Stonehenge…Live! The post-mortem
I’m writing this up June 23. Yes, I write some entries that far in advance. It’s how the daily updates happen at 9:00 exactly. I file a bunch at once and let the computer auto-post. It means I can work on my PhD with no distractions, or at least no blog related distractions. It also means that I can go back and re-edit entries, though taking a few days before starting writing this entry means I’m not going to be as scathing as I could have been. Just as well. I didn’t think Stonehenge Live was that bad, just disappointing and a bit of a missed opportunity.
Foamhenge by the light of an artificial moon.
For those of you who didn’t see the first episode, which I think is everyone I know, it dealt with the process of creating the model. A lot of the time therefore wasn’t about Stonehenge, but rather Foamhenge. I think this wasn’t that bad and the Foamhenge problems were used to contrast with the ancient problems in building Stonehenge. The stand out segment for me was Gordon Pipes and his stone-rowing team.
Stone-rowing effectively puts a half-a-dozen levers on either side of the megalith and then gets a couple of people on each lever. You then lift, shift the stone slightly and then drop. Then repeat the process. He had hoped to get his team to move the megalith twenty-five yards in twenty minutes. In the end he only moved it thirteen which sounds like failure. I liked it. I think the method could be improved, but it’s certainly worth persevering with. For a start it wasn’t an entirely fair test. I imagine his crew was unpracticed. I think fitter (sorry) Neolithic people who were trained could turn a decent speed with the technique.
The other experiment, dropping the stone into a hole was memorable, though for different reasons. It didn’t budge an inch from its stand when the ropes were cut. This baffled me. Not that the experiment failed, it looked odd when it was set up. Rather that he has a better technique burning the support out. It looks more spectacular and it works. I’ve no idea what changed his mind. I don’t think either system was used, there are ramps by the stones, but nevertheless I expected something better. All-in-all though his engineering ideas were interesting. Gordon Pipes is clearly thinking about practicalities. My only caution is that there’s almost certainly more than one way of moving the stones. Just because you find a way, it doesn’t mean it was the way. You’d still need correlating archaeological evidence to convince someone.
Programme one then was frothy, but fun froth and not mad. Lightweight but as far as it went sound. I thought they’d set up something interesting for programme two.
I’ll declare an interest here. Most of my suggestions for programme two weren’t used so I could just be bitter. Nevertheless programme two was poor.
The programme name was Stonehenge The Ultimate Experiment…Live! Now my idea of an experiment is when you get an idea and test it. That happened. We had a look at what sunrise would like, and what sunset would look like. Clive, I thought, was very good given the time restraints he had. His segment was over in about seven minutes. There wasn’t a lot of time for him because the other ‘experiments’ included druids blessing the circle and an authentic Bronze Age ritual.
They blew their credibility and they blew it early on with the druids. They said in programme one that the druids didn’t build Stonehenge and weren’t around in the era they reconstructed. So bringing them in for five minutes was spending five minutes when all we ‘learned’ about was that some modern people like to wear robes and wave things. What did this tell us about how Stonehenge was used in the Bronze Age? What, even, does it tell us about modern Druidism – which would be anthropologically interesting phenomenon? The end was dominated by this authentic Bronze Age ritual and that was painful. I really do respect Francis Pryor. I think he’s more intelligent than me and he really knows the Bronze Age but I can’t work out what planet he was on for that programme. As the Bronze Age people processed up the hill and the horns droned he was asked if that was authentic Bronze Age music. “Oh yes,” he replied, “We have surviving instruments and we know the range of notes they can play, the rest is a matter of imagination.” Right. So if I stick a piano in front of someone and ask them to hammer a few keys I’ll get authentic 20th century music? Where were the drums? Where were the whoops and hollers from the people? Mike Parker Pearson commented that it was a very Church of England reconstruction and he was exactly right. It simply reinforced tired clichés and dated stereotypes of the past.
I could live with that. If the programme had been called Noël’s Henge Party I’d have been cock-a-hoop about the programme. But it wasn’t. As ultimate experiments go this one was pants. And as for the ending about “opening a new era” in Stonehenge studies? I’ve been reading Kate Fox’s book on the English and she suggests the English national catchphrase would be “Oh come off it!” It fits beautifully. A new era? Oh, come off it.
The reason I’m so disappointed is that the model was unreservedly brilliant. Mike Pitts and the manufacturers did an amazing job putting it together. It was outstanding and it should have been the star of the show. Instead it wasn’t exciting enough so it was filled with druids, or fake Bronze Agers. Anything that could distract from the stones. There was a lot they could have done.
The sun gleaming on the Altar Stone.
Some people noted the Altar Stone shifted around a lot in the programme. Sometimes it was behind the Great Trilithon, sometimes in front of it and sometimes outside the stone circle having a quick cigarette. It was usually in a controversial place. Mike Pitts put it behind the Great Trilithon with good reason. There is a large pit and a break in the bluestone circle there. Placing the altar stone there could make sense. But not all the archaeologists agreed. Why didn’t they turn the boffins loose in the circle to argue about the placing of stones? There’d be passion, arm-waving and you might actually get a sense of what they thought Stonehenge was for as they each tried to justify their own positions.
I’d have also tried following up on something Mike Parker Pearson said. He noted the problem of visibility. It was hard to see into the centre of the circle from the outside. Well that depended very much on where you stood and what you were looking for inside the circle. With a full scale model you could test the lines of sight and see if there were significant viewpoints.
They could have also used the polystyrene nature of the stones to better effect. If they are polystyrene you can move them. Was there one Heel stone or two? What would happen if you moved one away? There are three slaughter stone pits, but does that make three slaughter stones? Was one moved around a lot? What would it look like if one had been moved? These are things you could test to see why Stonehenge looked the way it did. You genuinely could have learned something new.
Rituals aside it wasn’t bad. You couldn’t jump up and down and yell “THAT’S PLAIN WRONG” at the screen. I think the fault was that it was over ambitious. By seeking to include everything Stonehenge it could also deal with anything superficially. Add in the need to preview what’s coming up later in the programme during airtime and you end up with very little time and a lot to squeeze in. That’s a shame because the effort and the detail in the site was slightly intimidating. But if you still want to see a good programme on Stonehenge, then it’s still Julian Richards’s Stonehenge: The Enigma that you should see.
Google+
Hi,
I have now updated my website with my thoughts on the recent experiments. I have included photo’s from experiments that were also recorded for National Geographic Channel, these include picking the 12ton stone up from the bare earth. See http://www.stonehengetheanswer.com
I think that the experiment that was done to make this show should be seen as only the beginning. There is a second stage that should be implemented while (and if) this replica is still standing. (And if it’s not, then it should be set up again!)
Robert Temple’s The Crystal Sun: Rediscovering a Lost Technology of the Ancient World, (Century, 2000. ISBN 0 7126 7888 3) deals with the ability of the ancients to grind lenses of rock crystal.
This fact of expertise in optics being thousands of years old came to his attention when he noticed that some passages in ancient documents were being mistranslated — simply because people assumed that this knowledge and technical ability could not have existed at the time. However, Robert Temple has traced the written records of such technology, showing that though fragmentary they are nonetheless real. And he has verified the existence of over 400 ancient magnifying devices. All is reported in this book with substantive footnotes, photographs and references.
The relevance of this book to Stonehenge is discussed under the subject of the ancient culture known as the “Hyperboreans” on pages 171 to 177 of the hardcover edition (in the latter part of a chapter titled “The Case of the Disappearing Telescope”).
These Hyperboreans were known to the Greeks to have had a “spherical temple”. The ancient scholar Diodorus is quoted: “They also say that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth, and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye.” Such a description of being able to see mountains and other surface features on the moon, and to describe it as appearing to be brought close, can ONLY be based on having viewed the earth’s satellite through a telescope!
Temple goes on to point out that if all the lintels are in place on top of and around the great circle of sarsen stones, this flat elevated ring could easily form the base for a domed roof. Covering this 100-foot-diameter round space, such a roof would make the building appear “spherical”.
So, the experiment needs very much to have a “part two”, namely, to put in place a dome upon this magnificent structure, which seems like a logical conclusion to the exercise. People capable of building with stone could also build with wood. We should not assume that they didn’t know how to make domes. And think what would be the effect on the acoustic experiment were a dome to be added above those vertical refecting surfaces.
It’s an experiment crying out to be done.
With a roof, the purpose of the shorter stone might become clearer, and perhaps even the arrangement of large interior ones might begin to be explained. Since reading Temple’s book I have wondered if they might have been mounts for an early large telescope. The structure for that was probably of wood, and certainly all trace of it would be lost. Any large crystal lenses, possibly spherical as well, would have been taken elsewhere and used for other purposes if they survived whatever cataclysm caused destruction of this amazing structure.
Britain was more full of stone circles than exist today, with the implication of astronomy being widely practised there. The stones have been broken up and taken away to build newer structures. Temple describes sadly how even the surveys of many of these have been lost. No scholars were interested in the data after the Scottish researcher who studied them had died.
The latter part of the program was kind of poorly founded. It departed from science into conjecture, in making assumptions about beliefs and rituals instead of exploring the implications of sophisticated knowledge of astronomy. And if in addition to knowing architecture and acoustics, the British/Hyperboreans knew optics, that is even more significant
The filmakers should continue this project. Stonehenge Rebuilt Part II would make an even more interesting television documentary, as this has idea never been shown before. I think that the experiment that was done to make this show should be seen as only the beginning. There is a second stage that should be implemented while (and if) this replica is still standing. (And if it’s not, then they should set it up again!)
No stone should be left unturned to find out what these structures were really used for, while some of them still stand. (If they still stand.)
(If accidentally in attempting to edit this I have created a second posting, please delete the earlier one which accidentally repeats part of my post. Thank you.)
I’m wary of Robert Temple’s work because there are omissions in what he writes. In the case of no scholars being interested in Alexander Thom’s research, there have been papers continually appearing in the Journal for the History of Astronomy for decades. There was so much interest in Thom’s work that for 27 years the Journal even published an ‘Archaeoastronomy’ supplement. In America the Center for Archaeoastronomy has been publishing its own journal (confusingly also called Archaeoastronomy) since 1977.
That doesn’t make Temple’s work automatically wrong, but if he’s not aware of decades of research then it’s plausible that he’s not that familiar with other relevant research.
There are clear references to uses of lenses in the ancient texts. Aristophanes mentions them as burning-glasses. Seneca refers to using water as a magnifying lens. So there is reason to assume magnifying lenses exist and you find ancient historians translating the material as such despite no unequivocal magnifying glass being found. It would be odd that they could get magnifying glass right but not get telescope. For an even handed paper there’s this PDF at Optics and Photonics News
Such a description of being able to see mountains and other surface features on the moon, and to describe it as appearing to be brought close, can ONLY be based on having viewed the earth’s satellite through a telescope!
The mountains could also be an explanation for Bailey’s Beads visible during a solar eclipse. The closeness of the moon could also be a reference to the low passage of the midsummer moon over the summer horizon. The Inuit of Greenland take this to its logical limit. During the summer the moon is said to be so close the shamans can walk to it.
Having said all that why not set up the model and release Robert Temple, Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas, Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval and Robin Heath loose on it to see what they come up with? At the very least it would be fun and they might yet come up with something staggeringly original.
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