Stonehenge may have been built in Wales and then relocated
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Seems a bit too convenient!
Especially when the evidence is a muddy hole nearly the same shape and size as a rock 150 miles away...
Oh, and look - it just so happens to be on the only farm you could get permission to dig on!
It's just as likely that archeologists unaffiliated with BBC came up with this theory months or even years earlier, wanted funding and a bit of publicity for their pet project, got hooked up with BBC, and scheduled the most important part of the excavation to coincide with the arrival of the TV crew as per the funding agreement. The whole point is to maximize the likelihood that an interesting discovery will take place during filming. NatGeo does this all the time, and I'm sure BBC does, too.
Professor Mike says he had long held the theory that the smaller bluestones which surrounded Stonehenge in a wide circle during its earliest phase, had started life as a monument in Wales.
But finding the site of a stone circle which no longer exists, 5,000 years after it was moved, is no mean feat.
The research started in 2010, with excavations beginning in 2012 but as they years went by they experienced many set-backs involving bronze and iron age circles which weren’t what they were looking for.
Mike, 63, did a deal with a TV company to film their progress in 2015.
Two years later, it was a despondent group led by Dave Shaw, who decided to excavate Waun Mawn, an “unpromising” marshy site described as “small and unremarkable” which had turned up nothing in the geophysics surveys.
... [goes on to describe finding it]
serendipitously?
You're pretty spot on - this is a well-known archaeologist with an established record as a television presenter. From what I remember of the previous Stonehenge specials, the filming process appeared to be: academic research team does the excavation for a few months, camera crew comes in when a "big moment" is expected, and also films a rollup where the researchers talk over exciting discoveries made in the past months while they're there. They've been digging near Stonehenge and on associated sites along the river for years and years.
I'm not saying I believe them for sure, but yours is in no way a fair characterisation.
Is it really that reliable to make such precise statements?
Carbon dating is never enough in itself. They are not saying that carbon dating proves that one thing happened before the other. They are saying that carbon dating does not disprove it, that the narrative they propose is not contradicted by carbon evidence. The fact that there are multi-century error bands means it can never be solid proof, but the fact that one error band is centered years later than the other does add weight to their proposed timeline. Carbon dating is a fuzzy telescope, but lack of perfect resolution doesn't mean it cannot produce useful evidence.
Largely about all these inferences made about history using so few data points and a brilliant imagination. Really? You could tell all these things about this specific household because of a pot you found?
I'm not sure I have a beef with the scientists themselves. There is value in guesstimating what dinosaurs looked like. But at some point these guesstimates get sold as scientific discovery.
Like 20 years ago we didn't even know that most dinosaurs had feathers. Most reconstructions are just wishful thinking IMO
It's true, but you have to start somewhere. That's the beauty of it. It's fine as long as you do it to the best of the current knowledge and tell it.
For fragments of history that are so old, visualization helps put things in context. And if it means you have to erase every reenactment and start over every other year, so be it.
There's a lot of story in history. Construct a narrative stitched together from different sources. Orators in Greece would do the same thing, remember a few lines and improvise the gaps.
I'm not sure how accurate a bullshit detector can be if you know literally nothing about the field in question.
First example from TFA:
Prof Pearson said the remains of a cow, which was found at the site, suggested animals may have helped to pull the stones to their resting spot in England
What, they didn't use trucks? A much better indication than "we found a skeleton" for these ancients having used oxen to move stones would be any remains at all of the sorts of yokes and related equipment that allow oxen to pull heavy loads. Cattle are primarily of value for their meat and dairy, so the fact that humans and cattle were merely associated at any particular site certainly doesn't mean what the good professor seems to claim.
Probably safe to argue that one is not from Upper Class/Aristicratic stock to avoid ancestral culpability though.
This is somewhat tautological - of course archaeologists make discoveries on the sites they are digging on. It's very hard to make discoveries at sites that you aren't allowed on!
Not as hard as it used to be: https://houseprices.io/lidar/SU1025069970
https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU11914213
Glastonbury Tor 3D:
https://houseprices.io/lidar/ST5125038630/3d
Maiden Castle:
https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU567924
in the news for discovery of Iron Age settlement:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/14/astonishing-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Tor#Terraces
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury#Location_and_environme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenham_Clumps#Location
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Castle,_Dorset#First_hi...
I think the inclusion for Glastonbury Tor is particularly useful, because the LIDAR perfectly shows the terraces that were already discussed in that section of the article.
In the past, I have scanned many hand-drawn (engraving) pictures in Victorian tomes of County Histories in my local library, to get topographies of hillfort sites for Wikipedia (mainly in the SW of England). I will now start to add these LIDAR images. Better to scan the ground itself than to scan a print of an engraving of a hand-drawn picture by some tweed-jacketed Victorian archaeology dude.
If hanoz has any issues with the copyright attributions and CC BY 4.0 license on wikicommons, I would be glad to correct any mistakes, or add more praise for the glorious hanoz :)
That is a fucking amazing resource, thank you!
I've already found two places of interest to check out next time I go North to my old stomping grounds in the countryside.
Sometimes the future isn't such a terrible place.
Yes, I did try it, as too the three other people I've since shared it with.
I like the point map version too - I've a grab of a 'minecarft-looking version' of my home village - wonderful!
By which he means, "When will it be populated with more data?"
I presume he's asking as his particular place of interest won't let him view 3d or pointmap views.
Thanks! x
- ed - reading this back, this sounds rude - sorry, just caught up in the excitement.
Natural Resources Wales is aiming for similar by Winter 2022 apparently.
The raw data comes from the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales as .asc files, which are just a big 2d array of height values in text file, in this case covering 1km2 each.
I downloaded all these and wrote a script to produce .png tiles using a "hill shading" algorithm, i.e. make pixel darker if pixel to top left is taller, using C#.
Once I was getting nice results I rented a hefty server at AWS to run it on the whole dataset for 24 hours, generating 2 million .png files, then used leafletjs to display them slippy map style.
I was originally hosting the tiles on AWS but the egress fees were too much so I move them all to a 3€/month bare metal arm server at Scaleway.
The 3D stuff re-fetches the raw .asc files from the source agencies on demand using a AWS Lambda script which cuts out the 1km2 of interest and passes it back to the web server, which renders it using three.js for the surface texture mode, or potree for the pointcloud version.
The website itself is built in asp.net core, running on a $10/month box at Digital Ocean.
In theory, you could combine terrain and surface models[0] to detect and colour features… but that's tricky.
[0]: https://lle.gov.wales/catalogue/item/LidarCompositeDataset/
There's an EU directive supposed to solve this, but it's a slow, slow process.
Is there a thing like this for the US?
The lidar map is kind of a side project within a side project. It's the first and so far only experiment within the 'Lab' section of the parent site (https://houseprices.io/lab) where I had intended to try all manner of stuff with mapping and open data etc.
It didn't exactly grow to be another Google Labs in the end. It did last longer though.
I assume it's some IT guys thing.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/mike-parker-pearson...
BA, PhD, FBA, FSA, FSA Scot, MIFA. Professor of British Later Prehistory.
Do I believe him or a random software engineer on HN who thinks it might be "a bit too convenient"? Hmm. Tricky one.
I know a guy who crossed the Channel on a tiny little narrowboat meant for 3ft-deep canals. The entire thing was filmed. The TV programme hammed it up and made it seem like an entirely haphazard endeavour. Of course it was playing to the camera. That doesn't mean he didn't cross the Channel. He did.
What you're referring to is Nobel Prize disease, and that is essentially the implicit human assumption that when you become an expert at one thing, you're an expert at everything. However it notably does not happen when someone is an expert at something, because well, they're an expert -- they know enough about the field to separate the wheat from the chaff
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Like the parent says, I'm not sure why you'd rather believe a software engineer on Hacker News -- who unless they are unusual, has zero experience with archeology outside of watching Time Team occasionally -- versus someone who is actually qualified in that field.
This is the kind of thinking that led to the catastrophe that was MetaMed -- software engineers and mathematicians not realising that they needed to actually learn things about other fields to be an expert in it (Unlike computer science where you can read a few well-curated blogposts and understand most of the problems in a week), and deciding to go into Medicine with that mindset (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/MetaMed).
Yes, somebody who sacrificed decades of their life attaining accreditations and studying said area of expertise clearly knows less than a software dev /s
- No, definitely no need to worry about this novel virus in China
- No, definitely no need to wear facial covering
- No, definitely no aerosolized transmission
- No, definitely no reason to violate protocol with a 1-dose regimin
- No, definitely no evidence of lab-release accident (TBD)
On each of these problems, attentive and interested non-experts called the correct answer months ahead of expert consensus. If your takeaway from 2020 is not "domain experts are always right, and there's no need for independent research from the outside"... you learned a really bad lesson.
That most certainly is not my takeaway, but perhaps you mistyped. What I had reinforced in 2020, however, was that though domain experts occasionally make a bad call (including you, dear reader), I'd still take their opinion over some random jackass on the Internet spouting off about "yeah, but remember when they told us not to wear masks?"
First, the delay of listening to domain experts (In america, the firing of any teams and staff that were trained in dealing with a pandemic, for example), and the delay in shutting down cross-country transportation as well as the delay in implementing social-distancing, led to the large spread of Coronavirus that is continuing to this day.
Secondly, the reason people were informed not to wear masks initially was because there was a PPE shortage. Part of this was very likely related to the fact that I remember reports of people stealing boxes of masks from hospitals, and people stockpiling masks early on, which led to hospitals that were much less equipped to deal with the spread of it and led to higher deaths of healthcare workers.
The reason Coronavirus got to the stage where it could mutate, at least in Britain, was because the Government instituted a policy of blatantly letting people die and assuming "herd immunity" would take hold, versus actually listening to the domain experts saying that was a shitty idea.
If they had listened to them in the first place, and shut things down early on, the pandemic still wouldn't be going a year later. As you can see in China, Taiwan, etc.
One thing to think about is when domain experts speak on behalf of political/regulatory organizations, it's the organization making a statement, not the person sharing their honest personal opinions.
The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2021
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/or...
TLDR: Three of Stonehenge's stones have long been believed to come from a particular area of Wales. One of them has a pentagonal cross section which was found to approximately matches a pentagonal hole in a partial stone circle in that area, a circle surrounded by a ditch which - coincidentally or otherwise - has the same dimensions as a ditch at Stonehenge. Dating is inconclusive, but evidence supports some of the people cremated at Stonehenge having lived in south Wales for some of their life. It's also established beyond doubt that nearly all the other stones in Stonehenge have no logical connection with this site.
So the builders of Stonehenge might have taken as many as three stones from another site for symbolic or "hey, I know where to find a massive stone the right size for our new project" reasons
If it's 400 years (and the timeline is up for debate), who knows, it may have been a completely different people / culture that decided to move the stone (vs the ones that built the original circle).
I mean in western Europe, town walls were dismantled for other building projects. Walls that still exist are considered protected cultural heritage nowadays. It's a different point of view that changes over time and as cultures progress.
To further this example the limestone used to clad Egyptian Pyramids were removed to use as materials in other building projects.
Late errrors in projects are always costly.
I love the link to Ireland that at first seems incorrect until you learn that this part of what was part of Ireland in the past.
It indeed seems more like evidence in favour of a long-held theory.
Also though, as the OP says:
> It is already known that the smaller bluestones that were first used to build Stonehenge were transported from 150 miles (240 km) away in modern-day Pembrokeshire.
> But the new discovery suggests the bluestones from Waun Mawn could have been moved as the ancient people of the Preseli region migrated, even taking their monuments with them, as a sign of their ancestral identity.
I don't live in Wales but have definitely heard that before too, the discovery seems to be about larger ones and that they were previously erected (not just mined) in (what is now) Pembrokeshire. Is it definitely that that he thought to be common knowledge, not just that the stones were taken from the region?
Perhaps there's diamonds in the rough. Perhaps not.
It has nothing to do with ancient aliens and the like and is rather scientific about the electromagnetic properties of such structures.
The sarsen stones come from Wiltshire. The blue stones come from the Preseli Hills in south west Wales.
Stonehenge starts at 57:27
For a joke there should be a Stonehenge week on YouTube where scores of armchair historians research and invent parallel narratives.
It is fascinating how any mystery can be projected on to a Pagan religious belief that does not have to be specified further.
Even if it was nuked from orbit TV crews would continue their documentaries.