Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 10, 2015 8:03 am

Stonehenge Begins to Yield Its Secrets

Image

AMESBURY, England — About 6,300 years ago, a tree here toppled over.

For the ancients in this part of southern England, it created a prime real estate opportunity — next to a spring and near attractive hunting grounds.

According to David Jacques, an archaeologist at the University of Buckingham, mud was pressed into the pulled-up roots, turning them into a wall. Nearby, a post was inserted into a hole, and that may have held up a roof of reeds or animal skin.

It was, he said, a house, one of the earliest in England.

Last month, in the latest excavation at a site known as Blick Mead, Mr. Jacques and his team dug a trench 40 feet long, 23 feet wide and 5 feet deep, examining this structure and its surroundings. They found a hearth with chunks of heat-cracked flint, pieces of bone, flakes of flint used for arrowheads and cutting tools, and ocher pods that may have been used as a pigment.

“There’s noise here,” Mr. Jacques said, imagining the goings-on in 4300 B.C. “There’s people here doing stuff. Just like us. Same kids and worries.”

About a mile away is Stonehenge.

For Mr. Jacques, the house is part of the story of Stonehenge, even though the occupants of the Blick Mead home never saw that assemblage of massive stones. The beginnings of Stonehenge were more than a millennium in the future.

But Blick Mead, he said, helps fill in the sweep of hunter-gatherers who became farmers and then built Stonehenge and other prehistoric monuments dotting the English countryside.

“This is the first unknown chapter of Stonehenge,” Mr. Jacques said.

Stonehenge has captivated generation after generation. Archaeologists have over the years cataloged the rocks, divined meaning from their placement — lined up for midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset — and studied animal and human bones buried there. They have also long known about the other monuments — burial chambers, a 130-foot-tall mound of chalk known as Silbury Hill and many other circular structures. An aerial survey in 1925 revealed circles of timbers, now called Woodhenge, two miles from Stonehenge.

Continue reading the main story
Stonehenge’s Crowded Neighborhood
Researchers using aerial imagery, ground-penetrating radar and other techniques are discovering new details in the landscape around Stonehenge.

Stonehenge was constructed in multiple stages, evolving from a Neolithic earthen ring around 3000 B.C. to an elaborate Bronze Age stone circle raised and rearranged from about 2600–1600 B.C.
Durrington Walls is a Neolithic village ringed with earthworks and dating to 3500–2400 B.C. Radar images may show a row of buried standing stones.

Woodhenge once held concentric rings of timber posts, and was built around 2600–2400 B.C.
West Amesbury Henge is linked to Stonehenge through a processional pathway. People in the photo above are standing in excavated stone holes. The site is also known as Bluestonehenge, and some researchers suggest the missing stones were moved into the Stonehenge ring around 2400 B.C.
Blick Mead Last month, researchers excavated the area around a toppled tree shelter built about 4300 B.C. The home predates Stonehenge by more than 1,000 years, but hints at the progression of early Britons from hunter-gatherers to the farmers who built Stonehenge and surrounding monuments.
Note: Date ranges are approximate, and there is continuing research and disagreement about some dates. The map combines satellite imagery and elevation data to emphasize raised mounds and other details in the landscape.
Sources: Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project; Stonehenge Riverside Project; English Heritage. Map from Infoterra and Bluesky via Google Earth and the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project; Photos by Andrew Testa for The New York Times (Blick Mead) and Adam Stanford, Aerial-Cam
By The New York Times
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE

One of the enormous earthwork configurations photographed from space is known as the Ushtogaysky Square, named after the nearest village in Kazakhstan.NASA Adds to Evidence of Mysterious Ancient EarthworksOCT. 30, 2015
Grave of ‘Griffin Warrior’ at Pylos Could Be a Gateway to CivilizationsOCT. 26, 2015
Older Than the Rolling StonesJUNE 16, 2014
New discoveries shed light on the original purpose of the Stonehenge monument, shown here in a photo from the June 2008 issue of National Geographic.Stonehenge Used as Cemetery From the BeginningMAY 30, 2008
Archaeologists at work within Durrington Walls, part of the Stonehenge World Heritage site, in a project funded by National Geographic. In the foreground is the faint outline of a small, square house; the house’s hearth stands in the center. A line of holes in the background is what is left of a fence that once surrounded the house. Traces of Ancient Village Found Near StonehengeJAN. 30, 2007
“The stone monument is iconic,” said Wolfgang Neubauer, the director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna. “But it’s only a little part of the whole thing.”

Discoveries in the last decade, some via modern technologies like ground-penetrating radar, have revealed more about the people for whom the giant monuments held great meaning.

A Parade of Monuments

The story of Britain starts at the end of the last ice age. In the cold, Britain emptied of people. With so much ocean water frozen in glaciers, sea level was lower, and Britain was connected to the rest of Europe. As the world warmed, they walked back until rising waters severed the land bridge.

Around 3800 B.C. the first large monuments appeared — rectangular mounds known as long barrows that served as burial chambers.

Around 3500 B.C., a two-mile-long, 100-yard-wide ditch was dug close to the Stonehenge site, what is known as the Stonehenge Cursus. (Cursus is Latin for racetrack; the discoverer in the 18th century thought it was a Roman racetrack.)

The first stage of Stonehenge itself, a circular foundation ditch, was carved around 2900 B.C., and rings of timbers were erected.

About 400 years later came a heyday of henges. (The defining characteristic of a henge is not the rocks or timbers sticking upward, but a circular ditch surrounded by a raised bank. In this sense, Stonehenge today is not a true henge; its raised bank is inside the ditch.)

Twenty miles north of Stonehenge is Avebury, with three stone circles, the outermost more than 1,000 feet in diameter, so large that the town of Avebury has spread into the henge; at the center is a pub, the Red Lion, founded four centuries ago.

Closer to Stonehenge is Durrington Walls, a circular earthen structure about 1,600 feet in diameter.

Michael Parker Pearson of University College London has excavated houses at Durrington Walls and along the nearby River Avon, and he has proposed this is where the builders lived for the grandest stage of Stonehenge’s construction, which started around 2600 B.C. The giant stones, weighing some 40 tons, were moved and carved. He believes smaller bluestones, about two tons each, had been taken to Stonehenge during the initial construction from the Preseli mountains in Wales and now more, larger ones were hauled over.

Because early Britons had no written language, the simplest question — Why was it built? — has yet to be conclusively answered.

In Dr. Parker Pearson’s view, Durrington Walls was the land of the living, symbolized by the timbers of Woodhenge, while Stonehenge was the land of the dead. He believes early Britons gathered at Durrington Walls to feast and then proceeded to Stonehenge to honor their ancestors.

Continue reading the main story Slide Show

SLIDE SHOW|10 Photos
The Stonehenge Landscape
The Stonehenge LandscapeCreditTim Ireland/Press Association, via Associated Press
Last month in the journal Antiquity, Dr. Parker Pearson and his colleagues described fatty acid residues they identified on the inside of cooking pots.

“We’ve got the menu,” he said: beef and pork, boiled and grilled, with a smattering of apples, berries and hazelnuts. “They’re basically eating a very meat-heavy diet.”

People came from near and far for the festivities, Dr. Parker Pearson said. He said analysis of cattle teeth showed different isotopes of the element strontium, which vary based on the local minerals in the water, indicating the animals had been raised elsewhere and then taken to Durrington Walls.

Timothy Darvill of Bournemouth University, who conducted a small excavation at Stonehenge in 2008, has a different idea about the monument’s significance, pointing to the bluestones, which he said were not added to the monument until the second phase, around 2500 B.C., and in legend posess healing powers. “Those stones are pretty special,” Dr. Darvill said. “Perhaps their significance wasn’t fully understood.”

He said that Stonehenge originally may have been “the land of the dead,” as Dr. Parker Pearson asserts. But Stonehenge later became more like a prehistoric Lourdes, where people came seeking healing, Dr. Darvill said. “We see Stonehenge more as a place for the living,” he said.

Peering Into the Past

Much more may lie beneath the surface.

“We presume the bits we knew about are the important ones,” said Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford. “What we need to do is to find out really what is out there.”

The idea of using ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers to peer into the ground without digging goes back decades. In recent years, the equipment — particularly the computers to analyze the data — has become cheap enough and fast enough to be widely used in archaeology.

Dr. Neubauer collaborated with Dr. Gaffney to survey eight square miles around Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. “It’s been like an army moving across it,” Dr. Gaffney said.

In September, they announced a surprising claim: Buried in the banks of Durrington Walls are about 90 standing stones, some up to 15 feet tall. Dr. Gaffney said there may originally have been 200, more than twice as many as at Stonehenge. “That tells you the scale of this thing,” he said.

If true, that would jumble Dr. Parker Pearson’s differentiation of Durrington Walls as the land of the living from Stonehenge, the land of the dead. But he is skeptical of the findings, which have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

He said that a decade ago, he excavated some of those locations and found post holes that had been capped with cemented chalk. The radar reflections had bounced off the chalk blocks, he said.

Photo

Concrete posts mark where wooden stakes stood at Woodhenge. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
“The smart money is that the stones are not actually stones,” Dr. Parker Pearson said. He said he and Dr. Gaffney had discussed their differing interpretations. “We’ll dig a hole next year to resolve the issue once and for all,” he said.

A Place of Mystery

Still unknown is how the Stonehenge area became a revered site. The most intriguing evidence is right next to Stonehenge itself — three big post holes that held tall totemlike timber poles. Charcoal and bones in the pits have been dated between 8000 and 7000 B.C.

“It raises the issue whether you have a special place already recognized by a people a long, long time before Stonehenge,” Dr. Parker Pearson said. “That is a question one day we’ll be able to resolve.”

The post holes are far older than anything in the area except the Blick Mead site and one other newly dated post hole.

Mr. Jacques said that animal bones there — mostly aurochs, the big ancestors of modern cattle, but also red deer and boars — date to 7500 B.C., overlapping the Stonehenge post holes. The connection between the two is speculative, but this might be where the builders of the Stonehenge totems lived.

The spring there is full of flint tools and discarded bones. Mr. Jacques paints a picture of Blick Mead as perhaps a precursor of the Durrington Walls celebrations.

Fed from underground, the spring never freezes, and it may have seemed magical in another way, too.

A few years ago, a volunteer — Mr. Jacques’s mother — pulled an interesting-looking rock out of the spring and put it in her pocket. A few hours later, it had turned hot pink — a reaction of algae on the rock to oxygen in the air.

The algae grows only in certain partly shadowed conditions, and those conditions may not have changed much in 9,500 years. “We’re starting to realize this is a special place where special things are going on,” Mr. Jacques said.

He hopes to expand the digs to look for not just a house but a village.

“These people are the first Britons,” Mr. Jacques said. “We’ve found the cradle to Stonehenge.”

After the end of the grand construction phase of Stonehenge, around 2400 B.C., the monument was altered, but the era of megamonument building was over.

“That’s basically when their world changed,” Dr. Parker Pearson said. New people crossed the channel from Europe, bringing bronze and metalmaking to the stone age culture. “It’s a very interesting shift,” he said. “In a way, Stonehenge is a swan song.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 13, 2015 2:47 pm

Mysterious 'Wheel of Giants' IS as old as Stonehenge: Experts confirm Golan Heights circle is 5,000 years old and may have been used for gruesome 'sky burials'
Prehistoric stone monument of Rujm el-Hiri, or Gilgal Refaim went unnoticed for centuries in the disputed region of the Golan Heights
Archaeologists spotted it thanks to aerial photos showing the circles
Now it is believed to be 5,000 years old - a similar age to Stonehenge
However, the mystery about why the monument was built remains
By SARAH GRIFFITHS FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 06:20 EST, 11 November 2015 | UPDATED: 08:51 EST, 12 November 2015

It may be one of the Middle East's most mysterious structures, but it's easy to miss from the roadside.
The prehistoric stone monument of Rujm el-Hiri, or Gilgal Refaim, went unnoticed for centuries in a bare expanse of field in the disputed region of the Golan Heights.
Now archaeologists have dated it to 5,000 years old - making it roughly the same age as Stonehenge in Wiltshire - but they still don't know who built it, or why.
Theories include an ancient calendar, or a 'sky burial' site in which dead bodies were placed on top of stone mounds to be picked apart by vultures.
Scroll down for video
The prehistoric stone monument of Rujm el-Hiri, or Gilgal Refaim (pictured) went unnoticed for centuries in a bare expanse of field in the region of Golan Heights. Theories about its use include an ancient calendar and a 'sky burial' site in which dead bodies were placed on top of the mounds to be picked apart by vultures
Image
The prehistoric stone monument of Rujm el-Hiri, or Gilgal Refaim (pictured) went unnoticed for centuries in a bare expanse of field in the region of Golan Heights. Theories about its use include an ancient calendar and a 'sky burial' site in which dead bodies were placed on top of the mounds to be picked apart by vultures
Archaeologists first spotted the monument, composed of five stone concentric circles, by studying an aerial survey.
The images were released after Israel captured the territory from Syria during the 'six day war' of 1967.

Since this discovery, a number of excavations have revealed it's one of the oldest and largest structures in the region.
And now shards of pottery and flint tools have been used to date the site.
Scholars generally agree construction started as early as 3,500 BC but other parts may have been added to the structure during the following two thousand years.
By comparison, Stonehenge is believed to date back around 4,614 years.
Image
Known as Rujm el-Hiri in Arabic, meaning the 'stone heap of the wild cat', the complex 15-foot-high (4.2 metre) burial chamber at the centre of five circles, the largest of which measures more than 500 feet (152 metres) wide. The pattern is impossible to discern from ground level (landscape view pictured above)
Image
Known as Rujm el-Hiri in Arabic, meaning the 'stone heap of the wild cat', the complex 15-foot-high (4.2 metre) burial chamber at the centre of five circles, the largest of which measures more than 500 feet (152 metres) wide. The pattern is impossible to discern from ground level (landscape view pictured above)
But now archaeologists have dated the Israeli monument to 5,000 years old, making it roughly the same age as Stonehenge in Wiltshire (a stock image). Stonehenge is believed to date back around 4,614 years
+5
But now archaeologists have dated the Israeli monument to 5,000 years old, making it roughly the same age as Stonehenge in Wiltshire (a stock image). Stonehenge is believed to date back around 4,614 years
Known as Rujm el-Hiri in Arabic, meaning the 'stone heap of the wild cat', the complex has a 15-foot-high (4.5 metres) burial chamber at the centre of five circles, the largest of which measures more than 500ft (152 metres) wide.
Its Hebrew name of Gilgal Refaim means 'wheel of giants' and refers to an ancient race of giants mentioned in the Bible.
There is much debate whether the elaborate structre was built around its central burial mound (pictured) or whether this feature was added later on
Image
There is much debate whether the elaborate structre was built around its central burial mound (pictured) or whether this feature was added later on
Unlike the famous English monument built using around 100 huge stones topped by lintels, the Golan structure is made of piles of thousands of smaller basalt rocks that together weigh over 40,000 tons.
'It's an enigmatic site,' said Uri Berger, an expert on megalithic tombs with the Israel Antiquities Authority.
'We have bits of information, but not the whole picture.
'Scientists come and are amazed by the site and think up their own theories.'
Standing on the ground inside the complex, it looks like a labyrinth of crumbling stone walls overgrown with weeds.
But from the top of the 16-foot-high (5 metres) burial mound, it is possible to make out a circular pattern.
Only from the air does the impressive shape of a massive bull's-eye clearly emerge.
Dr Berger said no-one knows who built it – another parallel to Stonehenge, the purpose of which has remained a mystery for millennia.
Some think Rujm el-Hiri may have been constructed by a nomadic civilisation that settled in the area, but it would have required a tremendous support network that travellers might not have had.
Whatever the case, it is thought the monument could have astronomical significance and may have been used as an observatory.

Archaeologists first spotted the monument composed of five stone concentric circles by studying an aerial survey after Israel captured the territory of Golan Heights from Syria during the ‘six day war’ of 1967
Image
Archaeologists first spotted the monument composed of five stone concentric circles by studying an aerial survey after Israel captured the territory of Golan Heights from Syria during the 'six day war' of 1967
THE MYSTERIOUS ANCIENT CIRCLES OF GOLAN HEIGHTS
The ancient megalithic site in the Israeli-occupied portion of Golan heights is known by two names.
Its Arabic name is Rujm el-Hiri in Arabic, meaning the 'stone heap of the wild cat,' while ts Hebrew name means 'wheel of giants' and refers to an ancient race of giants mentioned in the Bible.
The monument, said to be around 5,000 years old, is made up of more than 42,000 basalt rocks arranged in five concentric circles, around a mount 15 feet (4.6 metres) tall in the centre.
Some of the circles are complete and others are not, suggesting it may have been laid out in accordance with astronomical patterns.
Some experts think it was built to be an elaborate burial site, while others think it was primarily an ancient observatory or calendar.
Few artefacts have been found at the site, hinting it was not near a settlement, but instead have been a ritual centre, linked to the cult of the dead.
On the shortest and longest days of the year - the June and December solstices - the sunrise lines up with openings in the rocks, Dr Berger said.
Rujm el-Hiri may have alternatively been built primarily as a burial chamber, but for whom is still a mystery.
If this was the reason it was constructed, any body or bodies have since been removed or stolen.
'All the five big, huge monumental walls around us are all, we think, were built for this chamber, the one who was buried inside. This is one of the theories,' continued Dr Berger.
However, some argue the circles preceded the tomb and were built for another purpose - perhaps as an ancient calendar marking the arrival of the seasons and astronomical events.
A 2010 report suggested the tomb may have been added 2,000 years after the rest of the structure, while another theory by Dr Rami Arav that emerged a year later, suggests the circle and mound were built at the same time and were used for 'sky burials'.
This is when a body is placed on top of a mount for birds such as vultures to pick clean.
Visitors can explore the wall of Rujm el-Hiri at weekends and holidays, but the prehistoric site lies in an area now used for training by Israel's military.
Other large circular structures have been found in neighbouring Syria and Jordan.
Only from the air does the impressive shape of a massive bull's-eye (pictured) clearly emerge. Shards of pottery and flint tools have been found in various excavations to help date the site
Image
Only from the air does the impressive shape of a massive bull's-eye (pictured) clearly emerge. Shards of pottery and flint tools have been found in various excavations to help date the site
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 21, 2015 11:45 am

T-shaped stones tell story of Göbeklitepe
ŞANLIURFA
As part of a Turkish-UNDP joint project, sculptors have engraved the findings of Göbeklitepe on T-shaped stones to show both the way to the site and the first steps of human civilization
Image
T-shaped stones tell story of Göbeklitepe
A path to Göbeklitepe, a 12,000-year-old site in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa often referred as the “point zero of history,” has been decorated with large stone plaques that tell about the ongoing excavation work there.

As part of a joint project by Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Ministry and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), sculptors engraved the results of excavation findings on stones two-and-a-half meters in height and one meter in width.

Nihal Dörtkardeş, the coordinator of the project, told Anadolu Agency that Göbeklitepe was receiving increasing attention but that visitors were facing difficulties in finding the site.

“Göbeklitepe has an 11,500-year history. We decided to erect these plaques since there are no road signs here,” she said, adding that 10 such T-shaped stones were erected on the four-kilometer-long road leading to the site.

Image
The T-shaped stones are inspired by the findings at the location. Archaeologists had found such stones with figures of wild animals on them.

Göbeklitepe, a site on the UNESCO World Heritage Temporary List, is located 15 kilometers from the center of the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa.

Archaeologically categorized as a site of the pre-pottery Neolithic A Period (c. 9600-7300 B.C.) Göbeklitepe is a series of mainly circular and oval-shaped structures set on the top of a hill.

Excavations began in 1995 under the direction of Professor Klaus Schmidt with the help of the German Archaeological Institute. There is archaeological proof that these installations were not used for domestic purposes, but predominantly for ritual or religious purposes. Subsequently, it became apparent that Göbeklitepe consists of not only one, but many of such Stone Age temples.

Furthermore, both excavations and geomagnetic results revealed that there are at least 20 installations, which in archaeological terms, can be called a temple. Based on what has been unearthed so far, the pattern principle seems to be that there are two huge monumental pillars in the center of each installation, surrounded by enclosures and walls, featuring more pillars in those set-ups.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 06, 2016 12:42 pm

Ancient meteorite 'older than Earth' from beyond orbit of Mars found at Lake Eyre
By Laura Gartry

Robert Howie and Phil Bland from Curtin University hold a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite while standing on Lake Eyre.

PHOTO: Curtin University researchers Robert Howie and Phil Bland (L to R) showed off the 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite, thought to be a chondrite or stony meteorite. (Supplied: Curtin University, Desert Fireball Network)

A meteorite estimated to be 4.5 billion years old has been recovered by Perth researchers from a remote part of Lake Eyre in outback South Australia.

In a race against time, the geologists dug the 1.7 kilogram meteorite out just hours before heavy rains would have wiped away any trace of it.

The team from Curtin University had been trying to track the fall site since the meteorite was spotted by locals and five remote cameras in late November in the William Creek and Marree areas.

But on New Year's Eve, as heavy rains brewed a downpour, the team found their needle in a haystack.

Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.
VIDEO: Ancient meteorite found at Lake Eyre (ABC News)
Curtin University team leader Phil Bland hand dug the meteorite from a 42-centimetre-deep hole in a remote section of the lake bed just hours before the arrival of heavy rains would have washed away any remaining clues.

"It was an amazing team effort, we got there by the skin of our teeth," Professor Bland said.

"It is older than the Earth itself. It's the oldest rock you'll ever hold in your hand.

"It came to us from beyond the orbit of Mars, so in between Mars and Jupiter."

The three-day operation to find the meteorite involved an aerial spotter, a drone, two researchers on a quad bike and local Aboriginal guides Dean Stuart and Dave Strangways looking in the sticky clay.

Observations from the air turned out to be critical as the impact site had deteriorated from rain.

A team in Perth was also working around the clock to analyse the incoming data from the search area.

A fireball captured by a remote camera streaking across the night sky
PHOTO: The meteorite was captured falling towards Lake Eyre by a network of remote cameras that also helped identify its orbit. (Supplied: Curtin University, Desert Fireball Network)
'It is a big deal': Cameras identify orbit of meteorite

The meteorite is the first result of a new observation network of 32 remote cameras across WA and South Australia.

Called the Desert Fireball Network, the cameras helped to narrow the search area to a 500 metre line.

Mechatronic engineer Jonathan Paxman said the fall site of the meteorite was very difficult to access, being more than six kilometres from a remote part of the lake's edge, and with the surface quite soft in places due to recent rainfall.

"The fact we have managed to retrieve the meteorite at all is remarkable," Dr Paxman said.

The fact we have managed to retrieve the meteorite at all is remarkable.
Jonathan Paxman, mechatronic engineer
Professor Bland said the meteorite was thought to be a chondrite or stony meteorite, providing an example of material created during the early formation of the solar system more than 4.5-billion-years ago.

The meteorite is also one of only 20 worldwide with an identified orbit, allowing the team to track it back to its original asteroid.

"This meteorite is of special significance as the camera observations used to calculate the fall positions have also enabled the solar system orbit of the meteorite to be calculated, giving important contextual information for future study," Professor Bland said.

"It is a big deal because space agencies like NASA or JAXA will spend a billion dollars trying to get to an asteroid and bring a sample back, so potentially we can do it for a lot less than that."

The researchers have asked the local traditional owners, the Arabana people, to name the meteorite in their language after a feature of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre.

Meanwhile the team has already identified another 10 crash sites to investigate.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)


Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 27, 2016 2:56 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 29, 2016 9:51 am

The Lost City of Cambodia
Deep in the jungles of southeast Asia, archaeologists have rediscovered the remains of an invisible kingdom that may have been the template for Angkor Wat
Image


Angkor plateau
On a remote plateau, researchers reveal a royal capital whose splendors prefigure the glories of the Angkor complex. (Chiara Goia)
By Joshua Hammer; Photographs Chiara Goia
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE
APRIL 2016

Jean-Baptiste Chevance senses that we’re closing in on our target. Paused in a jungle clearing in northwestern Cambodia, the French archaeologist studies his GPS and mops the sweat from his forehead with a bandanna. The temperature is pushing 95, and the equatorial sun beats down through the forest canopy. For two hours, Chevance, known to everyone as JB, has been leading me, along with a two-man Cambodian research team, on a grueling trek. We’ve ripped our arms and faces on six-foot shrubs studded with thorns, been savaged by red biting ants, and stumbled over vines that stretch at ankle height across the forest floor. Chevance checks the coordinates. “You can see that the vegetation here is very green, and the plants are different from the ones we have seen,” he says. “That’s an indication of a permanent water source.”

Seconds later, as if on cue, the ground beneath our feet gives way, and we sink into a three-foot-deep muddy pool. Chevance, a lanky 41-year-old dressed in olive drab and toting a black backpack, smiles triumphantly. We are quite possibly the first human beings to set foot in this square-shaped, man-made reservoir in more than 1,000 years. Yet this isn’t merely an overgrown pond we’ve stumbled into. It’s proof of an advanced engineering system that propelled and sustained a vanished civilization.

The vast urban center that Chevance is now exploring was first described more than a century ago, but it had been lost to the jungle until researchers led by him and an Australian colleague, Damian Evans, rediscovered it in 2012. It lies on this overgrown 1,300-foot plateau, known as Phnom Kulen (Mountain of the Lychee fruit), northeast of Siem Reap. Numerous excavations as well as high-tech laser surveys conducted from helicopters have revealed that the lost city was far more sophisticated than anyone had ever imagined—a sprawling network of temples, palaces, ordinary dwellings and waterworks infrastructure. “We knew this might be out there,” says Chevance, as we roar back down a jungle trail toward his house in a rural village on the plateau. “But this gave us the evidence we were hoping for.”

Phnom Kulen is only some 25 miles north of a metropolis that reached its zenith three centuries later—the greatest city of the Khmer Empire, and possibly the most glorious religious center in the history of mankind: Angkor, derived from the Sanskrit word nagara, or holy city, site of the famed temple Angkor Wat. But first there arose Phnom Kulen, the birthplace of the great Khmer civilization that dominated most of Southeast Asia from the 9th to the 15th centuries. The Khmer Empire would find its highest expression at Angkor. But the defining elements of Kulen—sacred temples, reflecting the influence of Hinduism, decorated with images of regional deities and the Hindu god Vishnu, and a brilliantly engineered water-supply system to support this early Khmer capital—would later be mirrored and enlarged at Angkor. By the 12th century, at Angkor, adherence to Buddhism would also put its own stamp on the temples there.

**********

Nothing ignites an archaeologist’s imagination like the prospect of a lost city. In the late 19th century, French explorers and scholars, pursuing fragmentary clues about the existence of Phnom Kulen, hacked their way through the jungles of Southeast Asia. Inscriptions found on temple doors and walls made mention of a splendid hilltop capital called Mahendraparvata (the mountain of the great Indra, king of the gods), and its warrior-priest monarch, Jayavarman II, who organized several independent principalities into a single kingdom in the beginning of the ninth century.

Another French archaeologist, Philippe Stern, trekked to the top of the Phnom Kulen plateau in 1936, and in five weeks of excavations he and his co-workers uncovered the ruins of 17 Hindu temples, fallen carved lintels, statues of the Hindu god Vishnu, and remnants of a great stone pyramid. Stern believed that he had located Mahendraparvata. But the temples of Angkor, built on a more accessible flat plain and visible on a larger scale, were more compelling to archaeologists, and the excavations at Phnom Kulen never advanced much beyond Stern’s initial dig. Then came decades of neglect and horror.

In 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War, Norodom Sihanouk allowed the North Vietnamese to set up bases inside Cambodia to attack the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese Army. Four years later, President Nixon escalated a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia, killing tens of thousands and helping to turn a ragtag group of Communist guerrillas into the fanatical Khmer Rouge. This radicalized army marched into Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, in April 1975, declared the Year Zero, emptied out cities and herded millions into rice-growing communes. About two million people—nearly one-quarter of the population—were executed or died of starvation and disease before the Vietnamese toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Phnom Kulen became the last sanctuary of the Khmer Rouge, and their leader, Pol Pot, known as Brother Number One. The last of the guerrillas didn’t surrender and descend from the plateau until 1998—Pol Pot died that year near the Thai border, not far from Phnom Kulen—leaving behind a traumatized population and a landscape strewn with unexploded ordnance.

Chevance reached Phnom Kulen in 2000, while conducting research for advanced degrees in Khmer archaeology. “There were no bridges, no roads; it was just after the end of the war,” Chevance says as we eat steamed rice and pork with members of his staff, all of us seated on the wood-plank floor of a traditional stilted house, their headquarters in Anlong Thom, a village on the plateau. “I was one of the first Westerners to go back to this village since the war began,” Chevance says. “People were, like, ‘Wow.’ And I had a coup de foudre—the feeling of falling in love—for the people, the landscape, the architecture, the ruins, the forest.”

It wasn’t until 2012, though, that Chevance marshaled high-tech evidence for a lost city, after he teamed up with Evans, who is based in Siem Reap with the French School of Asian Studies. Evans had become fascinated by Lidar (for Light Detection and Ranging), which uses lasers to probe a landscape, including concealed structures. Mounted on a helicopter, the laser continually aims pulses toward the ground below, so many that a large number streak through the spaces between the leaves and branches, and are reflected back to the aircraft and registered by a GPS unit. By calculating the precise distances between the airborne laser and myriad points on the earth’s surface, computer software can generate a three-dimensional digital image of what lies below. Lidar had recently revealed details of the Mayan ruins of Caracol in Belize’s rainforest, and exposed La Ciudad Blanca, or The White City, a legendary settlement in the Honduran jungle that had eluded ground searches for centuries.

The jungles of Kulen presented a problem, however: Rampant illegal logging of valuable hardwoods had stripped away much of the primary forest, allowing dense new undergrowth to fill in the gaps. It was unclear whether the lasers could locate enough holes in the canopy to penetrate to the forest floor. Despite skepticism, Evans, with help from Chevance, raised enough money to survey more than 90,000 acres in both Phnom Kulen and Angkor. “The whole thing was pulled together with chewing gum and duct tape,” Evans says.



The ruins at Angkor Wat have been left pretty much as they were found when they were discovered in the 1860s. Here, a tree grows from the temple of Ta Prohm, which was constructed by Khmer King Jayavarman VII as a Buddhist monastery and university. (Chiara Goia)
In April 2012, Evans joined Lidar technicians as they flew in a helicopter at 2,600 feet in a crosshatch pattern over Phnom Kulen. About two months after the overflights, Evans, awaiting the processing of visual data they had collected, switched on his desktop. He stared “in astonishment,” he says, as the ghostly legendary kingdom resolved before his eyes into an intricate cityscape: remnants of boulevards, reservoirs, ponds, dams, dikes, irrigation canals, agricultural plots, low-density settlement complexes and orderly rows of temples. They were all clustered around what the archaeologists realized must be a royal palace, a vast structure surrounded by a network of earthen dikes—the ninth-century fortress of King Jayavarman II. “To suspect that a city is there, somewhere underneath the forest, and then to see the entire structure revealed with such clarity and precision was extraordinary,” Evans told me. “It was amazing.”

Now the two archaeologists are using the Lidar images to understand how Mahendraparvata developed as a royal capital. The early water-management system they now saw in detail demonstrates how water was diverted to areas on the plateau that lacked a steady flow, and how various structures controlled supplies during rainless periods. “They employed a complex series of diversions, dikes and dams. Those dams are huge, and they required huge manpower,” Chevance says. At the dawn of the Khmer Empire, he goes on, “They were already showing an engineering capacity that translated into wealth and stability and political power.”

The Lidar imagery also has revealed the presence of dozens of ten-foot-high, 30-foot-wide mounds in symmetrical rows on the jungle floor. Chevance and Evans at first speculated that they were burial sites—but, in succeeding excavations, they found no bones, ashes, urns, sarcophagi or other artifacts to support that hypothesis. “They were archaeologically sterile,” says Evans. “They are a mystery, and they may remain a mystery. We may never know what those things are.” Lidar surveys of Angkor also detected several mounds that are virtually identical to those at Phnom Kulen—just one of many startling similarities of the two cities. Indeed, as the archaeologists studied the images of Mahendraparvata, they realized with a flash of insight that they were looking at the template for Angkor.

**********

Chevance and I set out on dirt bikes, bouncing over rickety wooden bridges that cross silt-laden streams, groaning up steep hills and plunging down switchback trails hemmed in by dense stands of cashew trees (grown illegally in this reserve). In one large clearing we come across the discarded remnants of huge mahogany trees that have been felled with a chain saw, cut into pieces and dragged out in ox carts. Chevance suspects the culprit is an affluent resident in the village of Anlong Thom, but says that fingering him will be pointless. “We will send a report to a government minister, but nothing will change,” he says. “The rangers are on the take.”

At the highest point on the plateau, Chevance leads me on foot up a slope to a monumental five-tiered platform made of sandstone and laterite (a rusty-red rock): the mountaintop pyramid of Rong Chen. The name translates as Garden of the Chinese, and refers to a local myth in which Chinese seafarers smashed their ship against the mountaintop at a time when an ocean supposedly surrounded the peak. It was here, in A.D. 802, according to an inscription in Sanskrit and ancient Khmer found in an 11th-century temple in eastern Thailand, that Jayavarman II had himself consecrated king of the Khmer Empire, at that time a dominion probably a bit smaller than contemporary Cambodia. And it was here, too, that the king created a cult of divinely ordained royal authority. More than 1,200 years later, in 2008, Chevance had arrived at the mountaintop with a team of 120 locally hired laborers. Government experts demined the area; then the team began digging. The excavation suggested that it was the centerpiece of a royal metropolis—a conviction later confirmed by the Lidar overflights. “You don’t build a pyramid temple in the middle of nowhere,” Chevance tells me. “It’s an archaeological type that belongs to a capital city.”

image: http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com/ ... mbodia.jpg

JB Chevance
Braving leeches and cobras, JB Chevance plots ground findings to confirm results from the “biggest Lidar archaeological survey in the world.” (Chiara Goia)
Today Rong Chen is a darkly numinous place, where the glories of an ancient Khmer civilization collide with the terrors of a modern one. Unexploded mines still lie buried here—the result of Khmer Rouge efforts to protect their mountain redoubt from assault. “We saw a few mines at the last moment when we were doing the excavations,” Chevance tells me, warning me not to venture too far from the pyramid. “Most of the villages on Phnom Kulen were mined. The road between the villages was mined.”

The hilltop camp afforded the Communist fighters a sanctuary near the strategic city of Siem Reap, then in government hands, and served as the base from which the Khmer Rouge carried out acts of sabotage—including blocking a spillway that carried water from Phnom Kulen into the city. “They prevented water from reaching Siem Reap, and the Cambodian Army knew that.” The result, Chevance says, was that the mountain was bombed. “You can still find B-52 bomb craters here.”

Chevance and I get back on our dirt bikes and bounce down a path to the best-preserved remnant of Jayavarman II’s capital: an 80-foot-high tower, Prasat O Paong (Temple of the Tree of the Small River), standing alone in a jungle clearing. The facade of the Hindu temple glows a burnished red in the setting sun, and intricate brickwork reaches to the apex of the tapered column. Ceramics inside this and other temples excavated on Phnom Kulen prove that they remained pilgrimage sites as late as the 11th century—an indicator that the structures continued to influence the rest of the Khmer Empire long after Jayavarman II moved his capital from Phnom Kulen to the Angkor plain and the city’s original population had disappeared.

**********

Angkor—which Chevance and Evans describe as “an engineered landscape on a scale perhaps without parallel in the preindustrial world”—is a place that inspires superlatives. Achieving its apogee in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the site, at its peak, was an urban center extending over nearly 400 square miles. Chevance leads me up the near-vertical stone steps of Pre Rup, a soaring tenth-century structure with a platform made of laterite and sandstone. It represents a transition point, a synthesis of the two extraordinary temples we explored on the plateau, Prasat O Paong and Rong Chen. “It is a pyramid with three levels,” Chevance tells me, as we clamber among the deserted ruins in the heat. “On top you also have five towers similar to the ones we saw on the mountain. It is a combination of two architectural styles.”

As has now become clear, thanks to Lidar, Phnom Kulen, faintly visible on the horizon 25 miles away, influenced far more than the later city’s sacred architecture. To support Angkor’s expanding population, which may have reached one million, engineers developed a water-distribution system that mirrored the one used on the plateau. They collected water from the Siem Reap River, a tributary of the Mekong, that flows from the plateau, in two enormous reservoirs, then built an intricate series of irrigation channels, dams and dikes that distributed water evenly across the plain. Although Angkor’s soil is sandy and not highly fertile, the masterful engineering allowed farmers to produce several rice crops annually, among the highest yields in Asia. “The secret to their success was their ability to even out the peaks and troughs seasonally and annually, to stabilize water and therefore maximize food production,” Damian Evans tells me.

image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com/ ... pscale.jpg


image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com/ ... pscale.jpg


image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com/ ... pscale.jpg


image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com/ ... pscale.jpg


A jungle yields up its long-buried secrets: When archaeologists conducted Lidar overflights on the Phnom Kulen plateau, the technology effectively stripped away dense forest to produce a new 3D model of sites including the Rong Chen temple (raised rectangles, center of image). The relationship between Phnom Kulen and Angkor Wat—where urban centers are defined by a monumental temple at the center—suddenly became apparent: “They have the same fundamental elements,” says scientist Damian Evans. (5W Infographics. Research by Nona Yates)
Angkor was at its height during the reign of Jayavarman VII (circa 1181-1220), regarded by scholars as the greatest king of the Khmer Empire. Two days after my arrival in Angkor, I’m standing with Evans on the highest platform of the king’s masterpiece, the temple known as the Bayon. Evans gestures across a stunning tableau of sandstone terraces, pillars and towers, as well as galleries carved with bas-reliefs depicting warriors marching into battle. “No king who came afterward ever built on this scale again,” says Evans. Jayavarman VII, who made Mahayana Buddhism the Khmer Empire’s state religion, grafted what are commonly believed to be his own features onto a serenely smiling Buddhist divinity. Its massive stone face beams in dozens of iterations throughout this complex, radiating compassion and kindness across the four corners of the empire.

It is here, in the heart of Jayavarman VII’s capital, that the histories of Ang­kor and Mahendraparvata converge most powerfully. “You are looking at cities that are widely separated in space and time,” Evans tells me. “But each has an urban core defined by a grid of streets and a central state temple—the Bayon here, Rong Chen there—at the center.”

Yet the Lidar data show that the cities followed divergent paths. While Mahendraparvata was a masterpiece of urban planning, with temples and dwellings carefully laid out by Jayavarman II around wide boulevards—a Khmer version of Haussmann’s Paris—Angkor developed haphazardly. Densely populated neighborhoods of wooden houses squeezed against the edges of the Bayon. Evans describes Angkor as a “messy aggregation of centuries of development, with features superimposed one on top of another.”

Beneath the jungle canopy south of the city, Evans’ Lidar surveys have detected huge spirals inscribed into the landscape, covering one square mile, reminiscent of the ancient geoglyphs discovered in the Nazca Desert of southern Peru. Like the mystery mounds, the spirals contained no artifacts, no clues about their function. “They could have a meaning encoded in them that may never be known,” Evans says.

**********

The sheer ambition of the Khmer kings, their re-engineering of a jungled landscape into an urban one, sowed the seeds of destruction. New research has provided a clearer picture of the sequence of events that may have doomed Mahendraparvata. The Lidar data revealed that its population didn’t engage in terraced rice farming in their mountain metropolis—which meant that they almost certainly relied on slash-and-burn agriculture. That would have depleted the soil rapidly, and probably contributed to the decline and fall of the city. The evidence backs up research conducted by Chevance and a colleague, who analyzed soil samples taken from a reservoir on Phnom Kulen. Evidence showed that vast amounts of soil and sand “got washed down the valley, indicating deforestation,” says Chevance. Soil from a later date contained a high concentration of jungle vegetation, which suggests that the land had been abandoned and taken over again by the tropical forest.

In the case of Mahendraparvata, this process likely occurred more rapidly than at Angkor—a major population center for about 600 years—where decline came more slowly. Over time, the artificially engineered landscape almost certainly led to topsoil degradation, deforestation and other changes that drastically reduced the capacity to feed the population and made Angkor increasingly difficult to manage.

Leaders of the rival kingdom of Ayutthaya, in what is now Thailand, sacked Angkor in 1431. It was abandoned and left to decay, doomed to the same fate as its predecessor, Mahendraparvata. “There are in the kingdom of Cambodia the ruins of an ancient city, which some say was constructed by Romans or by Alexander the Great,” the Spanish explorer Marcelo de Ribadeneyra wrote when he chanced upon Angkor nearly two centuries later. “It is a marvelous fact that none of the natives can live in these ruins, which are the resorts of wild beasts.”

“There are still many questions to answer,” Chevance tells me. “We know more about temples and kings than everyday life.” When it comes to the inhabitants of Mahendraparvata, Chevance adds, a fundamental question underlies his work: “How did they live?”

Answering that query will be difficult, because few traces of ordinary Khmer life remain: While temples —built for the ages—endure, Mahendraparvata’s population constructed their dwelling places out of wood, which rotted away long ago. Even the royal palace, which probably employed thousands of people, has been reduced to a few crumbling platforms, pavements, gutters, dikes and roof tiles.

Last year, as part of the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative, Evans and Chevance conducted a new series of helicopter surveys of Phnom Kulen to take in “the entire mountain range,” says Evans—more than 100 square miles encompassing archaeological sites, rock quarries and traces of ancient cities. The CALI project also included overflights to investigate ancient provincial centers of military and industrial significance, as well as the Khmer capital of Sambor Prei Kuk, 100 miles south of Angkor. The city endured from the seventh to the ninth centuries, declining just as Angkor was on the rise. In total, the CALI campaign covered more than 700 square miles.

Ten ground teams worked alongside the aerial survey teams in remote areas, and in extreme heat, refueling choppers, conferring with local authorities, collecting precision GPS data at ground stations, and persuading local people to stop burning off forest, so that flights relying on aerial sensors would not have the ground obscured by smoke.

The result of this ambitious effort, funded by the European Research Council, was a “unique archive,” says Evans, of the ways that human beings transformed the natural environment and shaped Khmer history over 2,000 years. The results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal later this year. Further surveys are planned using drones and satellites. Evans’ teams are currently on the ground across Cambodia, investigating surface remains shown by Lidar. This ambitious effort, he believes, eventually will reveal the entire mosaic of Southeast Asia’s greatest civilization, only now beginning to come into focus. Ultimately, he believes, what will emerge is a dazzling, nuanced understanding of a “complex hierarchy with an unmatched scale.”




Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/l ... Bxp95L4.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 30, 2016 12:45 pm

Thousands of Ancient Petroglyphs, ‘Dramatic’ Solar Calendar Reported in N. Arizona
POSTED BY BLAKE DE PASTINO ON MARCH 28, 2016
Archaeologists exploring the remote mesas of northern Arizona have uncovered a trove of previously undocumented rock art, including more than 1,500 petroglyphs, and confirmed the presence a prehistoric solar calendar, which has been marking the seasons for more than 700 years with a striking “shadow dagger” that travels across its sandstone face.

Researchers made these finds in the backcountry of Wupatki National Monument northeast of Flagstaff, which includes the ruins of dozens of sites built by Ancestral Puebloans known as the Kayenta and the Sinagua.

Experts with the Museum of Northern Arizona [MNA] and the National Park Service set out to explore the isolated reaches of the monument in 2014, in order to document the full extent of the rock art and other features that scientists had not studied in decades or, in many cases, had never seen before.

“As a result of the current project, the NPS now has a complete library of photographic images of every panel, every element, and every feature [in the study area]”, said MNA’s David Purcell, who supervised the study.

Researchers-at-Horseshoe-Mesa Arizona
Researchers used time-lapse, video, and billion-pixel panoramic photos to document the petroglyphs. (Photo: D. Purcell/NPS. May not be used without permission.)
“And we were able to expand the scope of the project … and conduct some pilot analysis of how the rock art is oriented to the horizons, and conduct detailed additional documentation of the solar calendars.”

Over nearly two years, including many special visits to watch the interplay of sunlight at certain spots during equinoxes and solstices, the researchers combed areas known as Horseshoe Mesa, Middle Mesa, and an unnamed landform that they dubbed Little Mesa.

In that time, they documented 122 panels of petroglyphs at Horseshoe Mesa — 50 of which had never been recorded before — and 107 panels at Middle Mesa, 88 of which were new to scientists.

Many of the panels contained several, sometimes dozens, of individual petroglyphs, resulting in more than 1,500 separate glyphs being recorded for the first time.

The most recent markings include graffiti made by American travelers in the late 1800s, and historic-era images of horses, barns, and cattle, sometimes with visible brands, scratched into the rock by Navajo inhabitants.

But the study also turned up evidence of human occupation dating back farther than some researchers expected — including petroglyphs and a lone stone artifact that are typical of the so-called Late Archaic period, which dates back as much as 4,000 years.

“The most significant finding was the discovery by MNA Archaeologist Nancy Mueller of a complete Elko Corner-notched dart point [a style that dated from 1500 to 4000 years ago], as well as the finding of Panel 92, an isolated [petroglyph of a] bighorn sheep of the Glen Canyon Linear style, which suggests a Late Archaic presence at Horseshoe Mesa,” Purcell said.

A petroglyph of a desert bighorn sheep found at Horseshoe Mesa is rendered in the Glen Canyon Linear style, another sign of Late Archaic culture, which dates back as much as 4,000 years (Photo: D. Purcell/NPS. May not be used without permission.)
A petroglyph of a desert bighorn sheep found at Horseshoe Mesa is rendered in the Glen Canyon Linear style, another sign of Late Archaic culture, which dates back as much as 4,000 years (Photo: D. Purcell/NPS. May not be used without permission.)
However, he noted, the majority of the petroglyphs documented by the team seem to be the work of the Ancestral Puebloan group known as the Kayenta, which lived in the Wupatki area from about 1150 to 1300.

“The rock art and the associated artifacts are solidly within the Kayenta tradition, although we have seen a few Sinagua potsherds,” Purcell said.

And among the Kayenta petroglyphs, the ones that caught the researchers’ attention most were a cluster of geometric forms found on the southern face of a sandstone ledge on Horseshoe Mesa’s northern end.

Labelled Panel 50, it was originally recorded by archaeologists surveying the area in 1931 and wasn’t suspected to have played a role in tracking the movement of the sun until the 1990s. But whether it did, and how, remained unclear for decades.

Purcell said the new research confirms that Panel 50 is indeed an “imaging calendar” — a time-tracking feature that uses the play of light and shadow — to mark the winter solstice, as well as the spring and fall equinoxes.

While the area around it is crowded with a variety of images, the calendar consists of only two large motifs, Purcell explained.

First, on the left or north side of the panel, partially protected by a rock overhang, is a set of eight circles, each 7 to 9 centimeters (3 to 4 inches) across, arranged in rows of two, three, two, and one.

To the right, under another small projection of rock, is a large spiral, which winds counterclockwise into a coil 10 lines deep.

Horseshoe-Mesa-Solar-Calendar-detail
The solar calendar at Panel 50 consists of two elements, a spiral (right) and a set of eight disks. (Photo: D. Purcell/NPS. May not be used without permission)
Using video and time-lapse photography during the “solar milestones” that mark the start of each season, the archaeologists observed the appearance of what they call a “shadow dagger” that interacts with these two elements in a unique way on those days.

On both equinox days, the calendar begins totally immersed in shadow, until exactly 12 noon local time, when sunlight first falls on the panel, striking the projection of rock above the spiral, and forming the triangular shadow.

As the hours progress, the dagger — the only shadow that appears on the spiral that day — narrows and moves upward, its leading edge running through the precise center of the spiral.

[See a photo gallery of the Panel 50 calendar at the equinox.]
“This is the most dramatic, but not necessarily the most important, interaction observed,” Purcell said.

At the same time, to the left, the clutch of eight circles is encroached upon by another shadow, cast by the outcrop overhead.

This shadow falls precisely along the bottom right edge of the grouped circles — at the same moment that the dagger bisects the spiral.

And as time passes, the shadow moves up, covering some rows of circles in darkness, while leaving others in the light.

“We think that somehow this provides a countdown to the equinox or a count from the equinox to some other important date, such as planting,” Purcell said.

Finally, another unique interaction takes place on the equinox, at sunset.

At that time, light passes through a natural crevice in the mesa opposite the panel, forming what the researchers call a “bar of light” that touches the upper left edge of the group of circles.

And the day after the equinox, again at sunset, this bar completely covers the whole group of circles, and touches the edge of the spiral, before receding.

“Because this bar of light moves so much in one day — it does not even touch the panel on the day before the equinox — this may confirm the exact date of the equinox,” Purcell said.

[See for yourself: “Photos: Watch the ‘Shadow Dagger’ Solar Calendar Mark the Equinox“.]
A few other rock-art sites in Wupatki have been thought to be solar calendars, he added. But none of them, so far, has demonstrated the complexity and specificity observed in Panel 50.

“When [those other petroglyphs] are viewed in the context of the whole panel, during the course of a day, they are simply part of the sunlight and shadow play that is visible on all of the panels,” he said.

By contrast, Panel 50 shows that its creators had an intimate knowledge of the equinoxes and the solstices, and how the light of those days fell upon that particular site.

The day after the equinox, a bar of light appears to isolate the circles, before moving right to graze the spiral's edge. By contrast, on the day before the equinox, this light bar does not touch the panel at all. (Photo: D. Purcell/NPS. May not be used without permission.)
The day after the equinox, a bar of light appears to isolate the circles, before moving right to graze the spiral’s edge. By contrast, on the day before the equinox, this light bar does not touch the panel at all. (Photo: D. Purcell/NPS. May not be used without permission.)
“The shadow pointer and the light bar have played out on the cliff face at Horseshoe for centuries or millennia, season after season,” Purcell said.

“The elements of Panel 50 were added by someone who was well aware through other means of reckoning which days marked the equinoxes and solstices.”

Given that the panel, like many of the glyphs around it, was crafted by the Kayenta, he added, it’s possible that Panel 50 is a local manifestation of the same knowledge that the Ancestral Puebloans used to craft solar calendars elsewhere.

“The ethnographic literature is clear that ‘sun priests’ or ‘sun watchers’ are a common and important role in historic Puebloan society, and the timing of ceremonies and dances requires careful observation of solar milestones,” he said.

And Panel 50 has much in common with Chaco Canyon’s now-defunct calendar known as the Three Slab Site — where three sandstone panels placed on end created a dagger of sunlight that either bisected, framed, or grazed an etched spiral, depending on the season being marked.

“I believe that the Horseshoe Mesa solar calendar is very much within the tradition of the Three Slab Site,” Purcell said.

“Some archaeologists view Wupatki Pueblo as the westernmost Chaco Great House; if that is the case, then the knowledge of how to construct solar calendars like the Three Slab Site may have been part of the ‘Chaco Phenomenon.’”

In an effort to learn more about Panel 50 and what it can tell us about the Kayenta, their ties to Chaco, and the prehistory of northern Arizona, Purcell and his colleagues are continuing to study the thousands of photographs, maps, and hand drawings that the team has produced.


Among the questions they’d like to pursue: Why does the Horseshoe Mesa calendar mark the advent of every season except summer?

“The shadow pointer does not mark the summer solstice, and the other interactions visible on that day are not completely convincing as solstice markers, so we believe that the people who made Panel 50 were probably not there to observe the summer solstice,” Purcell said.

“Since the summer solstice really marks mid-summer, not the beginning of summer, in northern Arizona, the date with which they would have been concerned is the beginning of the Monsoons, which averages July 4.

“Perhaps further research will determine if Panel 50, or some other petroglyphs, mark this important date.”

For now, the abundant new insights this research has provided into the rock art of Wupatki adds to the evidence of just how complex the Ancestral Puebloans’ understanding was of the natural world.

“Without the distractions of our technocratic culture, the people who lived at Horseshoe and Middle Mesas were fully aware of all aspects of the natural world around them,” Purcell said.

“They lived in the landscape and the seasons, not in opposition to them as we choose to do now.”

Photographs from this research appear in the exhibit “Images on Stone: Petroglyphs of Wupatki National Monument,” at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona from March 26 through September 5.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jun 04, 2016 9:45 pm

Canadian Teen Who 'Discovered' Lost Maya City Speaks Out
William Gadoury is shrugging off scholarly criticism and planning an expedition to Mexico to find the city he calls K'aak Chi, or "Mouth of Fire."

William Gadoury, shown here in Washington, D.C., in May 2016, says that a very public critiquing of his theory that Maya cities are aligned with modern constellations only helps him advance his research.
PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA HALE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
By Kristin Romey
PUBLISHED JUNE 2, 2016
In early May of this year, a Canadian teenager sparked a global frenzy with the news that he had located a previously unknown Maya city in the Mexican jungle—while never leaving his home country.

According to the initial report, William Gadoury of Québec was able to align more than 100 Maya cities to maps of modern constellations. When one constellation appeared to be missing its corresponding city, Gadoury turned to specialists to interpret satellite images of the area in an attempt to find the "lost" site.

I think scientists are jealous. Sometimes they are scared of new ideas.
William Gadoury | Student
When the announcement that a Maya city, which Gadoury named K’aak Chi, or "Mouth of Fire," had indeed been located where it was expected to be, international media stumbled through its own Kübler-Rossian stages of coverage: unquestioning acceptance, sensational headlines, emerging naysayers, critical backlash, and then…silence. (Read the original National Geographic report on Gadoury's research.)

So what's happened to 15-year-old William Gadoury since his 15 minutes of Internet fame? While much of the archaeological community has rejected his conclusions, there's also wide admiration for the creativity and technical ability he's applied to his research. Gadoury's gone on to win a gold medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair for his project on K'aak Chi, and he has received an invitation to participate in the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in September.

Picture of satellite
William Gadoury used the position of a constellation to identify the location of a possible Maya city where an anomaly, shown above in a satellite image, was observed. Further study on the ground is required to determine the nature of this feature.
IMAGE COURTESY OF ARMAND LAROCQUE
Gadoury recently took a school trip to Washington, D.C., where National Geographic had the opportunity to talk to him about the coverage that his scientific theory has received, as well as his plans for the future.

You received a lot of criticism from scientists about your theory that Maya cities were built in alignment to modern constellations. One prominent Maya scholar even called it "junk science." How did you handle that?

Just OK, I guess. I know it's not very good when I'm not accepted by critics, but it just helps me advance my research.

When reports of your research hit the news, you must have had a lot of journalists trying to contact you, no?

Oh yeah, people were constantly calling. And I got maybe 400 or 500 emails. My mom helped me to manage everything.

So this very public critique of your work won't stop you from continuing your research?

No. No.

What field of science do you want to specialize in?

Astronomy or archaeology—I'm not sure yet.

Will you make your research public and open to scientific review?

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Worst Places to be Stung? Ask This Guy
Derailment Raises Concern Over Train Shipments of Crude Oil
Coming Up: Food and Travel Twitter Chat
I want to publish my research in a scientific journal so I can share it with archaeologists and scientists. Right now I'm talking to one [journal] about writing for them.

You've been working on this project for three years. What's your next step?

I have to go to Mexico and locate this city on the ground to prove it is there. Maybe this summer.

How long do you think such an expedition will take you?

Maybe two weeks, I'm not sure. I'm not an expert on this.

And how much money will you need to conduct this research?

Around $100,000.

You conducted this research in Canada using computer software and satellite imagery. Have you ever visited a Maya site in person before?

Last summer I visited Ek Balam and Chichen Itza in Yúcatan. They're amazing sites, and even better in person.

So you're confident that—despite what most scientists say—people all over the world, for thousands and thousands of years, all saw the same exact configuration of constellations we identify today?

Yes, we've all seen the same patterns. There are Aztec cities that align with the constellation of Orion, and Inca sites that align with Sirius.

Do you have a favorite constellation?

Cassiopeia. It's shaped in a W, like my name.

When our story ran, we received a lot of comments from readers who claimed that scientists debunked your theory simply because they are jealous of your research. Do you think this is correct?

Yes, I think scientists are jealous. Sometimes they are scared of new ideas. They're afraid to have their established ideas criticized.

So you think scientists should be more open to people with scientific ideas who may not yet have a degree in science?

I do really want them to have more open minds and to listen to other ideas.

What would you say to other young students who have their research criticized by established scientists?

I'd tell them to push their limit and never stop working. Follow your dreams!

Maya archaeologist and National Geographic grantee Francisco Estrada-Belli invited you to come to the jungle and find Maya sites with him. Will you take him up on his invitation?

Oh yes. Definitely!



Hikers on Caribbean island of Montserrat find ancient stone carvings
The petroglyphs – thought to be 1,000 to 1,500 years old – are the first known of in the British Overseas Territory: ‘They really add to Montserrat’s unique history’
Montserrat's National Trust is announcing the discovery of pre-Columbian petroglyphs, the first find of its kind on the island in the east Caribbean.


Montserrat’s National Trust said the pre-Columbian petroglyphs are the first find of their kind on the island in the eastern Caribbean. Photograph: mhmon
Ryan Schuessler
@RyanSchuessler1
Friday 3 June 2016 06.00 EDT Last modified on Friday 3 June 2016 18.50 EDT

Hikers out for a stroll on the Caribbean island of Montserrat have discovered ancient stone carvings that archaeologists believe could offer valuable insight into the island’s pre-colonial history.

The petroglyphs – which appear to depict geometric designs as well as beings of some kind – were carved into the side of a mossy boulder in the densely forested hills in the island’s north.

Petroglyphs left behind by the Caribbean’s indigenous peoples have been found throughout the region but until now had never been seen on Montserrat or nearby Antigua.

The petroglyphs were found in densely forested hills in the island’s north.

The petroglyphs were found in densely forested hills in the island’s north. Photograph: Montserrat National Trust
Locals stumbled across the carvings while hiking through the island’s densely forested hills in January, but officials delayed announcing the discovery until the petroglyphs’ authenticity could be confirmed by researchers.

“We have Amerindian artifacts on the island, but had not seen petroglyphs,” said Sarita Francis, director of the Montserrat National Trust. “These are the first, that we know of, that have been found here.”

Initial analysis suggests Montserrat’s petroglyphs are between 1,000 and 1,500 years old, Francis said, though carbon dating will paint a clearer picture of the images’ origins.

On social media, Montserratians commented on the petroglyphs’ similarities to those that have been found on St Kitts, another nearby island. Mentore said that indigenous Arawak petroglyphs and other evidence of pre-Columbian settlement have been as far north as Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.

Woodlands beach in Montserrat, near where the petroglyphs were discovered.

Woodlands beach in Montserrat, near where the petroglyphs were discovered. Photograph: Bob Oliver/Getty Images
Francis said that she hoped further studies will reveal the messages, if any, encoded in the carvings. “They really add to Montserrat’s unique history,” she said. “To the history of people being on Montserrat, throughout time.”

Archaeological evidence suggests that ancient peoples first lived on Montserrat – today a British Overseas Territory – between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago. Arawak-speaking groups later inhabited the island, but are believed to have vacated it by the late 1400s following raids by another indigenous group, the Caribs.

Montserrat, which is approximately 16km (10 miles) long and 11km wide, came under British control in 1632. Today, the majority of the population is descended from colonial-era Irish settlers and African slaves.

George Mentore, a University of Virginia anthropologist who studies the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean and Amazonia said that similar engravings had been found along rivers in the north of South America where Arawak- and Carib-speaking groups live today.

“They’re obvious statements of human presence,” he said. “I think it’s pretty obvious that they’re sacred, in one way or another.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 27, 2016 10:21 pm

These Ancient Sites May Predate the Earliest American Settlements by Thousands of Years

June 22, 2016 Micah Hanks

Beginning in the 1926, a handful of ancient burial sites began to be excavated in parts of New Mexico, suggesting that a very interesting clue to the past lay hidden beneath the unturned earth. The site, located near the Blackwater Draw in eastern New Mexico, was among the earliest of its kind, but over the course of the next decade, similar discoveries at nearby Clovis, New Mexico, would begin detailing the settlement of a distinctive culture that appeared between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago.
The remains of this prehistoric Paleo-indian group became known as known as that of the Clovis culture, and in February 2014, a 12,600-year-old sample taken from the remains of an infant found in Montana — the “Anzick boy” — provided DNA evidence that the Clovis people were ancestors to roughly 80% of all modern Native American populations.
For decades, the knowledge of the Clovis culture and, more specifically, where in the geological strata their remains would be found, would set a new precedent for how dig sites were excavated. Based on this, the Clovis culture remains what many archaeologists today believe to be the earliest cultural group to arrive in the Americas.
The Blackwater Draw site in eastern New Mexico, as seen today.
The Blackwater Draw site in eastern New Mexico, as seen today.
However, there is some controversial evidence that may suggest an even earlier arrival in America by ancient people.
Albert Goodyear, a researcher with the University of South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, is the founder of the Allendale PaleoIndian Expedition in South Carolina. In 2004, Goodyear managed to stir controversy in the archaeological world when he made the bold suggestion that, rather than settling the Americas 13,000 years ago, some evidence may suggest that our ancestors may have arrived here much earlier, possibly even during one of the earlier known ice ages.
Goodyear’s information comes from a controversial dig site in South Carolina known as the Topper site. According to radiocarbon carried out at this location, Goodyear believes it is not only the first human settlement in North America, but that it may date as far back as 50,000 years, predating other known human settlements in North America by as much has 25,000.
In addition to radiocarbon dating at the Topper site, Goodyear and his team managed to find pieces of stone shards which appeared to bear the signatures of rudimentary human manipulation as tools. However, some feel that these purported artifacts are too indistinct to reliably offer proof of human tools at the location.
“He has a very old geologic formation, but I can’t agree with his interpretation of those stones being man-made,” Michael Collins with the University of Texas at Austin told CNN in 2004. Collins is now a Research Professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, and Chairman of the Gault School of Archaeological Research.
The Topper site is not the only paleolithic site that has been presented as evidence of pre-Clovis cultures. In Collins’ home state of Texas, a similar site was uncovered at Buttermilk Creek in Salado, Texas, which archaeologists believe may date as far back as 15,000 years. Further North in Virginia, another controversial site known as the Cactus Hill site was uncovered less than 50 miles from Richmond, which some archaeologists believe to be as old as 18,000 to 20,000 years.
Paintings found at the Pedra Furada sites.
Paintings found at the Pedra Furada sites.
Sites that allegedly predate the Clovis culture have been found in South America, as well. The Monte Verde site near Puerto Montt, Chile, is believe to be nearly as old as Virginia’s Cactus Hill location, though radiocarbon dating at the site has suggested evidence of settlement as far back as 33,000 years. To the northeast, the Pedra Furada sites in Piauí, Brazil, also point to settlements predating the Clovis culture.
If sites such as these, scattered across the Americas, are ever proven conclusively to date back as much as tens of thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Clovis culture, it raises an entire range of new questions, such as whether these individuals crossed land bridges during earlier periods of glaciation, or if, as suggested in more controversial theories, they traveled from even further locations (as proposed in the Solutrean hypothesis, which suggests Europeans were among the first to settle the Americas, a theory with notable proponents that include Dennis Stanford, director of the Paleoindian/Paleoecology Program at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution). While the questions remain, few would argue that, at the heart of the mystery, new perspectives await us that may help reshape our understanding of the ancient world, who inhabited it, and where these ancient settlers of the Americas hailed from originally.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 16, 2016 6:23 pm

Remarkable ancient structure found just two miles from Stonehenge
Exclusive: Stonehenge had a close, wooden rival of gigantic proportions - that was cut down before completion and buried for thousands of years. Now, thanks to a long-awaited excavation, its story can be revealed for the first time

David Keys Archaeology Correspondent @davidmkeys Monday 15 August 2016


Remarkable new archaeological discoveries are beginning to suggest that Stonehenge was built at a time of particularly intense religious and political rivalry.

Just two miles north-east of the World Heritage site, at an important archaeological complex known as Durrington Walls, archaeologists have just discovered what appears to have been a vast 500-metre diameter circle of giant timber posts. The find is of international significance.


Durrington Walls excavation
Originally archaeologists, using geophysics rather than excavation, had thought that they had found buried standing stones, so the discovery has totally changed their understanding of the site – the largest ancient monument of its type in Britain.

However, the most significant revelation is the discovery that the newly identified timber circle complex was probably never fully completed – and that, just a few months or years after construction had started, there was a dramatic change in religious – and therefore almost certainly also political – direction. Work on the circle was stopped abruptly by around 2460BC – despite the fact that it was nearing completion. The 200-300 giant 6-7 metre long, 60-70 centimetre diameter timber posts were lifted vertically out of their 1.5 metre deep post holes – and were probably used to construct or expand other parts of the complex.


What’s more, within a few months or years, the post holes themselves were then deliberately filled with blocks of chalk and were covered up for most of the circuit by a bank made of similar chalk rubble. Two of the post holes have just been fully excavated – and, at the bottom of one, the prehistoric people who decommissioned and buried the site, formerly occupied by the giant timber circle, had placed one of their tools (a spade made of a cow’s shoulder blade) at the bottom of the post hole before it was filled in. It certainly hints at the ritual nature of how the change of religious direction was implemented.

It was as if the religious "revolutionaries" were trying, quite literally, to bury the past. The question archaeologists will now seek to answer is whether it was the revolutionaries’ own past they were seeking to bury – or whether it was another group or cultural tradition’s past that was being consigned to the dustbin of prehistory.


Durrington Walls excavation
The discovery is particularly significant because the change of religious direction occurred at virtually the same time that Stonehenge itself was transformed from a large diameter circle of medium-sized stones to a much tighter smaller diameter circle of truly massive stones (the major ones we see today). It is also around the time that another very major Wiltshire prehistoric religious complex – Avebury – was being expanded through the construction of an impressive 2,500-metre-long avenue of standing stones. The 39-metre-high prehistoric Silbury Hill (near Avebury) – Europe’s largest artificial mound – was also built at around this time.

Can you see the 'ancient land sculptures' in these Google Earth images of Britain?
The changes may also be linked – in some direct or indirect way – to the arrival in Britain, at around or immediately after this time, of a new cultural tradition (and probably some new peoples or new elites) – known to prehistorians as the Beaker culture.

The changes at Durrington Walls and elsewhere represent a key element of Britain’s story – part of the transition from the Neolithic era to the Bronze Age. Usually it is impossible to glimpse the internal religious and political rivalries and conflicts of our prehistoric past – but the Durrington discoveries are giving the modern world an unprecedented opportunity to begin to understand aspects of the past that are normally hidden from view.


Durrington Walls excavation
The Durrington Walls excavation has been carried out by a team of archaeologists led by Professor Vince Gaffney of the University of Bradford and Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London. The site is open to the public and is owned by the National Trust.

“The new discoveries at Durrington Walls reveal the previously unsuspected complexity of events in the area during the period when Stonehenge’s largest stones were being erected – and show just how politically and ideologically dynamic British society was at that particularly crucial stage in prehistory,” said Dr Nick Snashall, the senior National Trust archaeologist for the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 90476.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 13, 2016 7:13 am

Unexplained Stone Structures Found Off Australia’s Coast
Image
September 10, 2016 Brett Tingley

Archeologists with the University of Western Australia have discovered a mysterious set of stone structures not far from the Dampier Archipelago in northwestern Australia. If current theories about the structures are confirmed, they could potentially rewrite much of Western Australia’s early history, not to mention human history.
Image
Australia’s Dampier Archipelago contains some of the world’s oldest archeological sites.
According to a UWA press release, the structures are the oldest known structures of their kind in Australia:
Excavations on Rosemary Island, one of the outer islands, have uncovered evidence of one of the earliest known domestic structures in Australia, dated between 8000 and 9000 years ago […] We anticipate that this extraordinary rock art estate will produce some spectacular insights into what life was really like in deep history.
The structures are a set of rooms cut into stone, some of which display evidence of early agricultural practices such as grinding seeds and storing shells. This find could change current thinking about civilizations of the time, which were previously believed to have been hunter-gatherer groups.
Rock art found in the Dampier Archipelago.
Image
Aboriginal rock art found in the Dampier Archipelago.
Lead researcher Jo McDonald, president of UWA’s Centre for Rock Art Research and Management, says that the site is important not only for the archeological history of the continent, but also for the indigenous communities of Western Australia:
This is an astounding find and has not only enormous scientific significance but will be of great benefit to Aboriginal communities in the area, enhancing their connections to their deep past and cultural heritage.
The Dampier Archipelago formed around 7,000 years ago as sea levels rose, creating isolated Aboriginal communities. Today, five distinct Aboriginal language groups are recognized in the area. Archeologists believe that the site has been occupied for around 25,000 years, pre-dating the last ice age, and a nearby site is thought to be over 50,000 years old.
Image
The bedrock in the Dampier Archipelago is some of the oldest on Earth.
Geological records show that the underlying bedrock in the region is some of the oldest on Earth, dating back some 2,400 million years; because of all of this archeological significance, there is an ongoing movement to list this area as a World Heritage Site
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/09/u ... ias-coast/
.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 28, 2016 9:12 am

22 NOVEMBER, 2016 - 14:52 VERONICA PARKES
Where the Fairies Dwell: Irish Ringforts in Our World and Theirs
Image
A cloud of mystery looms over the ringforts that speckle the countryside of Ireland. More than 45,000 ringforts have been documented throughout Northern Europe and yet little is known about the date, occupancy, and function of these structures. Perhaps this mystery persists due to the mythology surrounding them; that they exist as the gate way to the realm of the fairies and are protected pieces of Irish history that few dare to disturb. Accounts of missing livestock, trances, death, and other misfortune have kept the fairy forts protected for many years. However, a few brave historians and archaeologists are beginning to peel back the curtain and search for answers regarding these ancient structures.
A ringfort is a general term for a circular space, which could sometimes be raised above the surrounding ground, and in other cases could be surrounded by a shallow ditch as a demarcation. The “ring” of the ringforts was a boundary which encompassed the dwelling or group of dwelling within. The ditch that surrounded the fort would have been fortified by a palisade of timber, a hedge, or a thick growth or trees and shrubs. While the average ringfort tends to be around 27-30 meters in diameter internally, they have been found to be as large as 75 meters in diameter externally. The size of the ringfort, some have claimed, is directly linked to the occupancy of the dwelling. The large ringforts would have housed those in a higher class of society while a cluster of smaller forts would have grown around the larger fort.
Amoral Tricksters that Enhance World Mythology and Entertain Cultures
Irish Lore Keeper gives Dire Warning: US Company will be Cursed if Ancient Fairy Fort is Destroyed
1,000-year-old underground passage discovered in the Caha Mountains of Ireland
In Irish sources ringforts are referred to as “rath” or “lios.” A “rath” refers to a ringfort made from the earth, whereas a “caiseal” or “cathair” refers to one made from stone. The latter typically did not have an outer ditch and tended to be smaller than its earthen counterpart. A “lios” refers to the interior of the fort, and “urlann” to the surrounding area; anything that is not the “lios.” Some ringforts have been found to have a “souterain” or an underground passage that was typically carved out of the natural rock or clay underneath the fort, but could also be made of stone. It is posited that the “souterain” was used as a refuge by the inhabitants of the fort, as well as storage in safer times.
Image
Lisnagade ringfort.
Lisnagade ringfort. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Ringforts can be found across Northern Europe, especially in Ireland and South Wales. There was been over 45,000 documented examples of ringforts across this geographical area. They tend to be found on the slopes of the lowland areas, presumably for the well-drained soil. While there are thousands of these forts speckling the Irish countryside, few have embarked on a detailed study of the structures. The historian, Dr. Matthew Stout, has begun to fill this void with his study of the Irish ringforts. He suggests that the majority of these structures were constructed in a three-hundred-year period from the beginning of the seventh century to the end of the ninth. He has based this theory on radiocarbon and tree-ring dating from 47 excavated ringfort sites. As such, there is an insufficient amount of data to support this claim, leaving room for other theories. Other ideas have surfaced suggesting that the ringforts date back much earlier, into the Iron Age (c. 800 BCE -100 CE), as well as lasting much later, into the later medieval period, and even into the modern period. However, a vast majority of scholars have agreed that the majority of the ringforts were built and occupied within the timeframe suggested by Stout.

Image
The Grianán Ailigh in Co. Donegal, Ireland
The Grianán Ailigh in Co. Donegal, Ireland (Public Domain)
Just as the periods of occupancy have been debated, the functions of the ringforts are debated as well. Traditionally it was understood that the fort was owned by a free man, and his family, and was tended as a farmstead typically raising cattle. However, there is new evidence to suggest that this was not the only function of a ringfort. As the name would suggest, the forts had a defensive aspect as well. The palisades and shallow moats suggest that the ringforts were used for protection in agrarian communities. While they would not protect from full-scale war, the forts were enough protection from so-called “hit-and-run” raids on the cattle housed within the ring.

Image
Remains of a small earthen ringfort, now used to raise cattle.
Remains of a small earthen ringfort, now used to raise cattle. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Aside from their practical purposes and archaeology, the ringforts have a more tradition-heavy and mythological aspect to them. “Raths” in Ireland are also known as “fairy forts,” as they were said to be the homes of mythological creatures such as fairies, leprechauns, and giants. It was said that the forts were imbued with Druids’ magic and as such the fairies were protected within them. The very early inhabitants of Ireland, known as the “Tuatha De Danann” and “Fir Bolg” and supposed architects of the forts, came to be known as the “Good People” and associated with myths and stories about fairies. As such, the forts themselves were seen as gateways into the world of the fairies. It is also said that leprechauns may know of gold which has been hidden within the structure.
Image
A portrait of a fairy, by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1869)
A portrait of a fairy, by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1869). (Public Domain)
In the Labor Gabala, or Irish “book of invasions” the “Tuatha De Danann” were defeated by the ancestors of the present day Irish and subsequently sent to the underworld. As the victors took over the countryside once belonging to the “good people” or fairies, the ringforts became the only trace of the fairies left in our world. It is because of this that the fairies guard the structures vehemently. From this legend comes accounts of people having seen or heard lights and music coming from the raths at night. As such many refused to go near the sites, let alone disturb them. When the sites are disturbed there have been reports of missing livestock, people going into trances or deep sleeps, and even death. It is perhaps this superstition that prevents the ringforts from being studied in more depth.
The Dark Reputation of the Dunmore Cave of Ireland
How Ancient People Marked the Equinox Around the World
Child skeleton sheds new light on 1,500-year-old crime mystery in Sweden
Image
Folio 53 from the Book of Leinster. Lebor Gabála Érenn is recorded in more than a dozen medieval manuscripts and the Book of Leinster is just one of the primary sources of text. Image: Dublin, TCD, MS 1339
Folio 53 from the Book of Leinster. Lebor Gabála Érenn is recorded in more than a dozen medieval manuscripts and the Book of Leinster is just one of the primary sources of text. Image: Dublin, TCD, MS 1339 (Public Domain)
Since the forts were protected by magic, legend has it that death will come to anyone who so much as cuts the brush surrounding the fort. There are numerous myths surrounding the forts, that range from the distant past into our own day. In 1992, Sean Quinn ran into The Aughrim Wedge Tomb, and Irish ringfort in County Cavan, Ireland, while undergoing a massive quarry expansion. The site was relocated despite warnings of the “wrath of the fairies.” Since then Quinn has lost his cement works, hotel, and other business ventures, plunging him into bankruptcy. While many refuses to believe that this is the doing of the fairies, others believe that Quinn came upon his misfortune because he did not heed the warnings to respect the fairies dwelling within the fort.
Top image: The ringfort at Rathrar in County Roscommon, Ireland (CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Veronica Parkes
Resources
A Folklore Survey of County Clare by Thomas Johnson Westropp. Clare County Library. Available at: http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... apter4.htm
RINGFORTS (Medieval Ireland). Available at: http://what-when-how.com/medieval-irela ... l-ireland/
Sean Quinn’s downfall is fairies’ revenge say locals in Cavan. Available at:
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/se ... 94562.html
Fairy Cows (told by William Keating). Available at: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfgw/tfgw20.htm
Excavations.ie - summary accounts of archaeological excavations in Ireland. Available at: http://www.excavations.ie/
Irish Lore Keeper gives Dire Warning: US Company will be Cursed if Ancient Fairy Fort is Destroyed. Available at: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-mys ... ent-020515
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 11, 2016 8:48 pm

Image
Spray Falls is just one of the ice-climbing options in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore/Lars Jense

http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/20 ... ured-rocks
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 11:20 pm

Boulder collapse sends rock slide down Cathedral Rock (See video)

Image
Small trees and brush were taken out by boulders at this rock slide on Cathedral Rock on Monday. VVN/Vyto Starinskas


By Vyto StarinskasOriginally Published: November 23, 2016 10:38 a.m.


Rock Slide at Cathedral Rock in Sedona by Verde News
SEDONA -- Cathedral Rock chipped a tooth.

As funny as that sounds, a large rock slide on Monday did about that much damage to the famous rock formation in terms of cosmetic and historic significance.

The slide left Flintstone-size boulders poured out 50-yards wide and 100-yards long - spread out like a bowling alley below the western base of one of Cathedral Rocks towering cliffs.

The only evidence that the slide is of modern times is freshly broken trees and branches, and a photo circulating on Facebook of a dust cloud as the rock let loose.

It was an “unusual event” for Cathedral Rock, explained Brady Smith, public affairs officer for Coconino’s National Forest Red Rock Ranger District.

There was a “dust cloud” and a lot of “noise” Wednesday morning, Smith said. However, there was a lot of rain on Wednesday and it must have caused the slide.

There were no trails affected by the slide, Brady continued, and he was not sure how big the boulder was that was dislodged. However, it was not big enough to change the face of one of the most photographed rock formations in America.

In before-and-after photos taken by Coconino National Forest rangers, a large chunk appears to have fallen from midway from a cliff face and shattered as it spread to the ground.

Smith said this is the first time he has heard of such a rock slide at Cathedral Rock, even though they get reports from occasional rock slides throughout the Coconino Forest. Smith said he didn’t see the slide himself, but they sent a field worker over to inspect it. Smith said there was not much change in the view itself and no damage to the famous spires.

Just Wednesday, there was another rock slide on SR89 that closed the road in Oak Creek Canyon during a rainstorm.

Cathedral Rock is so popular that the Sedona Chamber of Commerce is promoting it as the “8th Wonder of the World.”

Residents of New Hampshire woke up to a harsh reality one day when one their most revered rock faces pictured on everything from post cards to license plates collapsed.

On May 3, 2003, the Old Man of the Mountain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a huge jagged profile of a face, broke off sending the state’s tourism promoters into a panic.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxXMV9RPDQ8

http://www.verdenews.com/news/2016/nov/ ... thedral-r/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 42 guests