[extropy-chat] HISTORY: Stonehenge & Unsolved Riddles was:(Solved & Unsolve

[ABlainey at aol.com]

On the issue of unsolved mysteries. A couple of days ago I drove past 
Stonehenge while going to a meeting. So as the meeting finished mid afternoon I 
decided that I would stop on the way home and have a quick wander around the old 
(Old,OLd...OLD) place and see it with more mature eyes than those of a Six year 
old. Which was when I first saw it.
I was amazed by the place, not just for the scale of the stones, which are 
Damn big, but dwarfed by the size of virtually any modern building. What 
impressed me so much was the obvious signs of earthworks around the site. Which 
spread out into the salisbury plains as far as the eye can see. There are Barrows 
(small man made hills and burial mounds), concentric rings of ditches and 
ridges and a large flat path that leads about half a mile to a man made plateau. 
Which had symmetrically placed areas each side which appeared to be chalk 
drawings cut into the surrounding hillsides. These chalk drawings interested me as 
they almost look like writing in Arabic or hebrew and do not portray images of 
horses, etc. Which is usual for this type of ancient artform. 

While walking around. I was using a handheld narrator device that is given to 
each visitor. A very handy thing that has numbered buttons which you press in 
correspondence to markers on the ground, which are dotted around the site. It 
delivers a recorded message that tells you all about what you are looking at 
in that location. 'Henge means hanging stones, yada yada...Made of this, etc.' 
 
After completing the narrated tour I was overcome by the overwhelming feeling 
that 99% of the information that I had heard and the stated facts were 
nothing more than complete guesswork. We have no idea who built Stonehenge, Why or 
When.
All we do know is the few small facts that are available. Those being the 
physical facts of the site itself.

The largest stone weighs roughly 45 tons and is about 6 meters high (9 meters 
total length as most people forget that one third of it is buried. That is a 
fairly big piece of rock that has been brought about 100miles from Wales by 
unknown methods.
The narration tells of how the site was constructed by 20,000 or so workers. 
Interesting, Am I right in thinking that at the highest point of roman 
occupation. London had a population of about 1,000 people? Baring in mind that the 
Romans didn't appear until several millennia after Stonehenge was allegedly 
built. What would the whole population of England have been when it was built? I 
would imagine that finding 20,000 people and getting them all in one place 
would have been a fantastic achievement in itself. Let alone get them to carry 45 
ton rocks 100miles across the country and then built Stonehenge and all the 
earthworks around it. Even if the quantity of people is diluted by time. this is 
still a mammoth achievement and one we would be very hard pressed to achieve 
today.

So when it comes to the mysteries of history. I think that Stonehenge has to 
rank pretty damn high on the board.