What Lies Beneath Stonehenge?
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
I wish every kid had the opportunity to spend a night awake and follow with open eyes our home galaxy moving over the night sky. After a week they can name the planets.
> How did the bluestones, which weigh between four and eight tons apiece, arrive at the site, nearly 5,000 years ago, from 170 miles away in North Wales?
It's my understanding that the majority of the bluestones have been confirmed to come from the Pembrokeshire area in South West Wales, not North Wales.
Some searching returned these results:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-16245746
http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/pdf-files/uploaded-to-ebu...
Hope that's of some interest to folks...
Duckduckgo 'distance from pembrokeshire to stonehenge' = 226.7 km
That's only an overall difference of approximately 17% in 'as the crow flies' distance.
(Without knowing the geography at all, in reality the difference is quite possibly even less, since the route is probably not straight and shares some of the same diversions. On the other hand, it could also be more, since Wales sounds (how scientific!) hillier than most places in the UK. Either way, it's still a bloody long way.)
So, personal experience; just slightly more scientific. But only slightly.
I found (and have found, across a lot of physical sciences) incongruity in this piece between some mild slander of past amateur archaeologists without perspective for how primitive our technology will one day look.
To wit: In 1839 ... Captain Beamish dug out an estimated 400 cubic feet of soil...Beamish’s “big hole was probably the final blow for any prehistoric features...that once lay at Stonehenge’s center.”
Followed shortly by modern day expert Vince Gaffney "acknowledging that it will require digging—“the testimony of the spade”—to discover precisely what was there."
Magnetometers would have been an unimaginable possibility to Beamish. I can only assume that at some future point there will be technology unimaginable to Gaffney (and us all) that may render his "testimony of the spade" as cruel to Stonehenge's secrets as those we mock from the past.
This isn't specific to Stonehenge or Gaffney. I think we as humans tend towards a little modern day hubris - "Look at how they used to do things, terrible science, we're so much more protective of things." And then we shovel Stonehenge, slice up the Shroud of Turin[1], and discuss opening a 2,000 year old bottle of wine because that's the only way to find out what's inside [2].
[1] I'm less concerned about this, because it's a fraud. [2] http://www.thelocal.de/20111209/39405
A fraud of what? It may not be the cloth in which Jesus was wrapped, but it's still very old nonetheless and certainly not a painting from the Middle Ages as some charlatans tried to portray it.
If its only 'claim to fame' was that it was a very old shroud or painting, then I would not make that claim (and, indeed, I doubt very much I would have heard of it).
Maybe fraudulent is a little bit strong. The different analysis done (not the C14 one, which proved to be unreliable) indeed show it may be around 2000 years old or so. Now, we have no way of proving that the person who was wrapped in the Shroud is actually Jesus or not, while there are some similarities in the injuries described in the Bible and the blood stains locations on the Shroud. I think even the Church itself does not recognize it as being 100% authentic.
So, "we don't know", is probably close to the truth than "fraud".
I'll try to find some sources if you are interested in the subject.
Non-destructive testing/measurement methods have so many plusses that you'd wonder why they aren't mandatory in archeology. In addition to the obvious fact that a damaged site or article can't then be tested with better future technologies, non-destructive methods are more reliable (calibrations and measurements can be repeated). This is so much more of an issue in archeology than it is in say, laboratory biology, where if a sample is destroyed there is often the possibility of resampling. It is more analogous to crime scene investigation, where if you destroy the sample DNA with a bad PCR, you may destroy the entire possibility of using that evidence. Really, the only justification for not mandating non-destructive methods in archeology is that we can always imagine that there is a better future method than whatever we have now, so if we always wait for an uncertain future, no archeology will actually get done.
I think that this conflict means that there is a real opportunity for collaboration between archeological societies and funders and scientists/device manufacturers of non-destructive methods. By default, archeologists tend to use lots of grad students with shovels, because they are cheap and being a grad student with a shovel is a rite of passage in archeology. If non-destructive device manufacturers would help replace the student shovels with e.g. student Raman scattering devices, this might help spur more use of the non-destructive methods to the point where archeologists would look askance at anyone who used shovels without first using less destructive tools.
Just some thoughts; I'm not an archeologist. I have seen a similar change in tool use prompted by device manufacturers working with professional societies, though, in radiation therapy (is anyone in the developed world using Co-60 with conformal blocks anymore?).
"Dave - you're a genius."
If this was say Westminster Abbey that was half destroyed we would do this, why is it not considered it seems for Stonehenge?
Edit: it looks like you just copy/pasted the subtitle from Smithsonian. Do you have any additional commentary that might enlighten the rest of us who are trying to decide whether to read the article?
ground-breaking - related to the actual act of breaking ground
Not sure how you don't know this, unless opening a dictionary would be a groundbreaking experience for you.
I spent two years in an occupation where the most entertaining thing to do was to read the dictionary for fun. The fact that someone, somewhere, defined a difference between the hyphenated and compound forms of the term doesn't mean that everyone is using those forms as defined; thus my request for disambiguation remains relevant.
Edit: also:
$ dict groundbreaking
2 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
groundbreaking \ground"break`ing\ n.
The ceremonial breaking of the ground to formally begin a
construction project. It is sometimes carried out by an
official who digs the first spadeful of dirt from the ground,
to begin the preparatory excavation work.
Syn: groundbreaking ceremony.
[WordNet 1.5] groundcover
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
groundbreaking
adj 1: being or producing something like nothing done or
experienced or created before; "stylistically innovative
works"; "innovative members of the artistic community";
"a mind so innovational, so original" [syn: {innovative},
{innovational}, {groundbreaking}]
n 1: the ceremonial breaking of the ground to formally begin a
construction project [syn: {groundbreaking},
{groundbreaking ceremony}]The OED doesn't comment on the act (ritual) of breaking ground, but Wikipedia does, and it uses the un-hyphenated form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundbreaking . (Wikipedia is not, of course, the most reliable possible source, but it does indicate that the un-hyphenated form is in wide use for the literal act).
My strong suspicion is that the colloquialism arose as a metaphorical back-formation of a participle from the gerund + object compound used for, you know, ritually inaugurating (inaugerating?) a building project.
Edit: removed ill-considered emoticon.
A mere upvote is insufficient for this groundbreakingly clever pun. For reference:
auger
2. An instrument for boring or perforating soils or rocks,
for determining the quality of soils, or the nature of the
rocks or strata upon which they lie, and for obtaining
water.groundbreaking
[ground-brey-king]
noun
1. the act or ceremony of breaking ground for a new construction project.
ground-breaking
adjective
1. innovative a ground-breaking novel
No literal groundbreaking involved, just somewhat remote sensing, at least this time. (The Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) will reflect off jumps in eletric permittivity in the ground, which are caused by changes in material, and especially by different water contents, which can also be an indicator for different materials (such as stone in soil, or sand in soil, or soil in different soil - material with smaller pores can retain more water due to capillary effects).)
new finds, including the more than 15 possible new or poorly understood Neolithic monuments. Gaffney emphasized possible, acknowledging that it will require digging—“the testimony of the spade”—to discover precisely what was there.
Two pits, marking the midsummer sunrise and the midsummer solstice, set within a monument that’s meant to be something to do with the passage of the sun.”
The “sunrise” pit was visible from Stonehenge, but the “sunset” pit was not
“Until you dig holes, you just don’t know what you’ve got,”
“It’s going to take years.”