Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Stonehenge - a pre-historic Burning Man?

Seems so: Scientists® say so!
"Stonehenge was a monument that brought ancient Britain together," the leader of a new boffinry team, Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, said.

"What we've found is that people came with their animals to feast at Stonehenge from all corners of Britain - as far afield as Scotland."

Pearson and his team from the universities of Manchester, Sheffield, York, Durham, Bournemouth and Southampton were given permission to excavate and study for the first time more than 50,000 cremated bone fragments from 63 people buried at Stonehenge.
The boffins now believe, after a decade of research, that the site was a burial ground first, long before the first massive sandstone block was lugged into place. It looks like Stonehenge started out as a burial ground for the ancient elite, families who were interred there around 3,000 BC, 500 years before the construction of the monument.

Just before the stones of the monument went up, around 2,500 BC, the site was home to vast communal feasts, analysis of cattle teeth from 80,000 animal bones shows. Up to a tenth of the entire British population headed to the site to celebrate the winter and summer solstices but also to build the monument itself.
What, you're not sure about this?  What are you, one of those Deniers?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, it appears to me that "Boffin" conveys the same amount of respect for a Scientist® as he deserves. But I'm no Anglophile, so I'm not sure how far I'm reading into that.

chiefjaybob said...

I see they misspelled, "Buffoon." How unfortunate.

Borepatch said...

As I understand it, "boffin" is a term of endearment.

Unknown said...

Sounds more like Social Science to me.

Old NFO said...

+1 on Jeremy...

Ken said...

You know what this means, don't you?

It means there is probably also an as-yet-undiscovered prehistoric means of sharing cat pictures.

Which in turn means that humans have been cat staff far longer than anyone suspects....

Anonymous said...

Build it and they will come.