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The bluestone debate
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Littlestone
Littlestone
5386 posts

Re: The bluestone debate
Nov 22, 2008, 06:08
Returning to that part of the discussion needlessly is very troll-like. This thread's dead for me (as it seems to be to most others).


Sadly, you're probably right Moth, but not because of the opposing ideas of how the bluestones may have been transported.

I was not at the Foamhenge experiment so cannot comment on the possible advantage of one transportation technique over another. But assuming for a moment that the bluestones were transported from Preseli wouldn't a combination of transportation techniques make sense? If, along the route, there was water to cross the transportation technique would obviously be different to moving the stone over hard ground, and different again over soft, and possibly different again going up or down hill, during winter or in the summer.

The people who transported the bluestones probably knew when the best time to move them was (personally I'd opt for winter) and probably knew what the best rout was to take. But that isn't to say that they wouldn't have varied the transportation technique to take advantage of the conditions. Isn't that what we do after all every time we drive a car? With the advantage of wheels and an engine we don't have to worry about the sheer brute force required to get us from A to B but we don't drive in the same gear all the way, and we modify our driving to the conditions outside. Put another way, if we were stranded on a desert island and had to get a log down from the mountains to the shore we'd use anything that would give us an advantage - rolling, dragging, pushing, floating it down stream. Come to think of it, that's still how logs in some part of the world are transported today - things may not have changed that much after all :-)
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