THE BOOK
Some of the ideas discussed in this blog are published in my new book called "The Stonehenge Bluestones" -- available by post and through good bookshops everywhere. Bad bookshops might not have it....
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Sunday 14 November 2010

Pulling big stones

Came across a couple of interesting videos on YouTube -- the one below is of some strange stone-hauling ceremony in Northern India.  Not sure why they are going to all this effort!  From what I can find out, a number of tribes in Nagaland have these ceremonies, pulling large elongated stones which are then erected during  festivals -- it's suggested that they are phallic symbols, since the festivals seem to be associated with fertility.  It shows that big stones CAN be pulled across rough terrain, given a large enough group of pullers and a strong enough motivation.  I'll put up another link to an experiment in Denmark, where they  made a reconstruction of how a large capstone was pulled up onto the top of a burial chamber, by a large group of volunteers using a sledge, rollers, ropes, levers and wedges. 

I have never had any doubt about any of that, since it is evident that even if the Stonehenge stones were all fairly local to the monument, they must have been pulled in to the site.  How big was the radius of the collecting circle?  One mile?  Twenty miles?  That's something we still have to work on.......... but note that in this video the ground is dry and the weather warm.  That may be a point of some significance.


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