Complex of 500 standing stones found in Spain | Hacker News Reader

Complex of 500 standing stones found in Spain

phys.org

78 pointspseudolus33 comments

How can something like this be discovered in 2022? It sounds incredible. I would understand it if it was at the bottom of the sea, but they appear to be standing in plain sight. No one gave any thought to it before?

Spain has a lot of remote rural areas. Must likely these stones were overgrown in tall grass, bushes or covered in dirt.

I walk a lot in remote areas but even there it's very rare for people to leave the trails.

And finally it's possible that some locals were aware of some "rocks in that field" but weren't aware of the archeological significance.

Be aware that the photo in the article is not from the site in question but one in France that's much bigger and maintained.

> Be aware that the photo in the article is not from the site in question but one in France that's much bigger and maintained.

I completely overlooked the text below the photo. That's on me, I guess, but it's crazy they don't have a photo of this new site in the article.

The archaeologists' paper (in Spanish) has pictures: https://tp.revistas.csic.es/index.php/tp/article/view/881/95...

Thank you!

Should be top comment

looking at those photos, it is entirely not obvious that these stones are placed in a pattern. some look entirely random. it's not surprising that this wasn't discovered earlier.

I hate the trend of "we have an article, we will use a stock photo" as it catches me here and there, also.

As I read once, Americans get surprised by European history (and Europeans by America's distances). As a local in Spain and as my sibling commenter said, this could def pass as "yeah there's a bunch of rocks in that field".

It was common for buildings in the middle ages and almost at any time in history to reuse rocks from the nearby ruins from older civilizations. After all those were readily available and saving weeks of work could mean the difference between having a dwelling and death.

It's also very commong to find archeological ruins when excavating, just yesterday my father (who is in construction) told me of a region in Spain where construction companies will just not go because it's certain they will hit ruins and have the project paralized.

As the article described, here the owner gets their field of avocados taken over by the government at least until 2026, hopefully they didn't take any loan to buy it or they'll surely default.

> where construction companies will just not go because it's certain they will hit ruins and have the project paralized.

I lived in one unspecified East European city and there was parking lot next to my flat where new construction was planned. It was next to old town so first team of archeologists came. They made grid with holes ~1m deep. Barely found anything. So they left. Then crawler excavator came and after while dug through the huge vault of some medieval cellar. Now there is underground garage. But there were cases when garages were made in place of Roman ruins as well, so this was nothing.

> It was common for buildings in the middle ages and almost at any time in history to reuse rocks from the nearby ruins from older civilizations. After all those were readily available and saving weeks of work could mean the difference between having a dwelling and death.

I'm sure that the choice between a dwelling or death was sometimes the case, but it's not like they needed such a stark pro to override the con of destroying archæological remains. It was simply that at the time there was no such thing as wanting to preserve useless old things that happened to be there, and reusing conveniently available building blocks was a no-brainer.

Something that I've learned recently that we're very misinformed is the concept of the "lazy peasant". Apparently for most of history, people and communities were very often at the brink of death by starvation[1], so saving weeks of unrelated work that you can be spend on producing food is very likely a thing that more often than not would improve your survival chances greatly. Of course as you say "historical relevant" was also not a concept as well for the common folks.

[1] Sure it'd be very seasonal, where you could go few years in a row with excess of food! But excess food was "bad" as well, so then what people got that they worked in reducing producing the amount of food to prefer diversifying their crops to reduce risk of a big event wiping their whole farm.

The article says many were buried & it’s a reasonably large site so it may not have been that obvious. A pattern may not have been discernible from ground level.

Exactly. I saw this story posted at the Archeology subreddit and that was also the first question there too. Mostly buried but obvious patterns to the trained eye.

I mean, this is the answer. The article's picture is not a picture of the site the article discusses, that's why.

One thing I'll add is that the article says "Many of the stones are buried deep in the earth." Presumably that's why nobody saw them until they looked pretty hard.

Newgrange, in Ireland, c.3300 BC (older than the Pyramids) was "discovered" in 1699, really just became a household name since archeology in 1962.

When you take the tour, it's described as

~"well, everyone living here knew about it, but it wasn't a big deal because it was always here, it was only when foreigners saw it that they made a big deal of it."

http://www.carrowkeel.com/sites/boyne/newgrange.html

Every winter solstice (only on and around the 21st December) the sun shines into the inner chamber. There are live-streams showing it. It's great.

Orkney (north east Scotland) is full of neolithic stone structures and rings, you can't go anywhere on the islands without tripping over some.

Totally recommended for visit. US cruise ships dock there all through summer.

I went to visit the Callinish Stones on the Hebrides once. By far and away the eeriest place I've ever been. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.

You may enjoy also the fantastic Aquis Querquennis roman camp in The North of Spain, lying under a reservoir and currently over the water level by the dry spell.

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

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Aquis+Querquennis&t=newext&atb=v31...

This is a wild guess, but foliage penetrating radar is getting pretty cheap and deployed for even smaller digs.

Larger scans (whole towns, or large fields) are exposing lots of unknown stuff, like forgotten wall structures and abandoned villages.

The article picture is not from the discovered site.

If you click on the picture you can read the full description:

> Carnac in northwestern France is one of the most famous megalithic sites in the world with some 3,000 standing stones .

Can someone take lots of photos, catalogue them, do whatever tests are needed and then move them somewhere else so we can get our avocados?

I know this is a joke, but given that avocados need shade, part of me wonders if the large stones could actually make it an even better site for an avocado plantation

The article says they're only 1-3 metres tall.

And also that many of the stones are buried deep in the earth.

Even better then, we can bury the avocado trees next to them to get even better shade. Problem solved.

It's amazing how us HN geeks are so good at coming up with original and effective solutions in non-IT fields.

Avocado trees on plantations are usually specifically pruned not to grow past 2-3 meters to make them easy to pick. In the wild they can grow 5x this size, but the article is specifically talking about a plantation

If you look at the pictures of the site [1] you'll see there's essentially no shade from these stones for trees, even 2-3 metre ones.

[1] https://tp.revistas.csic.es/index.php/tp/article/view/881/95...

It seems unlikely that the well-trodden paths among these stones are from animals.

The article says some of the stones are still erect, why weren't they noticed before?

These two young fish are swimming along, and an older fish swims by and says, "Morning, boys! How's the water?" And the two young fish just kind of look at each other, and then keep swimming. And then after a while, one says to the other, "What the hell is water?"

Looks like a grave site?

The photo in the article is of a completely different site in France. yorwba linked to the archaeologists' article with photos of the actual site, which looks quite different: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32537917

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