• megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5·
    2 hours ago

    The British isles are just a series of new people showing up and saying “mmm don’t mind if I do” Like, I can think of at least 9 separate groups that invaded, integrating and displacing the already extant groups to different degrees. The saxons were like, at least 5 invasions after stone henge. Hell, the earliest versions of King Arthur are about a dude fighting off the Saxon invasions.

  • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I’ve always wondered about the complete adoration British people have for Saxons out of all the many different succesful invading peoples in their history.

  • JayDee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    10 hours ago

    Not only could it be built today, it was rebuilt by a retired contruction worker named Wally Wallington in the 2000s. Here’s his official site documenting it that’s linked on his youtube channel.

    Turns out, probably just took beams and small stones used respectively as levers and fulcrums to do it. Various aspects of his setup is likely not period-perfect, but I think he demonstrates pretty clearly that this isn’t a forgotten ability, it’s just been made obsolete by more modern methods.

    Here’s Wally’s final creation as far as I can tell.

    • filcuk@feddit.ukEnglish
      10·
      8 hours ago

      Isn’t the big mystery that the stones originate from across the country?
      There’s no professor under this clown mask so please fact check

      • JayDee@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 minutes ago

        From this site ( I only inspected briefly so it might be a conspiracy site idk1):

        The massive outer stones came from about 15 miles north, the smaller inner stones traveled roughly 150 miles from Wales, and the central Altar Stone journeyed at least 750 kilometers from northeast Scotland

        Quite impressive, though I think we’ve compiled a wide variety of ways that could have been done, and have been recreated, for moving massive stones like Stonehenge’s, so it seems less of a ‘how’ and more of ‘which method’ that’s the mystery at this point. Here’s an article that articulates that sentiment, and a video of experimental historians replicating my favorite version of this.

        Edit:

        • 1 after giving it a more thorough look I feel safe saying this source is respectable.
        • bampop@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          39 minutes ago

          and a video of experimental historians replicating my favorite version of this

          Interesting how they keep it docile by blindfolding it. You don’t want one of those things to get spooked and run around stomping on people.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zoneEnglish
    15·
    11 hours ago

    “traditional Saxon culture” is pretty funny too given it’s more like a bunch of German mercenaries turned up wearing Adidas and the Britons started wearing Adidas too because they thought it was cool.

  • Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    106·
    19 hours ago

    Low on the IQ bell curve: “Modern British people couldn’t make Stonehenge.” (Conspiracy theory)

    Middle of the IQ bell curve: “Nooo! Stonehenge was made using advanced but historically plausible techniques.”

    High on the IQ bell curve: “Modern British people couldn’t make Stonehenge.” (They are just bad at everything)

  • ExtremeDullard@piefed.socialEnglish
    612·
    19 hours ago

    Stonehenge could be built very quickly with today’s machines and technology. But just like cathedrals, the problem isn’t the means but the will: nobody wants to waste time and money on religious nonsense anymore.

    • kestrel7_7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Someone built a modern one in SW washington state, although I think it’s just cast concrete. Certainly doesn’t look as nice in person

    • WhiplashPost@programming.devEnglish
      9·
      11 hours ago

      Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have to stop you right there buster. Stonehenge is not “religious nonsense” it is literally a way to keep track of celestial movement and track the solstices. This allowed for ancient peoples to track the change of seasons and properly plan their agricultural activities. It was entirely practical, and very good at its job as it still works today to an extent.

    • then_three_more@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      15 hours ago

      Building Stonehenge today would end up in an ill advised contract structure between public and private stakeholders which would be partially responsible for a cost overrun of ~175% and it would ultimately get cancelled after a decade and a half or so when only ~30% was finished.

      • Tudsamfa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        I don’t know about the budget back then, but the real Stonehenge took like a millennia to complete so if anything that’s actually finishing early.

    • KeenFlame@feddit.nuEnglish
      4·
      11 hours ago

      That’s extremely not true though. It’s what most people waste most time on of anything

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      9·
      16 hours ago

      Power tools disturb the spirits living inside the stone which causes them to depart and find different rocks to live in.

      A structure like Stonehenge must therefore necessarily be made exclusively by hand tools.

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          3·
          11 hours ago

          It’s that easy!

          No joke though there’s a spiritual sanctuary in rural Pennsylvania where they’re making their own stone circle. Every year they have a festival where they use ropes to prop up a new giant stone, and then they bury it so that it stays put.

          It’s a really cool place, I think it’s called Four Quarters. You should check it out if you ever get the chance. They also host raves, medieval cosplay festivals, all sorts of cool stuff.

          And they built their own suspension bridge across a ravine! One of their members is an engineer by trade. The thing is legit!

              • SpaghettiMaster@feddit.ukEnglish
                1·
                4 hours ago

                Look up Avebury if you want a stone circle you can actually go around. Much larger and there is a pub in the middle of it. If you like hill walking there are also the white horses

    • jdr@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      15 hours ago

      Stonehenge wasn’t religious, it was for a stone age equivalent of destruction derby

  • AgentSeven@lemmy.zipEnglish
    22·
    18 hours ago

    Cool video I found of a guy named Wally Wallington building some Stonehenge-style monoliths in his backyard - single-handedly with no modern tools.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldEnglish
      123·
      18 hours ago

      I love these videos. I watch them every couple years just to re-amaze myself at how very possible it was for like 2 people that simply understand how levers work to get 50 other people to do an amazing amount of stuff.

      Now, if you want to accidentally turn yourself into a “conspiracy theorist,” you can also learn about geopolymers, and make the extremely reasonable jump to ancient people in places with the right combination of salts could make water glass and both dissolve and form granite. Granite is an aggregate, so if you just take sand from places where people mined monolithic granite objects, you can use water glass to chemically melt the quartz, turn the sand into a soft polymer that takes a week to fully cure back into what looks like granite from the same quarry.

      Works for limestone as well. So when you consider the likelihood that pyramid blocks were likely simply cast in place with readily available materials, it sort of makes you angry at the traditionalists that say everything was carved, and the ancient aliens people.

        • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          31 minutes ago

          Right? Leave it to the French to think “We’re doing this 100% authentic!” and mean how they dress for it.

          For what it’s worth, I’ve made some natron bricks from dirt in the yard (natron you can make by cooking baking soda) just to see what I would get. Seemed like regular dirt at first, then after a week, they were shockingly solid. I expect with limestone gravel, it would work even better.

  • zloubida@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    14·
    18 hours ago

    Some time ago, in Brittany, a store was built on a site where menhirs once stood. Nearly forty menhirs were destroyed, a true scandal.

    A fascist politician, Éric Zemmour, who fancies himself a historian (having written books on the history of France), seized the opportunity to decry the destruction of France’s Celtic history. The problem? The menhirs were erected two millennia before the Celts even arrived in Brittany… The guy read Asterix and Obelix and thought to himself, “What a great documentary!”. If this is the caliber of fascist intellectuals, I shudder to think what their henchmen must be like!

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      5·
      16 hours ago

      And ground penetrating radar has shown that the original structure actually spans a far wider area than just the stone ring in the center.

      • rumschlumpel@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        The bell beakers weren’t proto-Celts, they were displaced by the Celts

        Do you have a source for that? Your link doesn’t mention it.

        • CrimeIsLegalNow@ani.socialEnglish
          8·
          16 hours ago

          Among other things the Celtic culture became distinct in mainland Europe 1500 years after the Bell Beaker migration and scholarship still hasn’t clarified from what part of Europe besides definitely not Britain. A link as a related tongue to proto-Celtic is hypothetical, as it is to Italo-Celtic, but the point being it’s like calling Proto-Indo-European speakers “proto-Celts.”

          Like, potentially, for some of them, but even if that ends up being the case but you’re skipping some ancestral steps, and because the Celtic proper migration was genetically distinct we can at least say they were different groups.

          And this is all just basic facts on the bell beakers…

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture

          https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04287-4

          tl;dr

          Bell Beakers displaced/genocided by modern terms the Neolithic Britons in ~2500 BC, Celtic migration occured around ~1000-800 BC, which also coincides with the recognition of Celts as a distinct group so that migration itself is probably a better target for the label proto-Celt. It was certainly the introduction of an actual Celtic language to the isles.

          tl;dr;dr calling the Bell Beakers proto-Celts is like calling an early 5th Century Roman soldier stationed in Londinium a proto-Chav.

          Like, maybe, but mostly by accident and there’s just so many important steps in between, first and foremost being that Roman soldier starting the tradition of leaving his pregnant British wife behind to go fuck around on the mainland and never coming back, which is just as well because the kid was actually a Saxon’s.

          • rumschlumpel@feddit.orgEnglish
            31·
            15 hours ago

            You know, I appreciate the info, but it’s weird how you sound like I personally offended you by writing an incorrect half sentence on a prehistoric topic.