More Rocking and Rolling (3)

 The Merlin Wheel or Merlinwheel

A few years ago there was an interesting web site with fantastic graphics explaining how another fine invention, the Merlin Wheel, worked.    It was, as I recall, really a pair of wheels joined together not by a central axle but by parallel beams joining the two rims.  This would then create a "cage" within which a heavy elongated stone could be either slung or packed in to the position that would otherwise be occupied by the axle.

The web site has sadly disappeared, and I can find none of those splendid graphics on the web.  Does anybody know where they went?

How stable such a structure might have been is anybody's guess,  and I suppose the connecting beams would have acted as obstacles to the effective rolling of the wheels, in effect turning the whole thing into a gigantic roller, with much more frictional drag etc. 

When is a wheel not a wheel?  All of the archaeologists say that when Stonehenge was built, the wheel had not been invented.  But as Nigel Molesworth might have said, "any fule kno that the best way to move a heavy log is to roll it."  So rollers of one sort and another must have been known in the Neolithic.  The question is -- did they know about the axle?

The truth about Stonehenge

This message from Boadi was posted on the OU Forum relating to the 2008 Stonehenge dig.  One has every reason to think that it is authentic.....

Stonehenge was built as a place of execution of invaders by my great great great great grandfather ffred fflyntstwn who found fame and fortune when he paddled his stone coracle across the sea to discover america and potatoes , the latter he imported into his home country selling them at one and six for 20, or 2 shillings if filter tipped. The profits from this enterprise paid for the building of Stonehenge.
The first executions were of Picts and Scots who came down from the north and despoiled the countryside by carving white horses into the chalk hillsides to advertise their native drink; a most serious offence against the hill-fort and ridge & furrow planning regulations.
The invaders were executed in batches of 15 on each Saturday afternoon while the watching britons sang their traditional execution songs .
This practice has continued down to the present day. On the outskirts of Cardiff two wood henges are erected at opposite ends of a green sward and between them, as a Saturday afternoon’s entertainment,
15 foreign invaders are executed, their screams of agony being drowned by the singing of “Calon lan yn llawn daioni ……“sung in a minor key.
The very first execution was of one known to the Britons as Toni ap Robyn whose severed head garlanded with mistletoe was displayed on a pole at the centre of the circle, unfortunately the head refused to hold its tongue and kept heckling the chief druid during the summer solstice executions. This situation could not be tolerated so the head was buried at a secret location , during the internment a dreadful curse placed upon his descendants in perpetuity. The curse compels them to roam the land, digging wherever they go in a vain attempt to recover the head and give it a decent burial. To this day one might encounter Toni ap Robyn’s descendant flanked by his two ceremonial spade bearers, Mick of the flowing hair and Phil of the feathered hat, marching through the land, pausing to dig for the cabbalistic number of three days, then moving on under the guidance of their high priestess the lady Carenza
Love
Boadi

More Rocking and Rolling (2)

Here is another cradle idea -- this time proposed by the Cambridge engineer Dr Dick Parry -- and featured in the Daily Mail in 1997.  On balance, I think I like the "wicker basket" idea rather better -- the one featured in the above illustration may have required carpentry skills that were beyond Neolithic tribesmen...... planks, filler blocks, circle segments, dowels etc.  But on the other hand these guys (at least in the later stages of the monument) knew about mortise and tenon joins, and also tongue and groove -- so maybe they did have the necessary skills.

More rocking and rolling

From the blog site "Past Thinking" -- an idea proposed by Bristol engineer Nick Weengenaar in 2007 -- we might call it the "lintel lifting wheel"........  he called it the "litho lift".
See also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wiltshire/6908300.stm

Standing Stones and Megalithic navigation

This is the latest from The Times -- about the research of Peter Davidson between 1970 and 1990.  Not sure why Norman Hammond should have chosen to write this up now, since there is nothing new here -- but the info about Peter's work has recently been put onto a new web site, so I suppose that creates a justification for flagging it up and pretending that it is ground-breaking stuff.  I have had a look at some of the info on the site, and it seems pretty obvious, for the most part.  Clearly, if people were putting up stones in Neolithic or Bronze Age times they might have had ritual or sacred purposes, or maybe they were just memorials to dead ancestors, or maybe they were way marks or navigational guides (for travellers on land or sea) or maybe they were cattle scratching posts.........

Where I do have problems is where statistical analyses come into the frame, with "significance" being looked for -- and found -- on the basis of a highly incomplete record.  How many standing stones are there in an area?  How many WERE there?  And I'm very worried too about the tendency in the PD work for alignments to be looked for (as at Gors Fawr), and then given compass bearings, and then for those compass bearings to be applied to the bearings between point A on the coast and point B on another part of the coast.  With that sort of thinking you can prove whatever you want to prove -- conveniently omitting any reference to everything inconvenient.

Megalithic stones ‘were navigational aids’

Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent
The Times, December 1 2010 12:01AM

Along the Atlantic coast of western Europe, from Spain to Ireland, England and Scotland, megalithic standing stones are among the more striking features of the historic landscape. Although most megaliths lie inland, and many form part of impressive monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury, or the Neolithic passage graves of Brittany and the Boyne Valley, a surprising number can be seen from the sea.
A new website has been set up to stimulate discussion of the notion that such standing stones acted as prehistoric navigational aids. It follows two decades of study between 1970 and 1990 by Peter Davidson, a retired engineer whose hitherto unpublished papers on “Megalithic Aids to Navigation” are now available on the site.
While some noted groupings of megaliths, such as Stonehenge, have been plausibly linked to astronomical observation, “what is more difficult is to show how it could have been an important enough part of the lives of the stone-arrangers to justify the often very large investment”, David, Iain, and Peter Davidson note in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
The patterns of settlement, monuments and artefacts from prehistoric sites on both sides of the Channel and the Irish Sea have long indicated that there were strong and frequent seaborne connections. Peter Davidson proposed that, given the social and economic cost of finding, hauling and erecting the monoliths — some, like the 71ft, 347tonne Grand Menhir Brisé at Locmariaquer in Brittany, of colossal size — some were related to a major regular hazardous activity.
He suggested that acting as navigational markers to steer ships into safe anchorages would have been just such a function, and that the markers “could be used to establish a dead-reckoning for navigation from one sandy beach to another”. Davidson also looked for stone alignments that did not have obvious or plausible solar or lunar correlations.
He found after inspecting a number of sites on the ground that “in many instances they could be used to indicate key landfalls from a local departure-point”. Overall, the results of artefact and megalithic site distributions “seem to show a picture of routine marine transport over the Atlantic seaboard from Carnac (Brittnay) in the south to Callanish (in the Outer Hebrides) in the north, with a high level of statistical support. This could have a profound impact on our thinking about how Neolithic society organised itself, and the importance of travel to their way of life”.

Visit: megalithicnavigation.co.uk/default.aspx International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 39: 433-435

Wickerwork cradles used for bluestone transport?

Acknowledgement:  Daily Mail / Garry Lavin

 This is the latest Stonehenge story in the media --  the theory that the bluestones might have been rolled all the way from Wales in roly-poly wickerwork cradles.  It's in the Daily Mail -- and already picked up by lots of other media as well.  The originator is Garry Lavin -- engineer and former BBC man.

 Extract: 

Mr Lavin has come up with a cylinder ‘basket’ to roll the massive and irregularly-shaped stones. The basket is created by weaving willow and alder saplings to form a lightweight structure that can be easily moved by 4 or 5 men. To complete the rig and to ensure the best rolling and floatation conditions, the gaps between the basketwork cylinder and the irregular stone are packed with thin branches. This spreads the load as the basket flexes in transit, much like a modern tyre, and creates buoyancy when transported down rivers and across the sea. One of Mr Lavin’s key discoveries during his earlier experiments was that the wicker cages that contained the stones were able to float. This would have enabled Neolithic man were able to get the huge stones across rivers on their journey, as well as making it easier to transport them over long distances without having to carry them the entire way. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1334166/Stonehenge-built-rolling-stones-using-giant-wicker-baskets.html#ixzz16sYMnI5T

Stonehenge 'was built by rolling stones using giant wicker baskets' 

By Niall Firth

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1334166/Stonehenge-built-rolling-stones-using-giant-wicker-baskets.html#ixzz16sXIIjn9

 

There is quite a lot here that is fun.  This isn't NEW, of course -- people have been suggesting primitive wheels and cradles as means of moving large stones for many years.   I'll come back to this.

Glacial deposits on the Lizard?

I have come across a couple of references in which it is suggested that the strange gravels at Crousa Downs, on the Lizard, are glacial deposits dating from some ancient (Anglian or earlier?) glacial episode.  The conventional explanation is that they are Tertiary fluvial gravels:

"There are superficial deposits lying on the Lizard rocks at Crousa Downs, Lowland Point, and as an apron of clay-bound gravels around the coast. Those at Crousa Down represent a Tertiary Age deposit of sands and gravels of probable fluvial origin, which have been derived from the north. These gravels contain traces of cassiterite and gold and would be classified as placers. At Lowland Point is a Pleistocene Age deposit of loess of wind blown silty sediments (this occurs elsewhere on the Lizard) and clay-bound gravels occurring as aprons around the coast of solifluction deposits known as head are also Pleistocene in age. The head deposits sometimes show evidence of frost heave (cryoturbation)."
http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&expIds=17259,18167,27084,27743,27752,27824,27879&xhr=t&q=Crousa+down&cp=11&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=1aac15d7857edbcb

From Natural England:  "At St Erth in west Cornwall and Crousa Down on the Lizard, there are small outcrops of sand and clay of possible Tertiary age. The St Erth Beds comprise sands and clays which have yielded marine molluscs of Pliocene, or early Pleistocene age (1.5-2 million years old) age. These sediments were deposited in a shallow sea that covered this part of south-west Britain and which cut an erosional platform into the surrounding landmass. Subsequent uplift of the land has led to this platform being located at a present-day height of about 130m".

Not far away we have the Three Brothers of Grugith -- three large boulders making up a cist grave or simple dolmen:
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/249/three_brothers_of_grugith.html

Then there are the Crousa Common menhirs -- apparently made of granite.  Are they erratics?
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/689/crousa_common_menhirs.html

and of course the famous Giant's Rock at Porthleven is not far away.  That is generally considered to be a glacial erratic, and there has been endless discussion about whether it came from real glacial deposits or was dumped by a passing iceberg or slab of floe ice.......

Does anybody have more info?  Worth investigating further......