View allAll Photos Tagged Neolithic
Our ancestors settled on Træna 9000 years ago following closely the retreat of the ice cap covering Scandinavia during the last ice age. It is humbling to imagine people sailing and fishing, or even surviving long winters above the arctic circle, at a time when agriculture was still an object of curiosity and mammoth were still roaming in northern Europe.
The Bridestones ..
A chambered cairn, near Congleton, Cheshire, England, that was constructed in the Neolithic period about 3500–2400 BC.
The cairn originally had a stone circle surrounding it, with four portal stones; two of these portal stones still remain.
The site is protected as a scheduled ancient monument.
The origin of the cairn's name is unclear. One legend says that a recently married couple were murdered at the location, and the stones were laid around their grave. Another possibility is that they are named after Brigantia. Alternatively, the Old English word for "birds" was "briddes"; the stones in their original form could have resembled birds, giving rise to "Briddes stones".
Ring of Brodgar, Orkney; the best way to avoid the tour bus groups is to visit the Ring in the evening; on this night I was lucky enough to have the place totally to myself with a lovely sky and the standing stones lighting up in the setting sun
The Neolithic "12 Apostles stone circle" rests on the high point of Ilkley Moor observing it's gently changing vista. In the distance a modern observation cluster takes views from its horizon. Unlike Dartmoor, where it is easy to detach from all modern reference points, Rombald's Moor always has man in its far distance. Rombald's moor is a mosaic of town moors and from Ilkley Moor you look down on the old spa, from Baildon Moor you look down on Bradford (with its national Media museum and sections dedicated to the history of photography), and to the north, the views are down on Skipton, with its flagstones and canals. The Bronte sisters are never far away and David Hockney's stunning Salt Mills is to the south in Shipley : more than a lattice of fine dry stone walls and peppering petroglyphs. For those visiting from the south, it may be worth going past Leeds and descending on a diagonal from the north. Getting across Leeds is urban orienteering.
AJ
Faldouet Dolmen under the night sky. The dolmen, foreground and tree were illuminated using a torch during a 30 second exposure
A just slightly conic sphere that has been shaped and polished into the side of a type of carved monolith that I term as a 'warm water form' - a monolith that has been adapted to warm water with the rays of the sun. As is the case with many of these wide shallow basins (not visible from this point of view), the monolith has moved with time, and can clearly be seen to be tipping down to the right. The amount of tilt down from the horizontal asks that relatively large time scales are considered, especially as many of the known examples are away from their original positions or axes. The fact that neolithic or chalcolithic style cups and canals can be seen on the surface of another 'warm water form' asks that one or more from the category of this monolith was carved from within or before the chalcolithic, or that geofacts and graffiti conspired to produce a significant amount of perfectly homologous marks, which is just not reasonable in my mind. The warm water form with these marks is around 45 straight km away.
The fact that a similar highly polished and slightly conic spherical basin can be found on the side of one of the most formed and beautiful of all megaliths - the Dolmen de Coste-Rouge (see below) should also be taken into account, as there is a date of around 3500 ybp. A ritual aspect must here be considered. This dolmen is around 55 straight km away.
This same dolmen has a cross carved onto its surface that is at the earliest medieval, and the cross looks like an afterthought, whereas the side basin looks to be of origin (I've uploaded quite a detailed image and the viewer can look for details of mark).
3500 ybp might be enough time to let the monolith and others of its category slip within its local geological context, understanding that some models of this form may be from a later date and that this may simply be a calibration for an early version.
Its a small detail, but the 42cm diameter and 23cm deep 'spheric' indent has qualities of resonance and amplification.
The polished quality reminds one of the way that neolithic stone tools are polished into perfect form.
There is an Anish Kapoor-esque transcendence to the negative space created by this carving, and it is certainly one of the most arresting features that I have witness from the last ages of prehistory. The fact that the feature also helps to date a category of large carved stone only adds to its modest but artful kudos: a voice from stone, a call to carve, a physical element for a rite, a sensuality from the raw; a link between regions, a creation of beauty for beauty's sake, a demonstration of perfection, speaking with the past and showing a present to our future.
Although I have only seen two examples, they are unique enough to merit a term and I shall describe them as 'polished concavities '.
The carving is currently understood as being part of a mechanism for a fruit press - an error that probably started around 1868.
AJM 07.07.20
One of six groups of standing stones at this location. Isle of Arran Scotland.
This rich archaeological landscape includes stone circles, standing stones, burial cairns and cists, as well as hut circles and an extensive field system, all dating to between 3500 and 1500 BC.
The stone circles were preceded by elaborate timber circles on exactly the same sites. They were associated with religious activities dating back around 4,500 years. Cremation and inhumation burials were placed in the circles, long after they were first built.
Large stone tombs, known as megalithic tombs, were built throughout Western Europe during the Neolithic Age. Over ninety megalithic tombs are know to survive in the Burren; the earliest of these are the court tombs and portal tombs built in the fourth millennium BC, about 1,000 years before the pyramids in Giza, Egypt were constructed. The Poulnabrone portal tomb is one of the two constructed in the Burren and is perhaps the best preserved example in Ireland.
We were fortunate to have this gorgeous sky to photograph the evening we visited Poulnabrone. We left Blarney earlier in the day to overcast skies, drove up to Lough Gur and the sky began to clear with puffy clouds all around. As we drove further north up to the Burren, the wind began to pick up and by the time we reached this site, the winds were gusting so strong it was difficult to stand. But the sky was beautiful and dramatic ~ just what I was praying for to photograph this mysterious portal tomb.
Avebury is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles, around the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, in southwest England. One of the best known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. It is both a tourist attraction and a place of religious importance to contemporary pagans.
Constructed over several hundred years in the third millennium BC, during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the monument comprises a large henge (a bank and a ditch) with a large outer stone circle and two separate smaller stone circles situated inside the centre of the monument. Its original purpose is unknown, although archaeologists believe that it was most likely used for some form of ritual or ceremony. The Avebury monument is a part of a larger prehistoric landscape containing several older monuments nearby, including West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill.
By the Iron Age, the site had been effectively abandoned, with some evidence of human activity on the site during the Roman period. During the Early Middle Ages, a village first began to be built around the monument, eventually extending into it. In the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, local people destroyed many of the standing stones around the henge, both for religious and practical reasons. The antiquarians John Aubrey and William Stukeley took an interest in Avebury during the 17th century, and recorded much of the site before its destruction. Archaeological investigation followed in the 20th century, led primarily by Alexander Keiller, who oversaw a project which reconstructed much of the monument.
Avebury is owned and managed by the National Trust. It has been designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument, as well as a World Heritage Site, in the latter capacity being seen as a part of the wider prehistoric landscape of Wiltshire known as Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites.
- Wikipedia
The Rollright Stones are a complex of three Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monuments near the village of Long Compton, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. Constructed from local oolitic limestone, the three monuments, now known as the King's Men and the Whispering Knights in Oxfordshire and the King Stone in Warwickshire, are distinct in their design and purpose. They were built at different periods in late prehistory. During the period when the three monuments were erected, there was a continuous tradition of ritual behaviour on sacred ground, from the 4th to the 2nd millennium BCE.
The first to be constructed was the Whispering Knights, a dolmen that dates to the Early or Middle Neolithic period. It was likely to have been used as a place of burial. This was followed by the King's Men, a stone circle that was constructed in the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age; unusually, it has parallels to other circles located further north, in the Lake District, implying a trade-based or ritual connection. The third monument, the King Stone, is a single monolith. Although its construction has not been dated, the dominant theory amongst archaeologists is that it was a Bronze Age grave marker.
The British philologist Richard Coates has proposed that the name "Rollright" is from the Brittonic phrase *rodland rïx 'wheel enclosure groove', where *rïx 'groove' refers to a narrow valley near Great Rollright and *rodland 'wheel enclosure' refers to the King's Men circle. By the Early Modern period, folkloric stories had developed about the Stones, telling of how they had once been a king and his knights who had been turned to stone by a witch. Such stories continued to be taught amongst local people well into the 19th century.
Choirokoitia in Cyprus is one of the oldest villages in the world, about 9000 years old. The people who colonized the island came by boat and brought cerials and domesticated animals with them. They represent the Cypriot Aceramic Neolithic, a particular culture using stone, bone and wooden tools. Pottery, however, was not yet invented, and for metal working we would have to wait for many millennia to come. Yet, these people decided to live together in a community surrounded by walls and in individual houses. They produced art and buried their dead inside their dwellings. If you wish to know how humanity made the transition from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural lifestyle - and finally to urbanisation, look at Choirokoitia. The image shows a modern reconstruction. The remnants of the village itself extend up and around the hill behind (and are considerably less photogenic).
Silbury Hill the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe from West Kennett Long Barrow a Neolithic Burial mound
Grotte de la Madeleine
Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone (Hérault),
Site archéologique Lattara
Montpellier
Once again a pot from the mid neolithic that was conceived for integrated string that would let it hang from a beam - probably near to where cooking occurred, so hanging with other pots in a line somewhere close to a fire place.
Low temperature firing (pre-glaze) requiring much potter's time buffing the drying clay to attain a water-proof surface. The precious final object could flit between definition; holding grain, water, human burial bones, nuts, flour, and so on. Everything about hanging round ceramics of the mid neolithic seems to have retained a maximum reverberation of the ceramics 'chambre' and there is a possibility that function changed with context, with the same bowl that transformed natural ingredients into 'supper' employed to transform a singing voice into a larger dynamic stylized musical resonance. Singing, clapping and playing pipes over hanging bowels being a potential way to access a myriad realm of amplification and reverb. Here is an example of a pot that seems to have been designed to hang in a tilted aspect. Whilst this might simply be to access 'dried herbs' for stews, the possibility should at least be levied that this might be an example of an early microphone from around 6,000 ybp.
AJM 21.05.18
These two huts are reconstructions of Neolithic houses. Their shape is based on excavations of Neolithic houses at Durrington Walls dating back to 2500BC. They are made from thin hazel rods woven around upright posts. The woven structure is then covered, inside and out, with a mixture of crushed chalk, chopped straw and water. This is called chalk daub. Their roofs have been thatched with straw from wheat. There are 5 houses in total, outside the Visitor Centre at Stonehenge.
Rock art (c. 3500 B.C.E.) on an orthostat in the passage of Cairn T at Loughcrew, Co.Meath. The T-shaped engraving to the left of the lowermost concentric circle is likely modern (19th. century?) graffiti.
Looking through the passageway entrance of the Neolithic chambered cairn that sits near the north shore of Loch na h-Airde on the Rubha an Dunain peninsula on Skye. Amazing to think this was built sometime in the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC!
The centre of the structure has collapsed hence the daylight showing inside the central chamber.