' Which tells us more about ourselves than them.

Anyway if this is correct there were at least two groups of people living in the western landmass which we can't give a name to because it was all part of a continuation of the main body of Europe. One group with cultural links stretching from Portugal and Spain through to France and all coastal areas west and north as far as northern Doggerland and Scandinavia.

The other group was a land locked group and tackled their situation by skills associated with working on the land rather than the sea. Seafarers live on the coast for the obvious reason that the coast is there, as is the sea with nobody to stop their progress.

There could also have been remnants of an original population which weathered the ice age in southern Britain, (not covered by ice) and as recently shown in parts of Norway and Siberia which were also ice free.

Even today the mindset of farm labourers is different from that of fishermen, or for that matter coal miners and engineering workers The technicalities of each discipline help to give a differing 'world view' to those occupied in the different forms of work.

The sea people would have been interested in navigation from their own point of view sailing on the water around coast lines. Their livelihood was also governed by the fact that they sailed about on boats. The land people would have been more attuned to the rhythms of harvests and breeding cycles. And underneath the miners dug away. Each group would have depended to a certain extent on the other but by pursuing their own disciplines they would have looked on life and nature in differing ways associated with their respective lifestyles.

[Mick Harper]

This is roughly THOBR's contention re the split between the Romance (!) and Germanic (!) branches of the Western Indo-European (!) language group.

[TisILeclerc]

'Map of the shoreline in the neighbourhood of the British Isles, ca 18 000 BP.

Note that the ice sheet shown on Britain in this map is much smaller for the same date than most other maps.

Photo: National Geographic Vol. 222 No 6 December 2012 '

This is a map showing the extent to which Britain was joined to Europe and how far the land extended westwards and northwards as well as showing the size of Doggerland eighteen thousand years ago.

It shows quite clearly how the resettlers in the west were isolated from those further east.

http://www.donsmaps.com/icemaps.html

The return of people to Britain was apparently much quicker than had previously been thought.

'"The big question has always been how quickly, and in what number, did people return once the glaciers had retreated," said research team leader Nick Barton, from the anthropology department of Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England. "Now with the benefit of larger numbers of radiocarbon dates corrected against a highly accurate record of global climatic change from the Greenland ice record, it seems reoccupation was an almost instantaneous event across northern and central Europe." '

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... tion2.html

[Boreades]

Note that the ice sheet shown on Britain in this map is much smaller for the same date than most other maps.

That's a curious thing in itself.

Presumably they also have another explanation for all the geological features down south that we used to be told were caused by glaciation?

[Boreades]

If that really is using the latest evidence on the full extent of the ice sheet, the "glacial erratics" theory is in trouble. Hasn't that has been the geologists' preferred explanation for some time?

In 1908, geologist Herbert Thomas suggested that the Stonehenge bluestones matched a suite of igneous rocks found in the vicinity of Carn Menyn, a rocky outcrop in the Preseli Hills in western Wales, more than 200 kilometers away. ... Then, in 1971, geologist Geoffrey Kellaway published a study in Nature suggesting that the Stonehenge bluestones were transported onto Salisbury Plain by glaciers. Kellaway said that these bluestones were “erratics,” boulders that had been moved by ice from the west many thousands of years ago...

http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/st ... ous-stones

[Boreades]

Balls.

Ball-bearings is now the latest idea on how the stones were moved from their quarry sites to the Henge construction site.



Students from Exeter Uni get to pretend to be Thomas The Tank Engine?

Experts hit on the new idea after examining mysterious stone balls found near Stonehenge-like monuments in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. About the size of a cricket ball, they are precisely fashioned to be within a millimetre of the same size.

What mysterious stone balls?

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

[Boreades]

Rolling stones seems to be an avenue worth exploring.
e.g.
The highest concentration of stone spheres in Bosnia is near the town of Zavidovici, northwest of the Valley of the Pyramids (Visoko) and about 100 kilometres from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo...The greatest concentration of stone spheres is found in Grab, in the immediate vicinity of Zavidovici. In a shallow valley on the outskirts of the village, tens of them – some complete, some broken – are located in a now dry creek bed.



http://www.philipcoppens.com/spheres.html

[Boreades]

But, to me, the "mysterious stone balls found in Aberdeenshire" look more like Platonic Solids than ball bearings, which are usually smooth to offer least resistance to rolling.



http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/britarch/h ... balls.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_Stone_Balls