Tag: stonehenge

New discovery: The ‘sacred boundary’ surrounding Stonehenge

Some 4,500 years ago, people dug a series of deep, wide pits in the area near Durrington Walls in southern England. They were gemometrically arranged, forming a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) wide circle that enclosed over three square kilometers (1.16 square miles).

Long mistaken for naturally occuring features, the circle of human-made shafts has now come to be understood as a colossal project that lends new dimensions to the Stonehenge landscape.

An invisible ring around Durrington Walls

Durrington Walls is just a stone’s throw from the small English town of Amesbury, and just three kilometers, or about half an hour on foot, from Stonehenge. Each pit or shaft is approximately 10 meters (32.8 feet) wide and 5 meters deep.

Of the 20 pits discovered so far, a new study suggests that at least 15 form a huge, even circle around the henge of Durrington Walls. A henge is a type of prehistoric earthwork consisting of a ring-shaped bank, fortified with an inward ditch, encircling a flat circular area.

They were likely used for ceremonial purposes, to congregate or perform rituals. At the center of Durrington Walls used to be a circular structure of wooden posts, driven deep into the ground and surrounded by a settlement.

The pits were discovered years ago, but the newest research is just now uncovering more details, and providing deeper understanding. Scientists have now been able to date the structure to about 2480 BCE using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL).

The OSL method is a fairly precise way of pinpointing a sediment’s last exposure to light — and by extension, the last time it was covered or buried — by measuring the natural radiation captured in certain minerals like quartz and feldspar. This technique relies heavily on the quality of the sample and has a margin of error of about 5-10%.

The recent study shows that the circular structure did not accidentally form over centuries, but was the result of intentional efforts in a planned, momunental project. The pits were actively used as part of the cultural landscape — and traces of humans, plants and animals indicate deliberate coordination.

A ‘sacred boundary’ mapped with astounding precision

None of the shafts examined can be attributed to natural erosion of the chalky landscape — the pits’ sheer size and number clearly suggest they were dug by humans. They form a near-perfect circle, and are spaced at even intervals. The width and distance of the pits follow a clear pattern.

This means that the humans involved were able to mark distances, count steps or measurements, and work out a coordinated plan — all before they started digging. And so, what at first glance seemed like an assortment of strange holes became a rare testament to the fact that numbers, measurements, and large-scale planning were already part of the daily lives of Neolithic people living in the area.

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Climate Activists Who Vandalized Stonehenge Acquitted And Set Free

Within a progressive controlled nation, who gets punished by the law is greatly dependent on their political and ethnic affiliations.  Left leaning groups (and people like migrants who are useful to left leaning groups) enjoy a separate set of legal standards compared to people who oppose leftist ideology.  This has become a clear trend within the UK in recent years.

This two tier legal system helps the encourage future crimes by leftists and their allies while the hammer is brought down on conservatives and patriots to ensure they are fearful of stepping out of line in the slightest.  

This double standard is obvious once again in the recent acquittal of three Just Stop Oil activists who made headlines after they spraying down the historic site of Stonehenge with a mixture of powder and orange dye.  The dye cost around $1000 to clean but luckily did not leave lasting damage.  The stunt was allegedly designed to draw attention to JSO’s climate change agenda.

The activists, Rajan Naidu, Niamh Lynch and Luke Watson have been found not guilty this week of criminal damage and causing a public nuisance.  The suspects cited human rights law in their defense, arguing that they had a “reasonable excuse”, and they they are protected under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights to freedom of speech and freedom to protest.

The judge emphasized that democratic protest rights can sometimes render otherwise unlawful actions lawful, even if disruptive.  In other words, suspects who commit a clear crime (such as vandalizing an ancient heritage site) will not be punished as long as they support causes that the current government agrees with.  UK patriots, on the other hand, will still get years in prison for posting memes on social media that are critical of mass immigration.

Just Stop Oil’s insanity was rampant across Europe over the course of the last few year until the group disbanded on the grounds that they had been “victorious” in achieving their primary goal (did they beat climate change?).  However, it is more likely they disbanded because of rising public anger over their disruptive tactics. 

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A Fingerprint Taken From Stonehenge Changes Everything We Know About Its Mystical Origins

Stonehenge offers mysteries aplenty. Just when we think we’ve solved one, we have to re-solve questions we thought were already answered. Such is the case with the origin story of the Altar Stone—one of the roughly 80-plus stones still on site in southern England.

The stones of Stonehenge feature a variety of compositions and originate from a number of potential source locations. Scholars previously believed that they knew most of what there was to be known about the Altar Stone—the largest of the non-sarsen stones on site, which is now partially buried beneath two fallen stones. But researchers led by a team from Curtin University may have upended that history, writing that a stone long believed to originate from Wales actually hails from Scotland.

By studying the age and chemistry of mineral grains within fragments of the six-ton Alter Stone—a thick sandstone block measuring 16 feet by 3 feet in the center of the iconic Wiltshire circle—the team crafted a chemical fingerprint of the stone. That chemical composition matched that of rocks from northeast Scotland, and clearly differentiated it from Welsh bedrock.

“Our analysis found specific mineral grains in the Altar Stone are mostly between 1,000 to 2,000 million years old, while other minerals are around 450 million years old,” Anthony Clarke, lead author and Ph.D. student from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group at Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said in a statement. “This provides a distinct chemical fingerprint suggesting the stone came from rocks in the Orcadian Basin, Scotland, at least 750 kilometers [466 miles] away from Stonehenge.”

According to English Heritage, the Altar Stone is a large slab of greenish Old Red Sandstone. Recent geological research had pinpointed the source of the stone to the Brecon Beacons area of southeast Wales. But the study, which was published in the journal Nature, discounts that reigning theory.

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Stonehenge mystery deepens: Scientists say the altar stone did NOT come from Orkney as claimed – as the hunt for its place of origin continues

The origin of Stonehenge’s iconic standing stones has baffled archaeologists for hundreds of years.

Last month, the plot thickened as scientists made a bombshell discovery that the stone circle’s altar stone could be traced back to Scotland, rather than Wales.

Now, the mystery has deepened once again as a new study finds that this bluestone slab did not originate from Orkney as most experts had assumed. 

‘The mystery of where the stone came from is becoming clearer and clearer as we begin to rule out specific areas in north-east Scotland,’ said Professor Richard Bevins from Aberystwyth University, the lead author of the new study.

‘This research is radically changing our thinking about the origins of the Altar Stone. It’s thrilling to know that our chemical analysis and dating work is slowly unlocking this great mystery.’

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Scientists Have Traced the Lost Journey of Stonehenge’s Mysterious Megaliths

Stonehenge hasn’t given up all its mysteries just yet, even though scientists are working to cut them away one by one. The latest scientific effort has been pointed towards identifying the origin of a pair of unidentified sarsen stones—numbers 26 and 160—that don’t neatly fall into past identification efforts.

The results may stretch our understanding of Stonehenge a bit—76 miles southeast, to be more precise.

In a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, researchers employed X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry to analyze the chemical composition of 54 sarsen stone fragments culled from the 5,000-year-old site. This allowed the team to show that stones located at England’s Stonehenge have a more diverse provenance than previously believed.

Over the past few years, scientists have traced the origins of many of the remaining 52 stones at the site. These stones fall into a variety of differing categories, some grouped together and others standing solitary. The bluestones of the inner circle come from the Preseli Hills in Wales, and a variety of the sarsen stones (made of silcrete sandstone) were traced in 2020 to roughly 19 miles from Stonehenge. That site, known as West Woods and located in the southeast Marlborough Downs, was a key source of stone for Neolithic people—both because of the widely available supply and natural access points.

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