Sunday 21 September 2014

How to build Stonehenge


Last night, me and H.I. sat down to watch both episodes of the latest documentary on Stonehenge using catch-up.

For the last five years, a team from Birmingham University and Germany have been carrying out an electronic survey of the vast area around the monument, using sonar-type detector gadgets, towed behind tractors and quad-bikes, which also sent out mapping information to satellites using what must be GPS.

The results were spectacular, showing up hundreds of other large structures and henges which have been all but ploughed-out, covering an area of many square miles. A phenomena whereby grass goes a patchy brown when struggling for water during drought, showed the exact position of the handful of missing stones that formed the uprights to Stonehenge, but what happened to these 40 ton blocks remains a mystery.

Any unanswered questions were handled in the usual way - barely thought-out conjecture which jumps to ludicrous conclusions illustrated by low-paid actors and extras. If you believe this stuff, then you will also believe that Britain was populated by a load of unwashed hippies who - although so skilled that they could fashion beautifully intricate arrowheads from unforgiving flint and conduct brain surgery with flint implements - could not sew to save their lives and dressed in rags and festering animal-skins.

Archeologists spend so much time staring minutely at stuff, that they never see the bigger picture - unless it is displayed on a large screen right in front of their noses.

The country's leading expert on the massive 'Sarsen' stones which make up the bulk of Stonehenge, took us to the Sarsen Valley (about a mile from Avebury which, although about 10 times larger than Stonehenge, was never mentioned once) where these monoliths lie around in their hundreds, waiting to be dragged 30 miles away to - but not down - the A303, having been dumped there by a melting glacier.

She walked to one prone stone and said with great authority that this rock was so hard that it could only be worked using the same stone, then she picked up a small boulder and began bashing the surface of one against the other. In about 20 seconds - quite a long time to be smashing a five pound lump of stone up and down with both untrained arms - she had enough pale dust to fill about half a thimble.

How the hell can an experienced archeologist ignore all the flint tools that have been collected from the area, and proclaim that the builders would have shunned them in favour of a method which was pretty much useless, using a material the same hardness as the very stone they wanted to carve? The thing is that almost nobody associates axes with stone - they universally believe they are only used against wood. I have about six steel stone-axes in my toolkit, and I use them often.

The unintelligence of modern archeologists lies in the fact that they refuse to ask anyone about something who might know better than them, for fear that it would blow their personal theory about something else, and they cannot bear to have that happen. They would rather appear to be stupid.

There then came the inevitable reconstruction of the method used when transporting the 40 ton blocks the thirty miles to the Stonehenge site.

A handful of filthy hippies struggled and strained with a half-ton pebble which was laid on a log sledge, pulling it backwards with a suspiciously modern-looking hemp rope, falling over every six feet or so and looking as though they were going to drop dead from exhaustion at any moment, which they probably were.

The two runners of this sledge were simple poles with bark still attached, which hadn't even been cut at an angle, and ploughed deeper and deeper into the earth with each pull on the rope. You would have thought that anyone who could lay-out and build an astronomical monument as impressive as Stonehenge, would at least have some rudimentary grasp on the practical theory of sledges, and how their use depends on cutting down friction as much as possible, wouldn't you?

Just off the top of my head, if someone came to me and asked me to manually move a forty ton block of stone a distance of thirty miles over rough ground, I would immediately have a picture in my head of the smoothest wooden runners on a sled as possible, and a series of equally smooth, moveable planks to run them on, which would be constantly lubricated with water as they were shifted from back to front in relay. I know this because I have actually done it, albeit with a two ton block, not forty. Rollers do not work on rough ground.

They should have come to me as advisor for this part of the program, but it was fun to see a load of besmirched hippies falling over in the mud and earning every penny of their fees for doing it. I can just see the blank looks on their faces as they queued up in front of the catering van on the windy plain.

"You look like you want sugar in your tea. Am I right?"

21 comments:

  1. Lack of common sense. You have to be over 60 to have it.

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    1. I have it in some areas, but not others.

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    2. I wouldn't know in what areas you have it and in what areas you don't. I don't know you at all.

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    3. I was talking about the fungal infection, not the common sense.

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    4. Like I said, I don't know you at all.

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    5. Prize for most interesting exchange!!

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  2. On 'Time Team' they used to recreate tools and objects. They'd melt iron ore, fashion flint tools, and turn ancient wood lathes; often with poor results. But the people who did such things were mostly TV celebs.

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    1. When Time Team came to Bath, they excavated on a large green which used to have a massive church on it, bombed during WW2 and demolished. They were looking for a Roman road, but were very excited when they found the foundations of a church - nobody told them about it, as far as I can tell.

      My friend walked past one night, and threw a Roman coin into their ditch. When they broadcast, they proudly showed us the Roman coin - the only artefact of that era to be discovered.

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    2. The Germans did us a huge favour when they bombed that Victorian church. It had a ridiculously tall spire which would have ruined all the photos of the Royal Crescent forever, and we were not allowed to deliberately pull it down.

      Shortly after it was built, a small boy was spotted right on the top of it - about 100 feet up - and had to be rescued. Nobody knew how he had got up there without falling to his death.

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    3. Little kids are quite like monkeys sometimes!

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    4. Are they? I wouldn't know. I've never eaten monkey.

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  3. There is so much practical knowledge we commoners could impart to the experts. But someone did notice the brown grass over buried stones and I give them marks for that.

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    1. Without wishing to be too ungracious about the experts, those brown marks could not be ignored, even by someone with poor eyesight.

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  4. Sadly, this sort of attitude seems to apply to many tv so called experts these days.

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    1. And sadly, except cooks. Chefs are all too easily found out if they don't know what they are talking about.

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  5. Except for your fellow Brit, Ivan Day. I think he must be super human in the culinary department.

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    1. Sorry, but I've never heard of him. I don't watch TV, unless it's on iPlayer. I remember Robert Carrier, and that's it, although it is difficult to ignore Jamie Oliver, no matter how hard you try to.

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    2. Oh, and Fanny and Johnny Craddock. They still give me nightmares. "May all your dumplings look like Fanny's!"

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  6. Excellent post! Where do I line up to be a spaced-out hippy in festering animal skins to do a stupid job for union actor fees?

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