The People Who Built Stonehenge Loved BBQ

The evidence is in, the Stonehenge crowd loved their roasted pork and beef.

The settlers who built Stonehenge worked hard and had an appetite.

They had to drag all those stones around, building one of the most famous monuments in human history.

That's enough to make anyone hungry for a BBQ.

Research about the diet of Stonehenge's builders tells us they are a lot like us, they loved BBQ.

It appears the ancient builders of Stonehenge may have hosted massive barbecue cookouts where thousands of revelers feasted on meat.

Yes, they ate barbecued meats, Like pork and beef, just like us.

By analyzing fat residue found inside pottery shards and on animal bones, a team of archaeologists from the University of York and the University of Sheffield discovered "evidence of organized feasts featuring barbecue-style roasting."

If Stonehenge’s builders ate veggies there’s little evidence of it. Mostly, the archaeologists say, they were busy were boiling and roasting the meat—pork, in particular—and then staging elaborate feasts. The cooking seems to have been done inside people’s homes as well as outdoors.

And it seems the cooking and feasting were organized to a fare-thee-well.

Okay, we don't know exactly how the food was prepared, but from where we see it, Stonehenge sounds like the perfect BBQ pit.

Reason For The Season

As an interesting side note: 

The winter solstice may have been more important than the summer solstice for the people who built and used Stonehenge. 

Excavations at Durrington Walls suggest that people held huge feasts around winter solstice time of year.

Archaeologists think that the people who built and used Stonehenge lived nearby. 

Recent excavations revealed huge amounts of discarded pig and cattle bones.

Archaeologists discovered that these animals were probably killed when they were around nine months old. 

They would have been born in the spring, so it would seem that these pigs and cattle were slaughtered around the time of the winter solstice. 

It’s probable that people gathered at Stonehenge during the solstice to take part in feasts, ceremonies and celebrations. 

The evidence shows that the Stonehenge crowd loved their roasted pork and beef.

The settlers who built Stonehenge worked hard and had an appetite.

It appears the ancient builders of Stonehenge may have hosted massive barbecue cookouts where thousands of revelers feasted on meat.

Yes, they ate barbecued meats, like pork and beef, just like us.

By analyzing fat residue found inside pottery shards and on animal bones, a team of archaeologists from the University of York and the University of Sheffield discovered "evidence of organized feasts featuring barbecue-style roasting."

If Stonehenge’s builders ate veggies there’s little evidence of it. Mostly, the archaeologists say, they were busy were boiling and roasting the meat—pork, in particular—and then staging elaborate feasts. The cooking seems to have been done inside people’s homes as well as outdoors.

And it seems the cooking and feasting were organized to a fare-thee-well.

The Sun has been around much longer than any life on Earth. 

From ancient civilizations to the present day, humans have made sense of the Sun in different ways. 

Significance of the Winter Solstice and the role of the Sun

The word 'solstice' comes from the Latin solstitium, which means 'sun stands still.' 

This is because the apparent movement of the Sun's path north or south stops before changing direction. 

Despite the Summer Solstice and the Equinoxes are also celebrated, the Winter Solstice is the most important day of the year at Stonehenge. 

As mentioned already, the builders of Stonehenge, the mid-winter solstice was presumably more important. 

As farmers and people rearing domestic animals and growing crops for food, the midwinter sunset marks the turning of the year. 

The days would get longer and the weather would improve. 

Soon, spring would come again and with it their life and work would be easier. 

Stonehenge's Stones Have Lasted 5000 Years

Stonehenge may be still standing because of the unique geochemical composition of the standing stones.

An international team of scientists analysed wafer-thin slices of a core sample from one of the great sandstone slabs, known as sarsens, under a microscope.

The 3.5-foot-long sample, called Philip's Core, was extracted more than 60 years ago.

The analysis shows the sarsen is made up of mainly sand-sized quartz grains that are cemented tightly together by an interlocking mosaic of quartz crystals. 

This explains the stone's resistance to weathering over the last 5,000 years and why it made an ideal material for building such a monument.

Chemical data from the Phillip's Core were used last year to show that most of the large sarsen stones came from around 15 miles to the north, in West Woods on the edge of the Marlborough Downs, Wiltshire. 

The study was led by Professor David Nash at the University of Brighton and involved geologists, geomorphologists and archaeologists from institutions including British Geological Survey, English Heritage and the Natural History Museum. 

It is extremely rare as a scientist that you get the chance to work on samples of such national and international importance,' said Professor Nash. 

'This small sample is probably the most analysed piece of stone other than Moon rock!'   

Sarsens were used to construct Stonehenge and other prehistoric stone circles, such as those around the Wiltshire village of Avebury. 

Typically weighing 20 tonnes and standing up to 7 metres tall, sarsens form all 15 stones of Stonehenge's central horseshoe, the uprights and lintels of the outer circle, as well as outlying stones such as the Heel Stone, the Slaughter Stone and the Station Stones. 

Researchers were gifted a unique opportunity to analyse Philip's Core, the narrow cylindrical sample, which was drilled from Stone 58 at Stonehenge during conservation work by British firm Van Moppes in 1958. 

It revealed the interlocking quartz cements developed through at least 16 cycles of mineral deposition, most likely as a result of wetting and drying while the sediment was buried underground. 

According to the experts, no previous investigation has analysed a single sarsen boulder with such a range of complementary techniques. 

Professor Nash said the data will support future research on sarsens at Stonehenge and other nearby Neolithic monuments.  

The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.       

4,500 years old monument is discovered in English countryside

Archaeologists have discovered a new prehistoric monument near Stonehenge.

The discovery of at least 20 massive shafts - more than 10 metres in diameter and five metres deep - forming a circle more than two kilometres in diameter around the Durrington Walls henge.

Coring of the shafts are Neolithic and excavated more than 4,500 years ago - around the time Durrington Walls was built.

This circle of deep shafts is the largest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain.

4,500 ago, the Neolithic peoples who constructed Stonehenge, a masterpiece of engineering, also dug a series of shafts aligned to form a circle spanning 1.2 miles (2km) in diameter. 

The structure appears to have been a boundary guiding people to a sacred area because Durrington Walls, one of Britain’s largest henge monuments, is located precisely at its centre. 

The site is 1.9 miles north-east of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire.

Prof Vincent Gaffney, a leading archaeologist on the project, said: “This is an unprecedented find of major significance within the UK. Key researchers on Stonehenge and its landscape have been taken aback by the scale of the structure and the fact that it hadn’t been discovered until now so close to Stonehenge.”

Who Built Stonehenge? Satan's Giants. Who Knew?

From the Huffington Post:

Not just any giants, either. Theologist Dr. Dennis Lindsay, president and CEO of Christ For The Nations, claims Satan created a race of giants to build the ancient megalithic site.

Speaking last week on the TV show hosted by disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, Lindsay announced that Satan had created the giants to infiltrate and destroy Israel.

It’s not clear how arranging stones to align with the sun on the solstice in England would help destroy Israel, but that didn’t stop Lindsay — who has no background in archaeology listed on his website — from pressing the case. 

“He’s out to destroy God’s creation and his whole plan of redemption and contaminate the human race because Jesus came not to save hybrids or non-human beings or fallen angels or Lucifer,” Lindsay said. “He came to save human beings and to have a family.” 

Satan wants to “have his own seed” and “make his own family,” Lindsay said in video posted online by Right Wing Watch.

Lindsay seems to have anticipated resistance to the notion of giants in world history, given the complete lack of historical records or fossil evidence. So he offered this explanation as proof: 

“Why and what is the evidence for giant beings on this Earth? We all know about Stonehenge, right? And that’s just one out of hundreds and hundreds of gigantic places around the world that testify that some sort of supernatural power or giants were involved in its construction.”

For more info (if you really want more) Huffington Post