Comment: I've written a lot of scathing posts about these mobs of so-called pagans who swarm all over Stonehenge for the equinoxes and solstices, but I'm too apathetic this year to crank out another long screed mocking them for their improvised rituals, costumes, drum circles, and all the other New Age anachronisms they indulge themselves in during these gatherings. What the hell. I guess they're not doing any harm as long as they don't completely trash out the site like they've done in the past. (More here.) After all, Stonehenge may have been, among other things, an ancient cemetery.
These winter-solstice events should include feasts, however. According to English Heritage, "[t]he winter solstice may have been more important than the summer solstice for the people who built and used Stonehenge. Excavations at Durrington Walls suggest that people held huge feasts around this time of year."
The events should probably include sacrifices as well, both animal and human, though the evidence for sacrificial rituals at Stonehenge is apparently still kind of sketchy. According to The Daily Mail (2015), "animal sacrifice, feasting, dancing, and religious rituals" were conducted on the Salisbury Plain around the monument, and National Geographic reported in 2009 that "evidence that Druids possibly committed cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice—perhaps on a massive scale—add weight to ancient Roman accounts of Druidic savagery."
According to Caesar, "the Gauls are extremely superstitious; and so persons suffering from serious diseases, as well as those who are exposed to the perils of battle, offer, or vow to offer, human sacrifices, for the performance of which they employ Druids. They believe that the only way of saving a man's life is to propitiate the god's wrath by rendering another life in its place, and they have regular state sacrifices of the same kind." -- Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul [VI.16].
Modern neopagans are too civilized for that kind of thing, however, which is the main reason they can never be real pagans. I have a feeling that most of the people in these gatherings would run away screaming if they ever found themselves in the presence of the ancient gods of Stonehenge.
"Although Stonehenge has become an increasingly popular destination during the summer solstice, with 20,000 people visiting in 2005, scholars have developed growing evidence that indicates prehistoric people visited the site only during the winter solstice. The only megalithic monuments in the British Isles to contain a clear, compelling solar alignment are Newgrange and Maeshowe, which both famously face the winter solstice sunrise." (Wikipedia)
"The most recent evidence supporting the theory of winter visits includes bones and teeth from pigs which were slaughtered at nearby Durrington Walls. Their age at death indicating that they were slaughtered either in December or January every year. Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield has said, 'We have no evidence that anyone was in the landscape in summer.'"
Both Julius Caesar and Strabo recorded instances of human sacrifice conducted by the Celts and Druids.
According to Strabo, "the Romans put a stop [to the customs] connected with sacrifice and divination, as they were in conflict with our own ways: for example, they [the Celts] would strike a man who had been consecrated for sacrifice in the back with a sword, and make prophecies based on his death-spasms; and they would not sacrifice without the presence of the Druids. Other kinds of human sacrifices have been reported as well: some men they would shoot dead with arrows and impale in the temples; or they would construct a huge figure of straw and wood, and having thrown cattle and all manner of wild animals and humans into it, they would make a burnt offering of the whole thing..." Source: Celtic Studies Resources.
Caesar reported that "those [the Gauls] who are greatly affected by diseases and in the dangers of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow to do so using the Druids as administrators to these sacrifices, since it is judged that unless for a man’s life a man’s life is given back, the will of the immortal gods cannot be placated." (Ibid) Caesar also described how the Celts would burn human sacrifices in giant wicker effigies, the apparent origin of the Wicker Man legend. Whether this actually happened or not is a matter of debate. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he main evidence for this practice is one sentence in Julius Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic war, which modern scholarship has linked to an earlier writer, Poseidonius."
Stonehenge "maintains its less explored, darker aspects, not least of which are the enigmatic burials scattered in and around this famous Neolithic monument. What can these burials, both cremation and inhumation, tell us about the rituals and activities that went on at Stonehenge more than four millennia ago?" Source: "The Stonehenge Burials," Ancient History Encyclopedia.
"...During the 20th century CE nearly 60 cremation burials were uncovered at Stonehenge, with perhaps a couple of hundred more remaining in unexcavated areas of the monument. Interestingly, the latest of these cremations has been radiocarbon dated to c. 2300 BCE, which illustrates that cremation was still being practiced at Stonehenge long after the bluestones and sarsens had been erected."
"In Stonehenge's early years, ancient people used it as a cemetery. In fact, excavations from 1919 to 1926 revealed the cremated remains of up to 58 people, 'making Stonehenge one of the largest Late Neolithic burial sites known in Britain..." Source: Live Science (2018).
"These cremated remains were discovered in the Aubrey Holes, a series of 56 pits at Stonehenge that were named in honor of the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey, who first wrote about them. All of the human remains were moved into Aubrey Hole 7, which was then re-excavated in 2008."
"One of the strangest mysteries [about Stonehenge] is why those giant stones were dragged to an unremarkable Salisbury hillside instead of being erected where they were originally found. Now it seems we have an answer - some of them were already there." Source: Science Alert (April 2018).
"Archaeologist Mike Pitts - one of few researchers to ever perform excavations within Stonehenge - has found evidence that two of the monument's biggest and most important stones, called sarsens, may have been at the site for millions of years."
Comment: I was kind of surprised when I read this story. I thought it was well established that the stones used to build Stonehenge were somehow transported to the site, apparently over a long distance, and that archaeologists / geologists had identified the areas where the stones were quarried. The main question was how these gigantic stones were transported and people have been coming up with various theories over the years.
Now it turns out that the stones (or at least some of them) may not have been transported from somewhere else at all. This makes a lot of sense, actually. According to Occam's Razor, when you're faced with a problem, the simplest solution tends to be the right one. In the case of Stonehenge, if nobody can figure out how Neolithic people could have moved these stones over such large distances, the simplest answer is that they didn't have to move them because they were already there.
Even if this is true, however, it still doesn't solve the problem of how the stones were shaped, raised and positioned. One way or another, Stonehenge is a masterpiece of prehistoric engineering and the absence of written records means that we'll never know for sure how it was constructed. There are only a limited number of ways it could have been done, though, so the ultimate answer will probably just be a list of possible techniques.
Note: There's a conspiracy theory floating around out there that Stonehenge is actually fake, having been constructed in 1954. This theory is based on old photographs which supposedly show construction work being carried out at the site decades ago. As it turns out, some of these photographs are authentic (see 1:09 and on in the video, for example).
According to English Heritage, Stonehenge was partially restored back in 1914 when some of the capstone lintels (which had collapsed) were lifted back into place using cranes and concrete was used to patch some of the standing stones. The land around the site was also cleared to some extent and I think this work is still going on. At any rate, the Stonehenge that exists today is, in a certain sense, a reconstruction.
This kind of restoration / preservation work isn't uncommon in archaeology and it sometimes has unintended consequences. For instance, efforts have been made to keep Egypt's oldest known pyramid, the Pyramid of Djoser, from collapsing completely, but this may actually have made things worse, according to a 2014 story in Smithsonian Magazine.
"Despite over a century of intense study, we still know very little about the people buried at Stonehenge or how they came to be there. Now, archeologists suggest that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument's construction, sourced from the Preseli Mountains of west Wales." Source: Science Daily.
"Analysis of small fragments of cremated human bone from an early phase of the site's history around 3000 BC, when it was mainly used as a cemetery, showed that at least 10 of the 25 people did not live near Stonehenge prior to their death. Instead, they found the highest strontium isotope ratios in the remains were consistent with living in western Britain, a region that includes west Wales -- the known source of Stonehenge's bluestones."
Video from 2017.
Archaeologists have known for years that the Stonehenge bluestones came from Wales, but they only identified the actual quarry sites [1] a few years ago:
"The very large standing stones at Stonehenge are of ‘sarsen’, a local sandstone, but the smaller ones, known as ‘bluestones’, come from the Preseli hills in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. Geologists have known since the 1920s that the bluestones were brought to Stonehenge from somewhere in the Preseli Hills, but only now has there been collaboration with archaeologists to locate and excavate the actual quarries from which they came." Source: University College London (2015).
[1]: Some archaeologists questioned the idea that the bluestones came from Wales, claiming that there was no evidence that the Presili sites were ever used as quarries. I'm not sure where this controversy stands today. If the bluestones, some weighing up to four tons, were quarried in the Presili hills -- and the current consensus seems to be that they were -- they would have had to be transported around 140 miles to Stonehenge.
If accurate, this analysis of the cremated remains at Stonehenge not only supports the theory that the bluestones were quarried in Wales, but suggests that some of the quarry workers traveled with the stones to the Stonehenge site and were most likely involved in the early stages of its construction.
Comment: The fact that Stonehenge was built without modern construction equipment has always been considered to be an unfathomable mystery, but I don't see anything particularly mysterious about it. We'll probably never know the exact methods the Stonehenge builders used to quarry, transport, position and raise those massive stones -- the standing stones are something like 13 feet high, seven feet wide and weigh around 25 tons -- but generally speaking there are lots of fairly straightforward ways it could have been done.
The video above shows one way the capstones could have been set in place. There are lots of similar videos out there, each of them showing different techniques that someone dreamed up to explain how various stages in the construction of megaliths like Stonehenge could have been carried out using primitive technology . For example, this 2016 video shows a man moving a 20-ton block of stone (or cement) by hand using wood, pebbles, counterweights and raw muscle power. That's just one example.
The point is that the technology for building these fantastic megaliths did exist back in the Bronze Age and probably even earlier. There's no need to bring ancient aliens into it when the basic principles of leverage and so on are more than sufficient to explain how it was done. The people who built Stonehenge didn't have modern cranes, so they had to use other tools. That's all there is to it. The fact that Stonehenge exists proves that prehistoric people had the ability to construct the monument. We know they knew how to build it for the simple reason that they built it and their work is still standing today.
The whole premise behind the ancient aliens stuff is that prehistoric people were too primitive to have constructed the impressive monuments that date back to their time. According to this argument, they didn't have heavy-lift cranes, power drills or industrial stone-cutting tools; therefore, they couldn't have lifted heavy objects, drilled holes or cut blocks of stone. What nonsense. The ancient engineers who built Stonehenge, the pyramids, Gobekli Tepe and thousands of other megalithic sites and stone temples around the world were modern humans and they were just as smart and inventive as we are, if not more so. These ancient structures prove that prehistoric man was a lot more advanced than we think.
"Britain's ancient monument Stonehenge is still revealing secrets 4,500 years after the stone circle was first erected in the late Neolithic period." Source: The Weather Network (2017).
"Many theories have been suggested as to its exact purpose, but modern archaeologists generally agree it was some sort of prehistoric temple aligned to the movements of the sun.
"But it seems that these famous standing stones were positioned to enhance their acoustic properties as well.
"Euan Wallace MacKie (born 10 February 1936) is a British archaeologist and anthropologist. He is a prominent figure in the field of Archaeoastronomy." (Wikipedia)
"Alexander 'Sandy' Thom (26 March 1894 – 7 November 1985) was a Scottish engineer most famous for his theory of the Megalithic yard[1], categorisation of stone circles and his studies of Stonehenge and other archaeological sites." (Wikipedia).
[1]: According to Wikipedia, the Megalithic yard is a unit of measurement that "some researchers believe was used in the construction of megalithic structures."
2018 Stonehenge Winter Solstice Celebrations
Comment: I've written a lot of scathing posts about these mobs of so-called pagans who swarm all over Stonehenge for the equinoxes and solstices, but I'm too apathetic this year to crank out another long screed mocking them for their improvised rituals, costumes, drum circles, and all the other New Age anachronisms they indulge themselves in during these gatherings. What the hell. I guess they're not doing any harm as long as they don't completely trash out the site like they've done in the past. (More here.) After all, Stonehenge may have been, among other things, an ancient cemetery.
These winter-solstice events should include feasts, however. According to English Heritage, "[t]he winter solstice may have been more important than the summer solstice for the people who built and used Stonehenge. Excavations at Durrington Walls suggest that people held huge feasts around this time of year."
The events should probably include sacrifices as well, both animal and human, though the evidence for sacrificial rituals at Stonehenge is apparently still kind of sketchy. According to The Daily Mail (2015), "animal sacrifice, feasting, dancing, and religious rituals" were conducted on the Salisbury Plain around the monument, and National Geographic reported in 2009 that "evidence that Druids possibly committed cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice—perhaps on a massive scale—add weight to ancient Roman accounts of Druidic savagery."
According to Caesar, "the Gauls are extremely superstitious; and so persons suffering from serious diseases, as well as those who are exposed to the perils of battle, offer, or vow to offer, human sacrifices, for the performance of which they employ Druids. They believe that the only way of saving a man's life is to propitiate the god's wrath by rendering another life in its place, and they have regular state sacrifices of the same kind." -- Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul [VI.16].
Modern neopagans are too civilized for that kind of thing, however, which is the main reason they can never be real pagans. I have a feeling that most of the people in these gatherings would run away screaming if they ever found themselves in the presence of the ancient gods of Stonehenge.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Britain, Commentary, Culture, Paganism, Prehistory, Religion, Ritual Sacrifice, Stonehenge, Videos | Permalink