New Views over Megalithia

[Boreades]

Can the Landlords start a new section? "Old Views Over Megalithia"

Item #1 :
Last night, St.Tony was on Channel 4
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/brit ... /64588-002
(oooh, he's starting to look as old as Mick!)

Tony follows in the tracks of Celtic chariots, explores a burial chamber that's older than the pyramids and uncovers the secrets of a great white horse on the Ridgeway.

Hill forts ... blah blah ... Celts ... blah blah ... Roman armies ... blah blah ... Saxons ... blah blah ... Normans.

Along the way, he visited Waylands Smithy and breathlessly concluded it's not Saxon. Doh.

Then he met with an archaeologist near Uffington Castle. Just for a second I thought it was going to get interesting.

Tony: Are they really hill forts?
Archaeo expert: Well, not really, they're hilltop enclosures, but I prefer to say hill forts.

Tony & Archaeo expert both laugh to camera at their little joke.
As in, "ha ha, we wouldn't get to be on TV if we just said hilltop enclosures".

The "secrets of a great white horse on the Ridgeway" were that, err, it's a horse, and it's, err, on the Ridgeway.
No mention of any astro-archaeology or not-horse ideas.

Boreades struggles to find toys to throw out of pram at TV.
Good aerial pictures from a drone of Dragon Hill.
That's about it.

[Britanny]

@Boreades

Why do you laugh at Tony? I thought it was a good program. Be grateful he says anything about your Ridgeway.

[TisILeclerc]

I think Baldrick has to tread a delicate path between the archies, the BBC or whatever other television service he works for and raising questions as an amateur in front of the experts.

I was particularly struck by his statement on the programme about Doggerland in which he saw two fish spears, one from England and the other from Denmark. He uttered the ultimate heretical remark that the two cultures were connected.

Something we are usually told only happened after the Romans left.

It's quite obvious really that there would be connections during the stone age and before but nobody ever mentions it. It's as if Britain was populated at some point but never explored across the North sea.

[TisILeclerc]

They don't like it up 'em.

For many years we have been regaled with tales of the evil Anglo Saxons going around massacring defenceless Celts. Not only in England, Wales and Scotland but also of course Ireland.

Studies on the 'G' haplogroup in Ireland have led Alastair Moffat to conclude that the invading 'Irish' committed genocide in their quest to take the country over.

This is hotly denied by the Irish themselves who naturally say they would never think of doing such a thing. Although in recent centuries they have never been shy about their martial prowess.

Moffat cites archaeological evidence, from the Copper Age, to suggest this movement. “Evidence for the beginning of the Copper Age in Ireland is also found in the south, particularly Ross Island in Killarney, where a tremendous complex system of prehistoric mines exists. It’s clear that the copper was exported.

“How did these new people impose themselves in such a big way,” he asks. “It has to have been through conflict. The early people were farmers so they invested generations of effort in improving the land. When these new people show up they must have used violence to shift the ‘G-Men’. The frequency of ‘G-Men’ is tiny in Ireland. Compare the statistics: 1 per cent versus 84 percent.”

Against this we have:

“I don’t know of any time in history where a culture came in and completely wiped out another,” says Pinhasi. “You don’t see total wipeouts, unless there is reason for a population to become extinct, like massive climate change. But we have no reason to believe Bronze Age farmers became extinct this way.

“Sure there were a lot of population movements and mixing going on at this time. That’s why modern people don’t look like neolithic people, genetically speaking, but it would have had minimal impact on the gene pool” he says. “You’re not going to have hundreds of thousands of people suddenly coming from Spain but you would definitely have had smaller groups coming in boats. Plus there’s no archeological proof of any massive warfare or battles here at that time.”

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/ ... -1.1426197

A case of biter bit perhaps? Will the Anglo Saxons be rehabilitated or are they still the genocidal exception?

[Boreades]

@Boreades

Why do you laugh at Tony? I thought it was a good program. Be grateful he says anything about your Ridgeway.

Hello Britanny.

Sorry, it's not personal. I laugh at a lot of TV presenters and authors. I even know some of them personally and host some of them for local events. I've even hosted the authors of TME, but that's another story/

Like Tissi says, the typical TV presenter has to tread a delicate path. That's between us (the numpties who know nothing, or are told that) and the prevailing experts (who know everything, or profess that). To be taken seriously by the chosen profession/subject area, the presenters have to defer towards the established experts. The elephant in the corner appears when it's a new or rapidly changing subject area, and the experts can only offer vague opinions, hardly any better than guesswork, or repeat what they were taught at university.

This very afternoon, I was walking the very same part of the Ridgeway as Tony (at Uffington Castle), and having to explain to a group of people why there are no castles. Despite loads of places being called Something Castle. I've known people come from as far as the USA to see the castles, and they were very pissed-off when there was no castle to be seen. It's the same for Hill Forts. Where's the fort? It's all a bit of a scam. Even the primary official body (English Heritage) knows this. See the fuss in Cornwall where they are erecting make-believe statues and literally inventing new Arthurian "history" at Tintagel to attract the tourists.

[Boreades]

The National CV of Britain is a delightfully curious mix of (a) history as far back as the megalithic...

The antiquity of Near Eastern cultures tends to be overstated; the volcanic eruption of the Mediterranean island of Thera, which extinguished the Minoans, is now thought by physicists to have occurred later than was formerly reckoned; this shortens the keystone Egyptian chronology, within which is recorded the resultant tsunami which hit the Egyptian coast; although iron from meteorites was used in jewelry early in Egyptian culture, the presence of presumably non-meteoritic iron in the construction of the Great Pyramid should influence the dating of that extraordinary structure more than it appears to; the over-extension of the Egyptian timeline was noted by Isaac Newton, after exhaustive study [see Isaac Newton]; then, too, there is a tendency among Britain’s archaeologists and historians towards national abnegation; while lauding and contributing enormously to the historical understanding of other peoples and places [see Scholarship], they often seem to view their own nation’s history through the wrong end of a smeary lensed telescope; Britain’s recorded history does not begin with the Romans and Briton’s were not barbarous before the arrival of Romans on their shores [see Rulers BC]; there is ancient cultural material that should provoke enquiry but is largely unconsidered [see Legends, Religion]; the British Isles in fact boast a vaster antiquity than the 'ancient world' to the east

.. and (b), a robustly independent streak.

We have pleasure in bringing you the briefest account of the LEAVE (OUT) story available anywhere (15 words), in line with our mission to deliver the most compressed complete history of Britain ever attempted:
“We joined a club, but they tried to take over our lives, so we left.”

http://www.thenationalcv.org.uk/megaliths.html

One might almost say a Pelagian attitude plus an Agincourt gesture.

[Boreades]

Spain 1, England 0

According to the Times:

A Spanish mining magnate has been fined more than €25 million and sentenced to 30 months in prison for destroying a cave that held evidence of how humans lived in neolithic times.

Victorino Alonso ordered the Cueva de Chaves in northeastern Spain to be prepared for use by a mining company, a judge ruled. He turned part of the archaeological site into a hunting ground and allowed goats to be kept inside the cave.

After a nine-year case, a judge at a court in Huesca ordered Alonso to pay €25.5 million in fines after he was convicted of damaging the national heritage. It is one of the toughest sentences handed down in a case of this kind.

Do the same in England (e.g. the Priddy Circle) and you just get a £2,500 fine and no time in prison at all.

http://www.somersetlive.co.uk/priddy-ci ... story.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-20096114

Mind you, there's a nice flat site on Salisbury Plain that could be used as a new Southern Central Airport instead of extending Heathrow. There's a few lumps of stone in the way, but they could easily be conserved/moved to a Theme Park somewhere. How about putting them in Hyde Park and save all the tourists making a long trip?

[TisILeclerc]

Don't give them ideas Borry old chap.

That's exactly what they would do if it got into their heads.

Only a few stones still stand at their original sites; most have been moved to museums or other protected sites

Two Pictish Class I stones are known to have been removed from Scotland. These are Burghead 5 (Moray), showing the figure of a bull, now in the British Museum, and the Crosskirk stone (Caithness), presented to the King of Denmark in the 19th century, but whose location is currently unknown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictish_stone

They could always be used as building material of course.

St Vigeans Church seems to have been largely rebuilt at the end of the 1100s or early in the 1200s. The area around the old church must have been dotted with large numbers of carved crosses and other carved stones. These included many dating back to the era of the Picts, the people who had governed much of northern Scotland for over five centuries but who had been subsumed into the Kingdom of the Scots by Kenneth I in the mid 800s. All these stones from around the site seem to have been simply gathered up and reused as building material to help construct the new church.

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/a ... stvigeans/

Mind you even the British Museum would have to think twice about pinching some stones.



https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot ... vered.html

Although a nice bluestone fire surround would be quite a feature in an arty person's home. I wonder how many could be chopped out of the ones at stonehenge? They could be given a certificate to show that they are genuine.

Or they could be tastefully arranged, or rearranged like Seahenge.

Other observations at the Seahenge Gallery were that not all the timbers from the circle are on show – the rest are in storage at the Museum with no plans to bring them out for display.

https://theheritagetrust.wordpress.com/ ... nn-museum/

[hvered]

St Vigeans Church seems to have been largely rebuilt at the end of the 1100s or early in the 1200s. The area around the old church must have been dotted with large numbers of carved crosses and other carved stones. These included many dating back to the era of the Picts, the people who had governed much of northern Scotland for over five centuries but who had been subsumed into the Kingdom of the Scots by Kenneth I in the mid 800s. All these stones from around the site seem to have been simply gathered up and reused as building material to help construct the new church.

The crosses "seem to have" vanished. The most obvious conclusion is the crosses, never mind the equally elusive foundations, are fictitious. The church is twelfth-century:

Some parts of the church's stonework dates to the early 12th century, and the original, small building was extended to the south and consecrated in 1242.

http://www.scottishchurches.org.uk/site ... ns+Tayside

though such contradictory findings don't put an end to the fiction

It seems likely a Pictish community founded a monastery here in around 700AD

The present church is on a 'prominent mound', presumably a Norman motte-and-bailey? Not quite clear why this Pictish monastery is supposed to have been built.

[Boreades]

The present church is on a 'prominent mound', presumably a Norman motte-and-bailey?

Let's not forget that some archaeos have just let slip that they agree some "Saxon" sites or Norman motte-and-bailey were built on top of much older constructions.

Like my local Merlin's Mound:

Radiocarbon dating tests were carried out on charcoal samples taken from Marlborough Mound, which lies in Marlborough College's grounds. The 19m (62ft) high mound had previously mystified historians. Some believed it dated back to about 600 AD. English Heritage said: "This is a very exciting time for British prehistory." Dig leader Jim Leary said: "This is an astonishing discovery. "The Marlborough Mound has been one of the biggest mysteries in the Wessex landscape. "For centuries people have wondered whether it is Silbury's little sister; and now we have an answer. " Silbury Hill, an artificial man-made mound about five miles away, also dates back to 2,400 BC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-13604479

It was the historians (folk with art degrees) who insisted it was Saxon or Norman, based on bugger-all evidence. It took folk with science degrees to actually produce evidence of how old they really are.