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The mysteries of Stonehenge is explained at last! Via Nerd Approved
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What was the purpose for Stonehenge? Was it a calendar, an observatory, or a sacrificial site? These suggestions by archaeologists assume that it was a completed design instead of a project left half-finished because the assembly instructions were provided by IKEA. Justin Pollard, John Lloyd and Stevyn Colgan composed a cartoon illustrating this explanation. This is the first panel; the latter stages seem to involve magic and heavy drinking.
Link via The Presurfer
Suddenly, the challenge of moving enormous stone slabs using Neolithic technology doesn’t look so daunting, as artist Brock Davis illustrates in this piece entitled “Rice Krispyhenge”. Presumably the stones were held in place with marshmallow.
Link via Geekosystem
Previously by Brock Davis:
Expressionist Versions of Classic Arcade Games
Boba Fett’s Invoice for Jabba the Hut
Andrew Young, a doctoral student at the University of Exeter, has a novel proposal about how ancient Britons built Stonehenge. He hypothesizes that they placed balls in grooved tree trunks to act as bearings for the heavy stones:
Young first came up with the ball bearings idea when he noticed that carved stone balls were often found near Neolithic stone circles in Aberdeenshire, Scotland (map).
“I measured and weighed a number of these stone balls and realized that they are all precisely the same size—around 70 millimeters [3 inches] in diameter—which made me think they must have been made to be used in unison, rather than alone,” he told National Geographic News.
The balls, Young admitted, have been found near stone circles only in Aberdeenshire and the Orkney Islands (map)—not on Stonehenge’s Salisbury Plain.
But, he speculated, at southern sites, including Stonehenge (map), builders may have preferred wooden balls, which would have rotted away long ago. For one thing, wooden balls are much faster to carve. For another, they’re much lighter to transport.
Link | Photo: University of Exeter
Photo by Luna
It’s quite the coincidence that Roadside America has a list of America’s Stonehenges today, as I took a daytrip yesterday to the one here in Washington at Maryhill. It’s true that the ancient stone monument in Wiltshire County, England has inspired people all over, and the efforts to recreate the magic of Stonehenge are many.
Photo by Luna
As for the one I visited, it was the first of the American replicas, built to honor those Klickitat County soldiers killed in World War I. Started in 1918 by entrepreneur Sam Hill, it’s situated right on a steep cliffside overlooking the Columbia River Gorge.
Sam Hill’s Stonehenge, built to scale out of reinforced concrete, was dedicated in 1918 — the first World War I monument in America — but it wasn’t finished until twelve years later. By then, Maryhill, an experimental Quaker community, had been abandoned, and Sam Hill, who was known for his erratic bursts of manic energy, was in a deep depression. He died in 1931, living just long enough to see his Stonehenge completed. He is buried at the base of the bluff because he didn’t get along with his family, and there is no easy path to his grave because he wanted to be left alone.
Photo by Luna
My daughter and I had a pickup game of baseball in the center of the “Henge. Note the large sacrficial altar-looking slab. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to look like, because Hill incorrectly concluded that the original Stonehenge was a place of human sacrifices, and his aim was to remind us that “humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war.” The plaque reads:
In memory of the soldiers of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country. This monument is erected in the hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death can alone quench.
See more Stonehenge replicas (including one made out of cars, natch) at the link, and if you’re ever in the area, check out this one… it’s pretty neat!
Stonehenge and other historic monuments in the UK are now available on Google Street View as a result of a joint venture between Google and the National Trust:
The pictures were taken late last summer using the ‘Google trike’ – a three wheeled bike with a Street View camera mounted on it, suited to collecting images in places not easily accessible by car.
Other locations include Stonehenge in Wiltshire, Lindisfarne Castle in Northumberland, Lyme Park in Cheshire and Ham House just outside Richmond-upon-Thames near London.
Link via J-Walk Blog
A few days ago, you read about Clonehenges, art installations that are made to resemble the original Stonehenge. You might not realize that Stonehenge is far from the only ancient stone circle in the UK, and there are some in Europe and North America as well. WebEcoist looks at 13 of these circles, including the pictured Avebury Stone Circle in England, which is bigger and older than Stonehenge! Link
Like The Last Supper or the Abbey Road album cover, Stonehenge is such an iconic image that people the world over recognize it, even if it’s made of bamboo or old refrigerators. Web Urbanist has collected 20 Stonehenge recreations from all over. Some try to faithfully resemble the original in England, others are art pieces using recycled materials. Pictured is Phonehenge in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Link -via Interesting Pile
In his series Die Macht Der Bilder (The Power of Images) series, German photographer Markus Georg replicated famous landmarks using everyday materials. I like this one the most: Stonehenge made out of pants on a clothesline.
