'World's oldest calendar' discovered in Scottish field | Hacker News Reader

'World's oldest calendar' discovered in Scottish field

bbc.co.uk

58 pointspg32 comments

Interesting to note that this was built not that long after the end of the Younger Dryas period (also known as the Loch Lomond Re-advance here in the UK) - so the landscape would have been quite different to what can be seen today, in particular this is before the pine forests of Scotland has a chance to re-grow.

Could you expand a bit of what I am supposed to be reading between the lines here? (If there's anything to read between the lines. I'm not trying to be a smart-ass going for karma here, I'm genuinely curious.)

The Loch Lomond Re-advance was a relatively short period of colder weather than happened after the warming at the end of the last major ice age - this ended ~11,500 years ago.

During the Loch Lomond Re-advance there was a large ice sheet in Western Scotland and smaller ones elsewhere but the country was mainly ice free. Obviously, the conditions during this time were much colder than today so flora and fauna were quite different and it took quite a long time for the species we think of as being "natural" for Scotland to re-establish themselves.

So the landscape that these people would have been living in was still "recovering" from glaciation and may have been quite different to what we see today - which I find fascinating.

NB I had a copy of "Land of Mountain and Flood - The Geology and Landforms of Scotland" handy when I was reading HN over breakfast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

http://www.slideshare.net/aland/loch-lomond-readvance

[NB I am from the North East of Scotland and fascinated by geology and archeology - so I was pretty excited to see this on HN!]

Thank you!

Here's a link to the rough area in Google Maps.

(https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=7390+9670+Crathes+Castle,+C...)

Google Maps can't find Warren Field.

I thought it was under the river, but this link shows it's near Miller's Ward Wood.

(http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/36670/details/crathes/)

(http://www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/smrpub/shire/print.aspx?refn...)

(http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=6134)

Are there any crowd-sourced "find crop marks" programmes?

Interestingly, other early monuments in the locality - such as Rothiemay recumbent stone circle - have been supposed to align with astronomical events and, consequently, evidence of early horology.

http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/details/1114898/

http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/17820/digital_images/ro...

This is a later monument, but to my mind still an indication of "pre-historic science" - and just how advanced it could be.

As an aside, I was always pleasingly intrigued by the fact that Rothiemay was furthermore the birthplace of James Ferguson...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ferguson_(1710–1776)

One of my favourite ancient artefacts in that area is the Tap o' Noth - a large vitrified fort - the rocks making up the huge walls apparently having been intentionally melted:

http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/17169/details/tap+o+not...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_o%27_Noth

The Tap formed my own mental image of Tolkien's Weathertop :-)

Exactly my own visualisation of Weathertop when growing up in the area!

Personally, I think vitrification was a product of accident/attack rather than direct intent...

I was going by this Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort

"Most archaeologists now consider that vitrified forts are the product of deliberate destruction either following the capture of the site by an enemy force or by the occupants at the end of its active life as an act of ritual closure"

I suspect the real answer is that nobody really has any idea how or why this was done - which makes it all the more fascinating :-)

I walked among the stones at Stonehenge about a year ago - was a great experience. I was particularly interested to learn that the focus of that famous site was Midwinter not the Summer Solstice. Warren Field, based on this article, seemed to have a similar seasonal focus for resetting the calendar.

At Stonehenge, the reasoning is that a midwinter, inter-tribal celebration brought neighbouring tribes together at a time when they were not planting, harvesting, or warring. The Winter solstice was also, perhaps, a time to honour the dead.

Of course, there's a lot more to Stonehenge and I assume to Warren Field. But I wonder if there are some parallels to be drawn?

"The Winter solstice was also, perhaps, a time to honour the dead."

The ~5000 year old Maeshowe on Orkney is a great example of this - only around the Winter solstice does the sun shine down the entrance passage and illuminate the central chamber:

http://www.maeshowe.co.uk/

http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/propertyresults/property...

Page with videos of the setting sun shining into Maeshowe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeshowe

On the off chance you haven't already done so and aren't aware - try Avebury. I liked it even more. When I was in the UK, any place I was at for more than about a week I bought an ordinance survey map of (think that's what they are called). I saw so many small stone circles, cemetery's, churches, roman walls and building, ruins, canals, etc, it was like a world existed just outside the everyday one. Most memorable was biking to an old american airbase. Ruined buildings, lampposts, but all the ground was grass with sheep wondering around. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury

Stonehenge was literally our last day living in London - and also the day I learned about Avebury! Would love to explore that part of British history more next time I'm in that part of the world.

The two are easily done in part of a day too. Grab the Wikipedia page and read it as you wander around or find somewhere to sit. Stonehenge is a far more touristy experience, but more concentrated and quite impressive. Avebury is good fun to walk around, across roads, through gates, around buildings, etc.

The winter solstice may have also been practical.

The question calendars are typically trying to answer is "When should we plant?". Harvesting is easy, you harvest when the crops are ready.

Summer solstice is shortly after the start of growing season even in Scotland, so if you recalibrate your calendar with the summer solstice you'll have nearly a full year of clock skew to contend with. If you count from the winter solstice, you only have maybe a third of a year of clock skew.

Is it me or does that picture look like a low-quality photoshop? I feel like manipulated images should have a disclaimer on them.

Assuming you mean the first image, it does say "an artist's impression".

Interesting. I sometimes wonder if the invention of timekeeping didn't do more harm than good in the world, along the lines of: Humanity's first mistake was counting time. I wonder if anthropologists have found societies without significant temporal verbosity and linked the absence of this property to other cultural features. No research library access :(

With the day / night cycle of the sun, the phases of the moon and, for a lot of parts in the world, the seasons I think it is pretty much a given that humans started counting time. I'm pretty curious about any timeless societies as well!

Check out the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people , then.

Daniel Everett states that one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; you simply don't tell other people what to do.

Now that sounds like a great society!

What is it that we are checking out? The only mention of time is to a Der Speigel article that is 404ing.

The society itself; the Wikipedia article only glancing mentions this aspect of society. "Don't sleep, there are snakes" is worth a read.

The wikipedia article _never mentions time_. I emailed Prof. Everett about the women and menstrual cycles. He said they are aware of cycles.

This is probably a joke that i am not getting because this sounds like one of the more ridiculous things I have read on HN in a long time. Keeping track of time is remarkably helpful for farming, hunting and fishing. Not to mention how frequently counting days/moons/seasons comes up in spirituality. I would also have a hard time believing that the women from the "timeless culture" would be unaware of menstrual cycles or normal duration of pregnancies.

Measuring time was probably the second thing mankind measured after distance.[1]

[1] Recent bbc metrology documentary is the reference off the top of my head.

All good points, though awareness is distinct from formal recording. I was trying to get at the latter.

If you were "trying to get at formal recording of time" why didn't you mention that in your comment? You only mentioned counting time and words for time.

I think the line of thought was and remains only half-baked in my own mind, it was more a ponderance than a well reasoned argument and I hadn't expected such a scientific style interpretation in readers. My bad.

You might be interested in reading more about the development of "Railroad Time" in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_time#Railroad_time

Interesting. After living for most of a decade in China I've often thought about the very (bureaucratically-)pragmatic decision made by the Communist Party to normalize the timezone across the entire country. Of course, it wouldn't happen today, but now it's a feature of the country and is unlikely to change.

For a great deal more evolutionary temporal trivia see the tz database mailing list; along with many others tasked with implementation, late last year I realised its seeming antiquity of scope and form, but this is being ignored. https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-October/018297.html

You are still not convinced that what you are suggesting is: http://cldr.unicode.org/ ?

Err, if you read the thread, CLDR is a reasonable but different, bloated and hacky library maintained by a completely different body, providing only subset of the intended functionality ... and a whole lot of other stuff.

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