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Who Built The Stones? (Megalithic)
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aurelius



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Mick Harper wrote:
No. This 'Pursuit of the Truth' is the ultimate orthodoxy. They all claim to be madly keen on it. We are in Pursuit of the Interesting. Things may be more interesting when they are also true but if you are reading my Unreliable History you'll get the difference.

Put it this way. If you worry about whether you're on the straight and narrow you won't get very far.


OK, I'll read UH, which presumable starts with the Manstein Plan sections - looks interesting.
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aurelius



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I like the idea of a landing stage, but I wouldn't put it there at Durrington Walls. The modern Ordnance Survey maps are actually a hindrance to any understanding, as they have too much modern detail and have lost a lot of the suptleties of older versions.

Fortunately there is a very good archive of historic OS maps here:
http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/

Thanks for that link, it provides clear contour lines. It looks a bit steep around the Camp to be dragging up 4 metre stones so I would still favour the 'natural harbour' shape into Durrington Walls, especially if the site was first used when sea and river levels were higher.

The Avenue is shown to divert, somewhat speculatively, south east to the Avon, west of the Camp on the Wiki page

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

so perhaps there was an unloading point down there. You would expect most trading to be conducted downstream from Amesbury but the stones came from upriver if floated from the Marlborough Downs.

There certainly seems to have been a lot of people living in the area.
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Boreades


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I like the ideas of the likes of Robert Langdon (everything megalithic was built above the 100m contour because everything below the 100m contour was too wet or underwater)

If we go with that, what does it suggest?

1) That this arc of stones at Durrington might have been an early-phase port wall while the waters were that high.
2) As the waters receeded, it became obsolete as a port
3) Vespasian's Camp was the replacement until that too was high-and-dry

As there will always be some contrary so & so, we have to take note that sometime c.500 or 600AD, the water levels in Southern England rose again (or the land suddenly sank), but not enough to make Vespasian's Camp or Durrington viable ports again.
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aurelius



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Boreades wrote:
1) That this arc of stones at Durrington might have been an early-phase port wall while the waters were that high.

More of a marker than a wall if they are arrayed in more or less the original positions (and not dragged there from a full stone circle by a later culture; this also assumes that many original DW stones were not later shifted to Stonehenge itself...)

Rapid sea level rises seem to have reached a peak around 7000 BP if this is correct (and I'll try to post the right link this time!) with the main pulses related to the collapse of the Scandinavian and Laurentide ice sheets,

http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-sea-levels-part-1-from-the-holocene-to-romans/

The rise is over a hundred metres. Some of this would have been offset by the elevation of the land once it became ice-free (isostatic re-adjustment).

By necessity, Langdon needs Stonehenge and possibly the others to be older than orthodoxy if our understanding of sea level rise chronology is correct.

2) As the waters receded, it became obsolete as a port


Could be...

Durrington Walls is around 300 feet above present sea level according to the old map you directed me to - just over 90 metres and well within the range on the chart.

Most flood maps show the effects of a sea level rise of 60 metres above present day ones . This brings the notion of floating the Bluestones from Preseli into the realms of feasibility. The inundation from the west would reach as far as Marston in Wiltshire.

3) Vespasian's Camp was the replacement until that too was high-and-dry


Possibly, I know nothing about this Camp yet.

It is also worth noting that if present sea levels were to rise by up to 40 metres, Newgrange would become islolated on a promontory by the River Boyne, and by 60 metres it is submerged.
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Boreades


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Good, but Bluestones from Preseli is a dead-end distraction. It was a "human transport" theory invented in 1922 by a Welsh geologist, Herbert Thomas, with no evidence (before or since). Even his Welsh colleagues thought it was a daft idea. Their preferred theory was glacial erratics.

If you look at those old 1:25,000 OS maps again, and (for example) look at the Marlborough Downs east of Avebury, you can see the whole area was positively heaving with large sarsen stones. There was no shortage of building material and no need to get "special" stones from Preseli.
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aurelius



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Boreades wrote:
Good, but Bluestones from Preseli is a dead-end distraction. It was a "human transport" theory invented in 1922 by a Welsh geologist, Herbert Thomas, with no evidence (before or since). Even his Welsh colleagues thought it was a daft idea. Their preferred theory was glacial erratics.

If you look at those old 1:25,000 OS maps again, and (for example) look at the Marlborough Downs east of Avebury, you can see the whole area was positively heaving with large sarsen stones. There was no shortage of building material and no need to get "special" stones from Preseli.


But Borry (if I may) we are told the two stones are of different composition and origin. There is not supposed to be a source for the Blue Stone dolerite in the region of Stonehenge - unless someone has proven otherwise?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluestone#Bluestone_of_Stonehenge

The glacial transportation theory is not without its problems. Wiki reckons the 'Amhurst Archer''s burial illustrates the international draw of the Stonehenge complex - and it is increasingly a complex - as more finds were made (why at least three henges in such a compact area)? Some think it was believed to be a 'healing centre'.

For a site of mega-importance, would not people go to mega-lengths?
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Boreades


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The stones at Avebury and Stonehenge are of many differing compositions. They are not from a singular source. As one would expect for the original megalithic engineers had a smorgasbord of large stones to choose from.
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aurelius



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Boreades wrote:
I like the ideas of the likes of Robert Langdon (everything megalithic was built above the 100m contour because everything below the 100m contour was too wet or underwater)


Believe it or not, although I read Prehistoric Britain - the Stonehenge Enigma a couple of years ago, at the time the reference to Durrington Walls meant nothing to me. and I usually forget 90% of what I have read pretty quick.

Today, though, I came across one of his videos on YouTube and I couldn't believe he had come to the same conclusion...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWVzy8jhGfQ
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Ishmael


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And how do you suppose England has so much water on it?
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Mick Harper
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Who built these stones?
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=40843
I reckon partisans in the Second World War. It would be nice to find out how that is ruled out.
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Ishmael


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In theory, forensic geology could rule out a recent assemblage of the rocks, by referencing the plant growth and weathering on exposed and unexposed portions.
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Mick Harper
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Excellent article in the latest edition of Q-mag http://www.q-mag.org/pytheas-megaliths-and-the-tides.html

Sample paragraph

Thomas noticed that the great megalithic observatories were all implanted in zones of strong tides. Carnac commands over the Atlantic Coast, and particularly over the difficult entrance to this interior sea which is the Gulf of Morbihan. The Great Menhir of Locqmariaquer (23m high, 347t, the height of the obelisk at Place de la Concorde, but 117t heavier!) surely served as a landmark to seamen, just as today the churchsteeple of Larmor-Baden. As for the “astronomic computer” of Stonehenge, it is situated halfway between Bristol and Southampton, the two points on Earth which (along with the Bay of Fundy in Canada) experience the strongest tides.
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aurelius



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Have mark stones' been mentioned on this site before? I've come across a reference to them in a reprint of a 1952 book by E. Mansell,
The Rambler's Countryside Companion.

It's a bit late for TME I know, but he has been talking about the Ancients having to travel for two major commodities, flint and salt. The very early trackways (not the Middle Ages ones, which "can be traced with a certain degree of accuracy") have been much obliterated, but, he argues, would have run straight across the country - up 'Down' and down dale - from settlement to settlement.

The method employed to attain accurate allignment was that of signalling the trackways with 'Mark Stones' (his descendant now plying his trade with the England Football team). To quote him,

"The allignment of these stones was arrived at in the same way as one obtains allignment of the sights on a rifle, only in the case of the
ancient track makers, two staves were probably used. A typical Mark Stone is either unworked or only very slightly worked, or "pecked" into shape. They are of many forms, except, perhaps, flat upright slabs, and usually have some appearance differing from chance stones in the district. Often they are of non-local stone. They vary from one to two feet to twenty feet in height...in some villages more than one can be found. It is not always discovered in its original state, for when Britain embraced Christianity, many of these pagan Mark Stones were converted into Christian crosses [my emphasis], either by utilising the stone as the base and erecting a shaft on it, or, if it was already an upright stone, by having a cross cut on it".

He says the churchyard cross at Vowchurch, Herefordshire, is an example of a cross built on to a Mark Stone. Another churchyard cross in the same county, at Bosbury, when moved from its original site in 1796, was discovered to have a large Mark Stone embedded in its fabric.

Mark Stones...often became places for trading. Many of these old track crossings, he says, are still crossroads today ([1952] and although the tracks themselves have changed out of all recognition the ancient Mark Stone which marked it is still often to be seen "as at Pembridge, where the old stone has been used to support an oak pillow, the socket stone of the fourteenth century Market Cross".
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aurelius



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Durrington Walls update.

The arc of stones, judging from the aerial images, forms a cup shape facing East - towards the River Avon.


There have been some developments, as reported in the Nov-Dec issue of British Archaeology. Back in September 2015 the diggers at the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project (SHLP) decided the geophys anomalies "suggested something hard contrasting with the surrounding chalk, the obvious explanation being stones."

Well, they've done some more digging and had a look at a couple of these anomalies. And there were no stones, just "masses of broken chalk", from chalk blocks which had slumped down from the bank. Into post holes. The bigger anomaly of the two was a posthole with a 3.75m ramp.

Both postholes, like previously excavated ones at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, were 1.5m and 1.35m deep and 1.2m across. The posts, "as revealed by their pipes had been 65cm and 50cm thick, cut from trees that had been growing for the best part of 100 years. Such tree trunk posts would have been around 6-7m long, standing between 4.5m and 5.5m high."

Both the postholes had left a pipe in the bottom of the pit where the post had once stood, packed with chalk to hold it in place. But "unusual materials2 had been deposited within the ramps after each post had been erected....a collection of cattle bones, a dog's skull and a fist-sized lump of iron pyrites". In one there was in addition to the cattle bones a piece of burnt sarsen stone and a flint scraper.

The archaeologists were puzzled there were no characteristic stains where the bottoms of the posts had decayed, nor any burnt charcoal where the buried ends would have been hardened. They concluded, therefore, that the posts had been pulled out (to be re-used?) after a relatively short period of time - about 50 years. They cite as evidence a cattle scapula shovel and a tibia at the bottom of the larger hole, arguing that they could not have been left there when the post went in or they would have been crushed.

More to follow (unless you have access to the article).
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Hatty
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Durrington Walls is usually assumed to have housed the people who were working on the Stonehenge site. Could these 'short-term' postholes at Durrington indicate a large housing complex which was dismantled when the henge had been completed (say, fifty years)?
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