Ancient stone monuments may have been used for Mysterious moonlit ceremonies, say archaeologists
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/07/07/ancient-stone-monuments-may-have-used-mysterious-moonlit-ceremonies/
The rationale for the headline produces some wonderful one liners .
Did someone actually say "“When we went out to some imaging at night, when the camera flashed we suddenly saw more and more art, which suggested that it was meant to be seen at night and in the moonlight."
Laughter aside , the important thing is that there are some genuine markings in an area where they are far from common .
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Gobekli Tepe .Response from excavators
https://tepetelegrams.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/archaeoastronomy-meteor-showers-mass-extinction-what-does-the-fox-say-and-what-the-crane-the-aurochs/
A useful response from the excavators ,mainly related to the problems connected with the nonsense about about the symbols and cherry picking .
It's not to be expected that they might have noticed that the astronomy was also wrong i.e. the asterisms were actually below the horizon on their chosen solstice date . Possibly why the images highlighted them during the day when they were above the horizon but invisible .
No mention either of the suggested date of the observation being a thousand years earlier than the earliest date from the site .
Hopefully the Telegraph and New Scientist will give this the space it deserves .
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The Uffington White Horse geoglyph as sun-horse .
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2016.269
Josh Pollard has an interesting paper in the most recent "Antiquity " . An original suggestion , afaiaa , that the geoglyph is a symbol related to the Trundholm sun horse and associated motifs found on Scandinavian razors and rock art .
Flemming Kaul has been the main instigator in suggesting that the symbol(s) are derived from Indo -European myth and represent the sun on it's daily journey from east to west , whilst a boat or chariot takes it on the underworld return west to east journey .
In this case the horse is heading just west of south .
There are problems with the Kaul suggestion but it still has adherents since his initial "Ships on Bronzes " nearly 20 years ago .
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What is the brocken spectre?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-31447148
A spooky weather effect, which in the past was thought to be a supernatural creature, has been photographed in Glen Coe. But what is the story behind it?
The myth describes him as a Scottish Big Foot, said to loom large in shifting grey cloud on the UK's second highest mountain.
The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui first came to prominence in the 1920s during a dinner speech at an annual gathering of the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen. etc .
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Newly discovered West Papuan rock art
News from the World Archaeological Congress WAC-7
"Divers at an ecolodge in West Papua have been instrumental in the discovery of new rock art from a lost civilisation.
Divers from the Misool Eco Resort spotted the previously unreported rock art and contacted Jean-Michel Chazine, a research engineer from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS-France) three years ago to survey the discovery.
Jean-Michel Chazine presented his research at the international World Archaeology Congress in Jordan this week and commented “It is a small paradise for archaeologists. The paintings are very ornate and beautiful.”
The recent second survey of a new cluster of paintings upon cliffs sinking in the ocean in the Misool islands archipelago has provided new insights. Seven new sites, which enhanced already the total of sites to thirteen, have been discovered in the vicinity of the previous located sites. These new sites present also a large number of hands stencils, which would appear, apart two cases, in all painted places.
The other confirmation in content and expression concerns the subject of the paintings, which are in majority related to the sea fauna. Tuna, sharks, dolphins and general more or less large fishes’ features compose the main core of representations. Being represented in majority up or down in a vertical position, they would obviously correspond to a basic symbolic figure. Many signs, dots, patches, thin or bold lines circling cupules, are also scattered within paintings."
The full article at: http://wac7.worldarchaeologicalcongress.org/wac7_news.html
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"New " henge found in Hertfordfordshire .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/threecounties/hi/front_page/newsid_8940000/8940216.stm
A Bronze Age henge has been discovered on land near Letchworth.
Archaeologists have found a circular area about 50 metres wide surrounded by a bank at Stapleton's Field in Norton. North Herts Archaeology Officer, Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews said: "Henges are quite rare with only 60 known in the UK, so this is a significant find. It's interesting as the only other henge known locally is on the Weston Hills, which is visible from the site we are working on."
Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, leading the team working on the site, revealed how the henge which dates back to between 3000 and 2000 BC was discovered: "Ariel photographs of the area showed this rather extensive ring of chalk. There's nothing visible at ground level so we decided to put a trench through it. Having done that we found the chalk bank just survives underneath the plough soil and we have massive ditches inside and out."
The archaeologists are able to date the henge because of pottery they found which is associated with the Bronze Age. "Grooved ware products were found, which dates the henge back to the third millennium BC," explained Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews.
Open invitation
There is an open invitation on Saturday 28 August 2010 at 2pm for members of the public to visit the site and view items on display. Stapleton's Field lies between Church Lane, in the centre of Norton and the A1(M) motorway.
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Bahn Lecture
Paul Bahn finishes a series of six Rhind lectures, "Art on the Rocks", tomorrow at the National Museum of Scotland. I managed to get to three on the Saturday. All were hugely informative, entertaining thought provoking and at times very funny. The one that would be of interest to most was "The Emperor's New Clothes". I won't twitter too much so here's wee synopsis.
It appears that there is not that much opposition, other than Bahn himself, to the David Lewis Williams' shamanic hypothesis but he pointed out that a majority of Neurophysiologists and Ice Age experts do not accept it and that in South Africa the experts on the ethnography of the tribes cited disagree entirely with him as does the "Stan" of South Africa, Bert Woodhouse. More importantly Tribesmen when asked their opinion on the carvings never mention shaman, this applies to other continents as well as Africa and oddly an area that provides some positive ethnography to the theory has no RA. A great iconoclastic attack that might help redress the balance. The theory has replaced the old hunting and sympathetic magic type explanations and likes lots of archaeo mantras it makes for lazy thinking. Nobody is denying the importance or existence of shamanism to many cultures but we have no evidence for it being an explanation for RA here, and as Paul would have it anywhere else. For me the Lewis – Williams books were stimulating reads that will probably influence thinking in this area for a generation but like a lot of big archaeo ideas the cracks were visible a while ago and are getting bigger.
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Post Modern Croft Moraig
Stuart Piggot and Derek Simpson did an exemplary excavation in 1965 , influenced by contemporary research on English stone circles they concluded the sequence at the site was a timber setting and shallow ditch was replaced by two successive stone settings. Pottery associations were dated to the Neolithic . A recent paper by Richard Bradley and Alison Sheridan , "Croft Moraig and the Chronology of Stone Circles " has transformed the earlier thinking. Thanks to the "Dating Cremated Bones Project" from the National Museum of Scotland 26 sherds of the 29 finds are now thought to be of a Late Bronze Age date , Similar sherds have been associated with cremated bone from the stone circles at Kintore and Old Keig and ring cairn at Gownie all giving a date of approx. 2800 BP. The pottery that was previously dated from the Neolithic probably relates to an episode of activity at the site but before any monument building .
The revised structural sequence is now .Phase 1)Outer stone circle Phase 2) Central post circle . Phase 3) Shallow ditched enclosure on site of the earlier post circle. Phase 4) The oval stone setting . All of the above phases have parallels elsewhere e.g. timber settings inside existing stone circles are found at Stannon Down Cornwall , Ogden Down Dorset and Strichen RSC . One of the implications of these findings is that we may have to rethink the Burl suggestion that the last stone circles were built around 1500 BC and abandoned by 1200 BC .
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