understanding Stonehenge(s)

[Widdekind]

i did not know, that the bewildering panoply of many megalithic monument types, all actually form a single family of essentially similar monuments... but all in various states of dilapidation. The big burial barrows were high hills of soil, sand, and sometimes stones... heaped over pre-emplaced chambers, composed of sizey stone slabs (for the four walls) and level-lying capstones (for the roof). Those chambers were sort-of sizey stone sarcophagi, cobbled together, from several slabs.

So, if you now imagine subjecting the burial mound structure, to many millennia, of wind & weather, erosions would first disperse the soil & sand heaped high in a hill, so exposing / revealing the interior stone structure... which would then look like a free-standing so-called "Dolmen"...

then, when the Dolmen collapses, you have a jumble of big boulders...

in such a way, most of the megalithic monuments can be likened to a couple of kinds of "Ford model-T-series cars"... albeit at different stages of assembly/dis-assembly, along the production line

 

[Widdekind]

Whatever else you believe, its fascinating and beautiful.

Its smaller than I expected. As you come over one hill, there it is atop the next hill, silhouetted against the sky. Just stunning. Go see it.

over-simplistically, SH comprises a dozen central Trilathons; ringed by 30 circle Sarcens

and so, SH may have been a monumental kind of calendar clock, keeping a solar calendar, of (over-simplistically) the familiar 12 months x 30 days/month = 360 days (plus some special extras)

(an ancient Romulan, pre-Roman solar calendar, seems the most similar)

if so, then the modern western calendar (12 months x 30-ish days per month) has archaic roots, back in the Bronze Age, c.4000 years ago.

If so, then western Europeans have basically been keeping to a calendar, composed of 12 x 30-ish-day months, for many millennia

 

[oldfart]

...
I think your reasoning holds up well for Neolithic tombs which were built of thousands of undressed stones common to the area. But how do you connect that to the massive quarried stones at Stonehenge and especially in Brittany and Galicia?

What "massive quarried stones" in Brittany & Galicia ?

You found the sources. A good survey is at Megalith - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I'm just more familiar with the Bel-beaker culture and Brittany and Galicia have prominent examples for that period.

Perhaps "quarry" implies actually breaking apart an entire projection of bedrock up above the soil surface, which would then qualify as "clearing land of rocky rubble" for farming ?

Give me a break. Since the invention of agriculture farmers have been developing land from waste to productive farmland. Areas too hard to convert were left for later generations. In the time we are talking about population was sparse relative to land and usually well-watered, well-drained, reasonably flat land was available. It took three millennia to cut down most of the European forests.

Some areas were more rocky than others, but natural processes caused rocks to come to the surface of even cultivated fields so that each year rocks had to be removed. Most of the rocks were far smaller than megaliths and could only be used for building to piled up out of the way (used for fill). I understand clearing fields and building walls, huts, and graves with this material. But a farmer of the period would never waste the time and effort to dig up a rock of several tons just to gain a few extra feet of ground. Besides, where would he put it?

No, megaliths, especially those displaying evidence of dressing or joining, were erected on purpose, and that purpose did not include clearing land for agriculture.

But good effort and I applaud your imagination!

 

[whitehall]

Stonehenge was built for the same reason the Pyramids, gothic cathedrals, the Lincoln memorial and the Reichstag was built. They are all symbols of political power. No magic, just engineering skill.

According to Magdalena Midgley's Megaliths of Northern Europe, in the eastern regions, of the vast megalithic culture, in modern Scandinavia, most people were buried in small (sometimes stone-slab-lined) graves; only the most prominent persons, were buried, in the big barrows. Such is similar to the Salisbury Plain & SH, whereat the overall estimated number of burials (~1000 ?), accumulated from perhaps 3000 years of use (4000-1000 BC), can only be a small "elite" fraction, of the population of the place. Cp. Winterbourne-Stoke Barrow Man from 3500 BC.

Plausibly like the pyramids of Egypt, the big barrows may have been built, as part of enormous funeral feasts, wherein people were paid, with food, to provide labor, to build the barrow. Or, perhaps prior clients, indebted to the deceased, paid back obligations to the person's surviving relatives, by working for a few weeks, to make the monument.

Either way (or both), the big mounds represent many laborers, sledding in stones, from a large area of land. Prima facie, the big barrows represent some politically-prominent person's display of prestige, demonstrating patronage, applied to improving that large land area. Perhaps such suggests, that the nobles buried in the big mounds, who had paid people to improve those large land areas, were therefore also the owners of those large land areas. Conversely, commoners may have been essentially share-croppers, serfs working land owned by another, basically paid wage laborers, not necessarily land & capital owners.

SH was, at root, a major megalithic monument, demonstrating the "power to pay" people to work to make the monument. SH is the only known site, in all Europe, whereat the stones were dressed and fitted together, with carpentry-like mortise-and-tenon joints. SH was, somehow, special in its own day.

Somewhat separately, i see SH as a "deluxe sun-dial", a set of stones with which to track time-of-year, keeping a calendar closely comparable, to the ancient pre-Roman "Romulan" calendar, which was basically 12 x 30-day-long-months... except 2 "taboo" winter months were set aside, as a single "Winter Solstice vacation", for celebrations of some sort. No "magic", merely keeping a calendar (day + month).

Nobody ever made a claim that the Stonehenge society cared about the people who died to make the structure anymore than the Aztec society cared about the people who labored to create the structures in the New World. Egyptian engineering geniuses wasted energy and time creating monuments that were the greatest structures on the entire globe while Egyptian society still lived in dirt and filth two thousand years later. Modern archaeologists seem desperate to put a religious slant to ancient structures while evidence suggests that that the structures were intended to intimidate and enslave the people who created them.

 

[Widdekind]

...Since the invention of agriculture farmers have been developing land from waste to productive farmland. Areas too hard to convert were left for later generations. In the time we are talking about population was sparse relative to land and usually well-watered, well-drained, reasonably flat land was available. It took three millennia to cut down most of the European forests.

Some areas were more rocky than others, but natural processes caused rocks to come to the surface of even cultivated fields so that each year rocks had to be removed. Most of the rocks were far smaller than megaliths and could only be used for building to piled up out of the way (used for fill). I understand clearing fields and building walls, huts, and graves with this material. But a farmer of the period would never waste the time and effort to dig up a rock of several tons just to gain a few extra feet of ground. Besides, where would he put it?...

According to Francis Pryor's Making of the British Landscape, the super-sized stone slabs, set up as the interior burial chamber, may not have been moved very far. In Wales,

Some of these tombs were constructed over large filled-in pits, which may have been dug to extract the capstone. Thus the stone that once lay below the ground was now hovering in the air.

Thus, seemingly practically, Neolithic western European peoples "worked around" the biggest boulders, building those sizey slabs into tomb chambers, essentially on site; and then filling in gaps in between the big blocks with smaller stones, gathered from farther a-farm-field; and seemingly usually constructing a "curb" retaining wall around the edges, of the entire outer mound. Thus, the overall structure had straight sides, with the hump of a hill over the top, so looking at least a little, like the vertical faces, of a Neolithic (long- or round-)house, with its thatched roof.

So, i'm suggesting, that rocky rubble was removed, "swept" from the soil, and then collected & concentrated, into high heaps, over the biggest boulders & most-immovable mega-liths. No, farmers did not dig out the sizey slabs, and move them many miles to piles of smaller stones... no, the smaller stones were hauled, and heaped, at the sites, of the biggest boulders.

That said, then the "functional" and "purpose" part of the process appears... the stones were not simply heaped into hills... instead, the stones were built up into burial monument structures, of some sophistication. One important part, of the purposes, of those monumental mounds, is obvious from their solar alignments, often to the Winter Solstice sunrise. On those special days, the architecture of the monuments would "detect" the Solstice, with a visually dramatic display of brilliant brightness juxtaposed with deep dark shadow, as a thin shaft of sunlight penetrated all the way up the entrance passageway, way into the back of the burial chamber behind.

By "detecting" important season-defining days, the monuments provided a kind of "calendar calibration". When more than one monument exist side-by-side, often they are aligned, to different season-defining days. Plausibly, ancient Britons and other northwest European peoples tracked time, by a "calendar count" of days, since the last major season-defining day. So, if WS, SE, SS, FE defined the four seasons of W,S,S,F; then the most obvious way, by which ancient Europeans would have tracked time, from those four "solar alignment days", would have been to talk of time, as the "__th day of the __ season", e.g. 1st day of Winter (since WS), 2nd day of Spring (since SE), etc.

Speculatively, i see in SH, a western-European-like, Roman-like, more-or-less modern current kind of calendar, comprising (essentially) 12 months x 30-ish-days per month. If so, then western European peoples have been keeping current-ish kinds of calendars, for many millennia.

 

[Widdekind]

... evidence suggests that that the structures were intended to intimidate and enslave the people who created them.

can you cite any source, for that claim ? No archeologist or scholar, of which i'm aware, puts that spin, on the many mounds, abounding in the British Isles and "Atlantic" Europe. There is no evidence of any Meso-American warfare, with captive sacrifice, or any such thing. The mounds represent politically prominent persons, plausibly more like clan kings & chieftains, than conquering foreign invader overlords.

Anthropologically, slavery generally results from the conquest of one group, by an outside foreign other. Scholars like Barry Cunliffe see only cultural continuity, from the archaic stone age past, through to the Mesolithic & Neolithic, in Atlantic Europe. So, social status differences were plausibly more like "Clan Murray Chieftain vs. common clansman", than conquering foreign invader enslaver vs. thralls.

 

[Widdekind]

some scholars seemingly see several Neolithic "cultures" who mutually identified themselves, with idiosyncratic styles of architecture, for their burial monuments:

to trace the origin, of the British unchambered long barrows to north France; the Severn-Cotswald chambered long barrows to the Loire area; and the Clyde-Carlingford long barrows to west France (w/ possible influences from Sardinia), is to resolve, rather than settle, the problem of west European long barrows

Hector Munro Chadwick. The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, p.18

SH is sited at the boundary, between the "Welsh" and "Continental" cultures. If that region was a place of contested territorial claims, than social competition could account, for the massive monuments built up around the region, e.g. SH, Durrington Walls, Avebury, Silbury Hill. Perhaps bringing Blue-Stones from Wales, to SH, was a way of laying a Welsh claim, to the SH area, of the Salisbury plain.

The Irish - Aquitainian - Sardinian culture seems associated with the modern Basques, ancient Aquitani and Spanish Iberians of Caesar's day, and Ireland as "Hibernia". Perhaps "Iberian" peoples, speaking "Aquitani-Basque" like languages, once inhabited much of Scotland, Ireland, SW France, Sardinia, etc. ?

 

[Widdekind]

Brian John's blog about SH (specifically) provides a picture, of the distribution of Sarcen slabs, still scattered on the surface, of the chalky downs around SH. i perceive a "gap" in the distribution, around the SH site. Plausibly, the sizey Sarcens installed at SH, were drawn, from a "litter" of such stones, strewing the surface of the Salisbury plain, all the way out to a distance of about 20 miles. If so, then their natural sockets, within which the stones sat for ages & eons, would be detectable, by surveying techniques (as with the Cuckoo stone, near SH, which was seemingly stood up, in ancient times, within its original natural socket). SH was exceptional, since, with SH, sizey stones were actually indeed dragged & hauled long distances, to the site (indeed the BS were pulled from Preseli, Wales).