Archive for February, 2007
The late, great Carl Sagan once wrote, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”, which is of course an admirable philosophy especially when it comes to investigating apparently contentious matters pertaining to Stonehenge. However, Sagan’s quote derives from an earlier observation made by Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace, a French mathematician and astronomer, who suggested that: “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”
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As far as I’m aware, Stonehenge is the only prehistoric stone circle in Britain constructed with dressed stone, although there are other monuments that possess engravings and carved stone. One of the stones at Berwick St James has a notable hollow in it and it has clearly been carved or dressed, although I cannot say if this happened in prehistory or in more modern times.
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Snowblind
2:12 pm
Those of us living in Britain have had a timely reminder recently of a notable aspect of nature that our ancestors must have encountered in midwinter – snow. I’ve seen some superb and atmospheric aerial photographs of Stonehenge that were taken after a snowstorm, but I’ve not yet come across any discussion of snow in the official literature on Stonehenge. Our ancestors must surely have lived through many blizzards around the time of their midwinter gatherings at Durrington Walls and Stonehenge, so is this phenomenon worth exploring further? Can an examination of snow throw any faint light at all on what took place at Stonehenge in remote prehistory? Perhaps, perhaps not – we shall see.
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Seeing Red & Pig Ignorance
5:00 pm
It surely cannot be possible to conjure up a detailed and credible vision of precisely how our ancestors used Stonehenge unless we minutely examine all the evidence available to us. If we come across a promising path of enquiry, then all well and good, but any conclusions about one particular activity must fit in seamlessly with everything we already know about the monument and the surrounding landscape. I do not see any realistic future in ignoring what we know of the timber phase of Stonehenge or the anomaly of Stone 11, for example, while there are many other enigmatic and apparently incongruous elements of the ruins to take into consideration as well.
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