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People buried at Stonehenge may have come from as far away as Wales
- hunta2097 8y agoI am lucky enough to live not too far from Stonehenge. The most surprising thing is how unremarkable the surrounding area is - geography-wise. It must have meant something to those people. It's pretty flat but that's not remarkable for Wiltshire. There are so many 5,000 year old ancient sites in this part of the Britain. Make sure you also visit Avebury if you are ever in the area - it's just as old as Stonehenge but you can still walk among the stones and touch them.
- singularity2001 8y agoWas it maybe their capital city because the area was flat?
- darkhorn 8y agoMay be there was forest back then?
- narag 8y agoIn the man-made department, I always wonder if missing pieces of buildings were made of wood. Maybe Stonehenge would make much more sense that way.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoThere have been serious academic archaeological suggestions that the original monuments were circles and lines of trees, and the stones were added to make the layout permanent. I'm not completely convinced. Dragging giant rocks over open chalk land is hard. Dragging them through woodland is a lot harder.
- chrisseaton 8y ago> The most surprising thing is how unremarkable the surrounding area is - geography-wise. Salisbury plain? It’s some of the most commanding land in the south of England.
- joshlemer 8y agoWhat do you mean by commanding?
- chrisseaton 8y agoYou can stand on the high parts and see large parts of the Kingdom of Wessex, enabling you to literally command it.
- DanBC 8y agoAvebury is remarkable. You can walk among the stones and touch them. People took some of the stones for building materials. And there's a modern road that cuts through the circle. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Avebury/@51.4289196,-1.8548908,498m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x48715c3293800313:0xd6131e27f8f5e5aa!8m2!3d51.4289196!4d-1.8548908 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Avebury/@51.4289196,-1.8...
- toddh 8y agoWhen I was there I was wondering that same thing. Nice little river valley. Pretty surrounding hills. Maybe if you could feel ley lines the experience would be different?
- cptskippy 8y agoIs 150 miles a big deal because of the time period or because it's the UK? For some reason they seem to make a big deal about distances that are a day trip in the US.
- matte_black 8y agoProbably took about 10 days to cover those 150 miles one way.
- ianai 8y agoWhy? Is the terrain tough or they just would have been on foot? (Having no knowledge of the geography)
- matte_black 8y agoProbably the dead body was a tough logistics problem. Gotta haul a casket, and also feed the party over the course of the days, while also watching out for roving highwaymen. Perilous days.
- Alupis 8y agoThe California missions are spaced approximately 30 miles apart, which was considered a days journey with the intention one could travel from mission to mission. This was, of course, with horses and wagons, etc... So about 10-15 miles a day back then is a reasonable assumption I think.
- kathe-rine 8y agoThe scientists in the article suspect that the bodies were cremated elsewhere, and the ashes transported to Stonehenge.
- chrisseaton 8y ago> highwaymen You're about four-and-a-half thousand years out there...
- seibelj 8y agoStonehenge really affected me. It’s essentially a circle of big rocks in the middle of nowhere, but what it says about humanity is fascinating. I highly recommend seeing it if you have any interest in human history.
- lostlogin 8y agoThe number of visitors and the nearby motorway really detracted from it for me, but it might have been a bad day. Much smaller but really impressive were other ones that appear on ordinance survey maps all over the U.K. (check the wiki). Even the relatively busy Avebury one is easy to escape the tourists due to is vast size and long Meg sticks in my mind. I was on a working holiday, and can recommend getting an ordinary survey map of any area you’ll be around in the U.K. and visiting the old stuff. World War Two airbases, Neolithic barrows, canal locks, quarries, mines and churches etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stone_circles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stone_circles
- chrisseaton 8y ago> nearby motorway There’s no motorways by Stonehenge - that’s the A303 you’re thinking of.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoWhile a motorway is a special designation of road in the UK, in practice roads like the A303 are motorways, as in roads consisting of constant, heavy motorised traffic.
- cup-of-tea 8y ago> ordinance survey > ordinary survey Ordnance Survey. Interesting couple of auto-complete errors.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoVery interesting take on strontium isotope counting revealing a corpse's pre-death geography. I didn't know they can do that.
- newthrowaway 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg&feature=share https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg&feature=share related
- scoot 8y agoIt's been known since the 20's that some of the stones came from Wales, (although the the view on which quarry has recently been revised [1]), so it shouldn't really come as a huge surprise that some of the people involved in the mind boggling task of transporting them should also have originated there. As for why, or how -- that remains a mystery. [1] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1215/071215-stonehenge-bluestone-quarries http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1215/071215-stonehen...
- cup-of-tea 8y agoI really think the reason why might be the same as why I've spent ten hours reorganising my emacs configuration this weekend. Why not? What really makes me wonder is how much of the output of people like us will be recognised in the far future. How much will be lost? Probably a tiny fraction will be remembered. Then it makes you wonder about what has been lost if we're only seeing a tiny fraction of their civilisation.
- j-pb 8y ago"But strontium turns out to withstand the heat," ... what a surprising discovery!