elderford
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Re: cairns
Jun 22, 2004, 16:23
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may well be, in Breconshire (now the bottom bit of Powys), longbarrows and round barrows are the rarity, more often than not it's long cairns and round cairns made from piles of stone.
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Hob
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Re: What Is It??
Jun 22, 2004, 16:44
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Eyup AR,
I know you might get told off for making direct comparisons across cultures, but if the person marking the dissertation is sympathetic to anthropological comparision, have a check out of the 'Bora' ground ceremonial circles in Australia. There's not much on the web, but journals etc should have some guff.
Some of them are hengelike, a few even have stones. I'm still trying to find out if any have internal ditches. It does fly in the face of accepted wisdom to compare them to henges though, as they are obviously the product of a non-farming, non-sessile culture. Proto-henges maybe? At the least, they might make an unusual inclusion.
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Kozmik_Ken
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Re: cairns
Jun 22, 2004, 17:01
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There are a fair few cairns around the moors.... n' possible cairn circles. The Woofa Bank enclosure is quite a wide arc of bronze age walling, with rock art in and around it. There are a fair few settlement and field walls around the moor, but Woofa Bank seems different in some way, with a standing stone and rock art in the middle of it.
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AR
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Re: What Is It??
Jun 26, 2004, 11:42
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Never complain that your opinion is never heard then. Hee Hee
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Ike
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Re: What Is It??
Jun 26, 2004, 12:17
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I have no opinion, I'm a liberal ;-)
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AR
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Re: What Is It??
Jun 30, 2004, 18:38
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If in theory, Arbor Low is a trading post of some kind, why do you think there was a person buried there? Do you not think this could suggest a more ritualistic purpose such as ancestor worship? Also, I have a friend who thinks the stones may have bee placed to reflect different features in the landscape. Having been to Castlerigg in this week I can kind of see what he means as the entrances seem to reflect the valleys, larger stones in line with larger hills! What do you think...... could it be true or am I just imagining things?? xxx
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BrigantesNation
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Re: What Is It??
Jul 01, 2004, 01:15
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It might be a good idea to question what we are calling trade. Axes for example may not have been anything like the trade goods that we commonly think of, it may be that the procurement of the axe may have been an integral part a the quest that took people across the country in an effort to appease the gods. I wonder exactly how much design variance there is with axes of a particular type, that might give some confirmation that they were many produced by a few, or more individually created.
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StoneLifter
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Re: What Is It??
Jul 01, 2004, 13:00
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This is on a tangent but in the big upland pasture where I'm working is an exposed bed of peat. About two feet beneath the present ground level is a bed of sticks and roots. Beneath that is another two or three feet of peat. The altitude is about 1700 feet and my basecamp is nearby. One of the bits of wood I've pulled out - Scotch pine - shows a fairly distinct axe mark where it's been severed from the trunk.
So much for the ring barking and brush burning theories !
Also found a third Black Stone - same site as previously. And TomBo is right - drystonewalling is alive in Weardale. ESA. It's not up to the standard of Alston Moor's but it's not far behind ...
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fitzcoraldo
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During Quartermaine & Claris's 1986 survey of the Langdale axe factories they looked at the south scree on the Pike of Sickle. By measuring the rock density and proportion of worked to unworked materials and then working on a principle derived from practicle experiments that each roughout weighing 1kg would produce waste flakes of between 6 & 10kg they concluded that between 45,000 and 75,000 axes were produced from this area alone. Taking into account other factories around Cumbria, the production figures are huge.
This is an industrial process and would have required a huge workforce.
Of course no two axes are identical as each axe was quarried prepared flaked & polished by hand.
There are axes that appear to have non-functional purposes such as the beautiful polished Jadite axes. Richard Bradley has identified that the axes from the most inaccessible peaks held the highest value.
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fitzcoraldo
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Re: What Is It??
Jul 01, 2004, 15:47
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We have to get away from the modern concept of an axe, the term is misleading, some axes were huge and used as ploughs, others were tiny
A modern analogy could be a Sword or a knife.
We use knives in our daily activities but large knives & swords can have a deep significance depending on it's function.
Some Swords and knives produced in certain areas carry a deep significance such as Toledo steel for swords or Sheffield or Solginen steel for knives.
Look at the role of the sword in our mythologies. Excalibur and the lady of the lake has echoes in prehistory with the deposition of swords in water just as axes have been found ritually deposited in water
bit more on axes here
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/user/328/weblog/0/16451
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