Indonesia: StoneHenge, with singing rocks

[Allegro]

See previous post, immediately above.


^ An outdoor mural and photo displays at the !Khwa ttu San Education and Cultural Centre.

[seemslikeadream]

Spruce Hill, a stone-walled hilltop fortress in Ross County, may be Ohio’s biggest mystery
By Bob Downing

Add This Published: October 25, 2013 - 05:39 PM | Updated: October 29, 2013 - 07:21 PM

Ranger Bruce Lombardo lectures to a group of hikers while standing in the remnants of a gate that once provided access to little-known Spruce Hill, a stone-walled hilltop fortress built from 1,600 to 2,000 years ago in southern Ohio. It is part of Hopewell Culture National Historic Park. (Bob Downing/Akron Beacon Journal)

BOURNEVILLE: Spruce Hill remains one of the biggest mysteries in Ohio.
It is a monumental stone-walled fortress on a plateau west of Chillicothe in Ross County.
The walls around the steep-sided plateau surround 140 acres and stretch more than 2¼ miles. That’s big enough to hold 110 football fields. The plateau was once forested. Today it is a flower-filled meadow.
Spruce Hill was once hailed as a place where Celtics or Vikings may have camped and forged iron. Others called the stone walls nothing more than a natural feature.
Limited archaeological research indicates that the fortress was actually built by the Indians of the Hopewell Culture from 1,600 to 2,000 years ago.
It remains one of the most important and puzzling archaeological sites in Ohio, one of a dozen surviving hilltop enclosures built by the Hopewells. It is similar to Ohio’s Fort Hill and Fort Ancient state memorials, and the largest single enclosure the Hopewells ever built.
Spruce Hill is one of only three Hopewell hilltops surrounded by stone, not earth as was more common. It might have been a fortress, or it may have been built for religious or ceremonial purposes. It was studied and mapped in the 1800s, but it has produced few artifacts, compared to Hopewell mounds.
No one has a solid explanation for why the ancient hunter-gatherer Indians built a stone-walled fortress 2,000 years ago above Paint Creek in southern Ohio.
What you find at Spruce Hill today is very similar to and largely unchanged from the early 1800s when it was discovered by white settlers. It sits above two nearby Hopewell works, the Seip Earthworks and the Baum Earthworks, with their geometrical shapes and mounds.
Something else adds to the Spruce Hill mystery: evidence that very hot fires burned there, hot enough to melt sandstone and create slag. It is unclear how or why that happened.
There are about 30 spots along the walls with burnt, fused or glazed sandstone, vitrified soils, burnt clay and cinders. The temperatures needed to produce such effects are far hotter than normal fires.
That fact led many to speculate that the Hopewells were forging iron, although there is no evidence of that. Others theorized that Celtic and Viking colonies could have built the fires to produce iron. That theory was strongly advanced in 1948 by Captain Arlington Mallery in his book Lost America.
Today, the theory is that timbers added to the walls burned. Archaeologists have found evidence that the walls at Spruce Hill likely contained logs that were later burned. There were baked clay clumps with the impression of criss-crossing logs in them, similar to old fired forts found in Scotland and elsewhere in northern Europe.
The 270-acre site sits south of U.S. 50 about 12 miles west of Chillicothe, about 3½ hours from Akron.
It is not part of nearby Hopewell Culture National Historic Park, which includes five other sites: the Mound City Group, the Hopewell Mound Group, the Seip Earthworks, the Hopeton Earthworks, and the High Banks Earthworks.
Spruce Hill is owned by the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System, a nonprofit group, and the Ross County Parks District.
The Arc of Appalachia covers 5,000 acres in 14 preserves in southwestern Ohio. The nonprofit group manages the Serpent Mound and Fort Hill, ancient Indian archaeological ruins, for the Ohio Historical Society.
Spruce Hill is rarely open to the public, but I signed up for a ranger-guided 3½-mile hike, a once-a-year event in late September. You need a permit from the federal park service or the Arc of Appalachia office to hike Spruce Hill on your own.
About 70 hikers met on a Sunday morning at the small parking lot on Spruce Hill Road in Twin Township. We were each furnished with a copy of an old map/sketch of the walls and entrance gates from 1848.
We hiked along an old farm road that climbed through the forest to the plateau about 350 feet above.
Much of the plateau was covered by a meadow that was dominated by goldenrods and asters. A rough-hewn trail had been hacked out of the brush a few days earlier by a crew from the park service.
We hiked the entire length of the meadow to what’s called the isthmus, one of the most interesting features at Spruce Hill, said ranger Bruce Lombardo of the National Park Service, our trip leader. He took us into the woods and showed us what’s left of the rock walls, but what we saw was not impressive.
Historical descriptions and conjecture vary. Some say the walls may have been 8 feet high; others disagree. Today the rocks are scattered and it takes some imagination to picture a rock wall at all. The stones are found mostly in a band yards wide or in low heaps in the woods. The walls are largely made of small, rubble-sized stone.
Lombardo showed us what’s been described as the north gate, a rock wall with three 10-foot-wide openings. They are separated by walls that range from 120 to 240 feet long.
We moved to the second gate opening and Lombardo stood in a ditch surrounded by pawpaw trees. It was easier to picture the stone wall here. Most people would never find the gates or the walls. Lombardo’s help was essential.
The second gate is where Lombardo explained to the hiking group what is known about Spruce Hill. It has received scant scrutiny over the years, largely because it was privately owned, he said.
A team of park service archaeologists worked at Spruce Hill in 1995-1996. They found a ceramic vessel, a discarded bladelet of flint and a few other artifacts at the base of the wall, proof that the walls were made by Hopewells. That investigation also proved that the walls are largely man-made, not naturally occurring.
Lombardo said some features at Spruce Hill are similar to the Pollock Earthworks in Ohio’s Greene County, part of the Indian Mound Reserve.
On the way back on the hike, we stopped at the smaller southern gate, where the entrance trail reaches the plateau and the meadow.
A few steps off the trail led to a shallow rocky defile where one opening had been built by the Hopewells. Today it is called Gate A. You could almost make out an opening in rocks scattered and piled on both sides of the gateway.
The Hopewell Culture park was initially established in 1923 as the Mound City Group National Monument.
In 1987, the park service began considering whether Spruce Hill was significant enough to add to the federal park, as it was at risk of being developed, logged and lost. It was acquired in 2007 by the Arc of Appalachia and partners just two days before it was to be auctioned off.

[seemslikeadream]

Another piece in Stonehenge rock source puzzle
By Neil Prior
BBC News
Carn Goedog
The chances of Stonehenge's spotted dolerites not coming from Carn Goedog are 'infinitesimally small'

Research to be published this month may bring us a step closer to understanding how bluestones from Pembrokeshire ended up at Stonehenge.

Scientists from Aberystwyth University, University College London and National Museum of Wales have located the specific outcrop, Carn Goedog, in the Preseli Mountains.

This is where the distinctive spotted dolerites originated.

The findings are to be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Geologist Herbert Henry Thomas first proposed in 1923 that the rocks which form the giant inner ring were specifically quarried for Stonehenge by Neolithic man around 5,000 years ago, and were hauled to Wiltshire via land and sea.

However, other geologists theorise that they were carried east on an ice-age glacier 20,000 years ago.

Trying to match the rocks at Stonehenge to a specific outcrop is considerably more complicated than looking for a needle in a haystack”

Dr Richard Bevins
National Museum Wales

While the new discovery will not answer the debate, according to Dr Richard Bevins, of the National Museum Wales, it may eliminate some of the unknown variables.

"I'm not here to come down on one side of the argument or the other," he explained.

"But our research is aimed at better informing the debate."

Dr Bevins, keeper of natural sciences, added: "Trying to match the rocks at Stonehenge to a specific outcrop is considerably more complicated than looking for a needle in a haystack but the more we can trace them back to their original source, the closer archaeologists and geologists can hunt for clues to back-up their theories.

Rock sample
The research has brought together archaeologists and geologists
"Archaeologists can now search an area of hundreds of metres rather than hundreds of kilometres for evidence of Neolithic quarrying.

"While geologists supporting the glacier theory know exactly where to hunt for the scarring they'd expect to find on the landscape if enormous chunks of the stone had indeed been swept east on a glacier."

As the name suggests, the spotted dolerites have highly distinctive markings created by the elements contained within, cooling at different rates in the minutes after they were spewed out of an underwater volcano 450 million years ago.

In 2011, Dr Bevins's team located the source of another of Stonehenge's Pembrokeshire Bluestones - the rhyolites - 3km away from the spotted dolerites at Craig Rhos y Felin.

Although the relative proximity of the two discoveries offers evidence to both camps.

"Three kilometres is both closer and farther away than expected, depending on which theory you support.

"From a geologist's point of view, 3km is nothing, and the rocks which ended up close to each other in Wiltshire could easily have been carried on the same glacier.

"However, for the archaeologists a distance of 3km between the potential quarries could be seen as evidence of planning and forethought, and a suggestion that the different types of stone were chosen for some specific purpose."

'Each piece of the puzzle'
Dr Bevins's team are able to say so categorically that they have discovered the source of the spotted dolerites thanks to a range of laser mass spectrometry techniques which analyse both the chemical composition of the rock and the microbiology present when it was formed.

He says that the chance of them having originated anywhere other than Carn Goedog is "statistically-speaking, infinitesimally small".

And while he is the first to admit that this discovery on its own gets us no closer to solving the riddle, he believes a definitive answer will come eventually.

"I've been studying the bluestones for over 30 years now, and I'm no closer to finding an answer which convinces me either way. But the one thing which I am increasingly sure of is that each piece of the puzzle we find brings us another step closer to the truth.

"We've located two of the sources, and there's another five or possibly six to go."

He added: "By the time we have identified those then I'm certain we'll have an answer either way. Whether that happens in my career, or even my lifetime, who knows?"

[seemslikeadream]

3 DECEMBER, 2013 - 10:28 APRILHOLLOWAY
Researchers reveal Stonehenge stones hold incredible musical properties

A team of researchers from London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) have discovered that the stones used to construct Stonehenge hold musical properties and when struck, sound like bells, drums and gongs. It is suggested that these properties could be the reason why the builders were willing to travel so far to source the stones from Wales and bring them to the site in Salisbury Plain, England.
In the new study, which was published today in the Journal of Time and Mind, experts conducted acoustic tests at the site for the first time by tapping the bluestones with small quartz hammerstones to test for sonic sounds. They found that the stones made metallic and wooden sounds in many different notes. Such sonic or musical rocks are referred to as 'ringing rocks' or 'lithophones'.
“Different sounds can be heard in different places on the same stones,” said the researchers.
The researchers used a special square of material to protect the surface of the rocks, but interestingly, several of the stones showed evidence of having already been struck.
The investigators believe that this ‘acoustic energy’ could have been the prime reason why these stones were transported nearly 200 miles from Preseli to Salisbury Plain, as archaeologists have not yet been able to explain why they were brought so far when there were plentiful local rocks from which Stonehenge could have been built. For some reason, the bluestones were considered special.
“It is not controversial to say that prehistoric people would have known of the stone's capabilities. We can see indentations on the rocks - the area is amazingly untouched,” said Jon Wozencroft, senior lecturer at the RCA.
The researchers had been concerned that the musical properties of the stones might have been damaged as some of them were set in concrete in the 1950s and the embedding of the stones damages reverberation.
“You don't get the acoustic bounce' but when he struck the stones gently in the experiment, they did resonate, although some of the sonic potential has been suffocated,” said Mr Wozencroft.
In Wales, where the stones are not embedded or glued in place, he said noises made by the stones when struck can be heard half a mile away. He theorised that stone age people might have used the rocks to communicate with each other over long distances as there are marks on the stones where they have been struck an incredibly long time ago.
One of the principal researchers, Paul Devereux is currently working on a book, Drums of Stone, which will tell the full story of musical rocks in ancient and traditional cultures.
To listen to clips of the stones being ‘played’ at Stonehenge, click here.

[seemslikeadream]

Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture



Stone Age Eyes and Ears: A Visual and Acoustic Pilot Study of Carn Menyn and Environs, Preseli, Wales

[seemslikeadream]

Easter Island's Statues Reveal Bodies Covered With Unknown Ancient Petroglyphs
21 January, 2014

MessageToEagle.com - Standing some 2,000 miles west of Chile, on the Easter Island, 887 mysterious giant statues have intrigued scientists and the public for years.

For a long time it was believed that the massive statutes consisted of just the heads.

However, in October 2011, when the Easter Island Statue Project began its Season V expedition, scientists could reveal remarkable photos showing that the bodies of the statues go far deeper underground than just about anyone had imagined.

Project director Jo Anne Van Tilburg said: "Our EISP excavations recently exposed the torsos of two 7m tall statues.


The statutes on Easter Island have bodies covered with ancient undeciphered petroglyphs. Image credit: EISP.ORG



A close-up of petroglyphs on the back of one of the statues. Image credit: EISP.ORG


"We found a round, deep post hole into which the Rapa Nui had inserted a tree trunk," she said. Van Tilburg said ropes were attached to the tree trunk and to the partially carved statue. "We found a rope guide that was actually carved into the bedrock near the statue." The Rapa Nui then used the tree trunk to raise the statue upright. Before the statue was upright, they carved its front. Once it stood erect, they finished the back, Van Tilburg explained.

The excavation team also found about 800 grams of natural red pigment — nearly two pounds — in the burial hole, along with a human burial. Van Tilburg believes the pigment was used to paint the statues, just as the Rapa Nui used pigment to paint their bodies for certain ceremonies.

The unusually large amount of pigment found indicates that it might have been used by a priest or chief, perhaps as part of mortuary practice, she said. Human bones were found throughout the dig, indicating that people buried their dead around the statues.


Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors to the island have been astonished to see that, indeed, Easter Island statues have bodies!

More important, however, we discovered a great deal about the Rapa Nui techniques of ancient engineering."

Among their discoveries, the team discovered:

· The dirt and detritus partially burying the statues was washed down from above and not deliberatelyplaced there to bury, protect, or support the statues
· The statues were erected in place and stand on stone pavements
· Post holes were cut into bedrock to support upright tree trunks
· Rope guides were cut into bedrock around the post holes
· Posts, ropes, stones, and different types of stone tools were all used to carve and raise the statues upright
The two "heads" in the quarry where Van Tilburg’s team dug are standing figures with torsos, truncated at the waist, that have become partially buried by eroded dirt and detritus over centuries.




Van Tilburg with two workers from her Rapa Nui team of diggers. Image credit: EISP.ORG



The team also discovered that ceremonies were certainly associated with the statues.
On the project website, Van Tilburg said: "We found large quantities of red, some of which may have been used to paint the statues.

Finally, and perhaps most poignantly, we found in the pavement under one statue a single stone carved with a crescent symbol said to represent a canoe, or vaka.

The backs of both statues are covered with petroglyphs, many of which are also vaka.

A direct connection between the vaka symbol and the identity of the artist or group owning the statue is strongly suggested."




Still, many of these ancient petroglyphs remain undeciphered and the history of one of the most remote islands in the world is now even more mysterious than ever.

[coffin_dodger]

From Indonesia To Turkey New Archaeological Discoveries Uncover The Mysteries Of A Lost Civilisation
By Graham Hancock 16 January 2014

"Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong," says Danny Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Centre for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. "Old stories about Atlantis and other a great lost civilizations of prehistory, long dismissed as myths by archaeologists, look set to be proved true."

I'm climbing with Dr Natawidjaja up the steep slope of a 300-ft high step-pyramid set amidst a magical landscape of volcanoes, mountains and jungles interspersed with paddy fields and tea plantations a hundred miles from the city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia.

The pyramid has been known to archaeology since 1914 when megalithic structures formed from blocks of columnar basalt were found scattered amongst the dense trees and undergrowth that then covered its summit. Local people held the site to be sacred and called it Gunung Padang, the name it still goes by today, which means "Mountain of Light", or "Mountain of Enlightenment", in the local Sundanese language. The summit, where the megaliths were found arranged across five terraces had been used as a place of meditation and retreat since time immemorial, archaeologists were told, and again this remains true today.

However neither the archaeologists, nor apparently the locals realized the pyramid was a pyramid. It was believed to be a natural hill, somewhat modified by human activity, until Natawidjaja and his team began a geological survey here in 2011. By then the summit had long since been cleared and the megalithic terraces recognized to be ancient and man-made, but no radiocarbon dating was ever done and the previously accepted age of the site - about 1,500 to 2,500 BC -- was based on guesswork rather than on excavations.

The first scientific radiocarbon dating was done by Natawidjaja himself on soils underlying the megaliths at or near the surface. The dates produced - around 500 to 1,500 BC - were very close to the archaeological guesswork and caused no controversy. However a surprise was in store as Natawidjaja and his team extended their investigation using tubular drills that brought up cores of earth and stone from much deeper levels.

First the drill cores contained evidence - fragments of columnar basalt - that man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to yield older and older dates - 3,000 BC to 5,000 BC, then 9,600 BC as the drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then, 15,000 BC and finally at depths of 90 feet and more an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier.

"This was not at all what my colleagues in the world of archaeology expected or wanted to hear" says Natawidjaja, who earned his PhD at Cal Tech in the United States and who, it becomes apparent, regards archaeology as a thoroughly unscientific discipline.

The problem is that those dates from 9,600 BC and earlier belong to the period that archaeologists call the "Upper Palaeolithic" and take us back deep into the last Ice Age when Indonesia was not a series of islands as it is today but was part of a vast southeast Asian continent dubbed "Sundaland" by geologists.

Sea level was 400 feet lower then because huge ice caps two miles deep covered most of Europe and North America. But as the ice caps began to melt all the water stored in them returned to the oceans and sea-level rose, submerging many parts of the world where humans had previously lived. Thus Britain was joined to Europe during the Ice Age (there was no English Channel or North Sea). Likewise there was no Red Sea, no Persian Gulf, Sri Lanka was joined to southern India, Siberia was joined to Alaska, Australia was joined to New Guinea - and so on and so forth. It was during this epoch of sea-level rise, sometimes slow and continuous, sometimes rapid and cataclysmic, that the Ice Age continent of Sundaland was submerged with only the Malaysian Peninsula and the Indonesian islands as we know them today high enough to remain above water.

The established archaeological view of the state of human civilization until the end of the last Ice Age about 9,600 BC was that our ancestors were primitive hunter gatherers incapable of any form of civilization or architectural feats. In the following millennia settled agriculture was very gradually developed and perfected. Around 4,000 BC the increasing sophistication of economic and social structures, and growing organizational abilities, made possible the creation of the earliest megalithic sites (such as Gigantija on the Maltese island of Gozo for example) while the first true cities emerged around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia and soon afterwards in Egypt. In the British Isles Callanish in the Outer Hebrides and Avebury in southwest England, both dated to around 3,000 BC, are the oldest examples of true megalithic sites. The megalithic phase of Stonehenge is thought to have begun around 2,400 BC and to have continued to around 1,800 BC.

Within this well worked out and long-established chronology there is no place for any prehistoric civilization such as Atlantis. But interestingly the Greek philosopher Plato, whose dialogue of Timias and Critias contains the earliest surviving mention of the fabled sunken kingdom, dates the catastrophic destruction and submergence of Atlantis by floods and earthquakes to "9,000 years before the time of Solon" - i.e. to 9,600 BC, the end of the last Ice Age. Since the Greeks had no access to modern scientific knowledge about the Ice Age and its rapidly rising sea levels (often accompanied by cataclysmic earthquakes as the weight of the melting ice caps was removed from the continental landmasses) the date Plato gives is, to say the least, an uncanny coincidence.

In Danny Natawidjaja's view, however, it is no coincidence at all. His research at Gunung Padang has convinced him that Plato was right about the existence of a high civilization in the depths of the last Ice Age - a civilization that was indeed brought to a cataclysmic end involving floods and earthquakes in an epoch of great global instability between 10,900 BC and 9,600 BC.

This epoch, which geologists call the "Younger Dryas" has long been recognized as mysterious and tumultuous. In 10,900 BC, when it began, the earth had been emerging from the Ice Age for roughly 10,000 years, global temperatures were rising steadily and the ice caps were melting. Then there was a sudden dramatic return to colder conditions - even colder than at the peak of the Ice Age 21,000 years ago. This short, sharp deep freeze lasted for 1,300 years until 9,600 BC when the warming trend resumed, global temperatures shot up again and the remaining ice caps melted very suddenly dumping all the water they contained into the oceans.

"It is difficult," Natawidjaja says, "for us to imagine what life on earth must have been like during the Younger Dryas. It was a truly cataclysmic period of immense climate instability and terrible, indeed terrifying, global conditions. It's not surprising that many large animal species, such as the mammoths, went extinct during this precise time and of course it had huge effects on our ancestors, not just those 'primitive' hunter gatherers the archaeologists speak of but also, I believe, a high civilization that was wiped from the historical record by the upheavals of the Younger Dryas."

What has brought Natawidjaja to this radical view is the evidence he and his team have uncovered at Gunung Padang. When their drill cores began to yield very ancient carbon dates from clays filling the gaps between worked stones they expanded their investigation using geophysical equipment - ground penetrating radar, seismic tomography and electrical resistivity - to get a picture of what lay under the ground. The results were stunning, showing layers of massive construction using the same megalithic elements of columnar basalt that are found on the surface but with courses of huge basaltic rocks beneath them extending down to 100 feet and more beneath the surface. At those depths the carbon dates indicate that the megaliths were put in place more than 10,000 years ago and in some cases as far back as 24,000 years ago.

Columnar basalt does form naturally - the famous Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland is an example - but at Gunung Padang it has been used as a building material and is laid out in a form never found in nature.

"The geophysical evidence is unambiguous," Natawidjaja says. "Gunung Padang is not a natural hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of construction here go back long before the end of the last Ice Age. Since the work is massive even at the deepest levels, and bears witness to the kinds of sophisticated construction skills that were deployed to build the pyramids of Egypt or the largest megalithic sites of Europe, I can only conclude that we're looking at the work of a lost civilization and a fairly advanced one."

"The archaeologists won't like that," I point out.

"They don't!" Natawidjaja agrees with a rueful smile. "I've already got myself into a lot of hot water with this. My case is a solid one, based on good scientific evidence, but it's not an easy one. I'm up against deeply entrenched beliefs."

The next step will be a full-scale archaeological excavation. "We have to excavate in order to interrogate our remote sensing data and our carbon dating sequences and either to confirm or deny what we believe we've found here," says Natawidjaja, "but unfortunately there's a lot of obstacles in our way."

When I ask what he means by obstacles he replies that some senior Indonesian archaeologists are lobbying the government in Jakarta to prevent him from doing any further work at Gunung Padang on the grounds that they "know" the site is less than 5,000 years old and see no justification for disturbing it.

"I don't deny that the megaliths at the surface are less than 5,000 years old," Natawidjaja hastens to add, "but I suggest they were put here because Gunung Padang has been recognized as a sacred place since time immemorial. It's the deepest layers of the structure at between 12,000 and more than 20,000 years old that are the most important. They have potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of history and I think it's vital that we be allowed to investigate them properly."

Gunung Padang is not the only ancient site that raises huge question marks over the story archaeologists tell us about our past. On the other side of the world, in southeastern Turkey, another man-made hill has been excavated during the past decade, this time by Professor Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute. The site, called Gobekli Tepe (which means "Potbellied Hill" in the local Kurdish language) consists of a series of immense megalithic stone circles on the scale of Stonehenge and was deliberately buried (creating the appearance of a hill) around 8,000 BC by the mysterious ancient people who made it. The circles themselves date back to 9,600 BC, however, with the oldest work being the best. At least twenty further circles on a similar scale, identified by ground penetrating radar, are still deeply buried. Some of these, Klaus Schmidt told me when I visited Gobekli Tepe in September 2013, are likely to be much older than those already excavated.

At 7,000 or more years older than Stonehenge the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.

In essence what I proposed in that book was that an advanced civilization had been wiped out and lost to history in a global cataclysm at the end of the last Ice Age. I suggested there were survivors who settled at various locations around the world and attempted to pass on their superior knowledge, including knowledge of agriculture, to hunter-gatherer peoples who had also survived the cataclysm. Indeed even today we have populations of hunter gatherers, in the Kalahari Desert, for instance, and in the Amazon jungle, who co-exist with our advanced technological culture - so we should not be surprised that equally disparate levels of civilization might have co-existed in the past.

What I could not do when I wrote Fingerprints, because the evidence was not then available, was identify the exact nature of the cataclysm that had wiped out my hypothetical lost civilization, and this absence of a specific "smoking gun" was one of the many aspects of my argument that was heavily criticized by archaeologists. Since 2007, however, masses of scientific evidence have come to light that have identified the smoking gun for me in the form of a comet that broke into multiple fragments now known to have hit the earth 12,980 years ago. The impacts (some on the North American ice cap, some elsewhere) caused floods and tidal waves and threw a vast cloud of dust into the upper atmosphere that enshrouded the entire earth for more than a thousand years, preventing the sun's rays from reaching the surface, and setting off the Younger Dryas deep freeze.

I believe it is possible that Gobekli Tepe may prove to be the work of the survivors of a great civilization lost during the Younger Dryas (interestingly the so-called "origins of agriculture" have been traced back by archaeologists to the vicinity of Gobekli Tepe and to the exact period in which Gobekli Tepe was created). But it is to Gunung Padang that I now look for a possibly even more stunning confirmation of my theory. Danny Natawidjaja's geological survey has revealed not only deeply buried massive constructions and very ancient carbon dates at Gunung Padang but also the presence of three hidden chambers, so rectilinear in form that they are most unlikely to be natural. The largest of these lies at a depth of between 70 and 90 feet beneath the summit of the pyramid and measures approximately 18 feet high, 45 feet long and 30 feet wide.

Could it be the fabled "Hall of Records" of Atlantis? If Dr Natawidjaja's geological excavation is allowed to proceed, despite strenuous attempts by local archaeologists to prevent it, then we should know the answer to that question, one way or another, by the end of 2014.

photos at link - http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/Hanc ... zation.php

[seemslikeadream]

[slimmouse]

See previous post, immediately above.


^ An outdoor mural and photo displays at the !Khwa ttu San Education and Cultural Centre.

How beautiful is that image, not to mention the sky?

The sky was like that about 4 years ago when I first came to SE Asia.

Its a murky sickly blue these days.

Its pretty cold too.

[seemslikeadream]

Gunung Padang and The Lost City of Atlantis

January 29, 2014 Martin Clemens

There are megalithic sites and then there are megalithic sites. Our ancestors, it seems, were particularly fond of building things. Look at the skyline of any major city and you can see we haven’t strayed too far from that ideal ourselves. From stone circles to pyramids, the builders of the ancient world knew well how to create a structure that will last through the ages, and our landscapes the world over show many examples of their expertise.
We know quite a bit about these ancient structures too. We know how the pyramids were built, we know who build the ruins in Greece and why, we know (or we think we know) how the massive walls and terraces were built in Mesoamerica, and for the most part, we know when all these structures were built. For a long time, it was thought that the oldest structures built in the ancient world were somewhere around 9000 years old.
That all changed with the discovery of a temple structure in modern day Turkey called Göbekli Tepe. This discovery flipped the conventional wisdom of archaeology upside down, because following careful excavation and analysis, the site was dated at 10,000 BCE. That’s at least 4000 years earlier than any other known structure. Considering its age, Göbekli Tepe is fairly sophisticated in terms of its construction and the artwork that’s associated with it. The site now carries the title of Oldest Known Megalithic Site, or at least it did.
There’s a new kid on the block though, or an old kid, or…whatever. Gunung Padang is that kid, so to speak.

First described in the Dutch naturalist manual Rapporten van de Oudheidkundige Dienst in 1914, Gunung Padang had been known to locals for millennia. It sits on a hill in the Indonesian village of Karyamukti, which is in the Cianjur regency, in West Java province. It is described as the largest megalithic site in south-east Asia, and at first glance appears to be a series of terraces with bordering walls and successive steps between each. The terraces are covered in large volcanic rocks organised into lines and shapes, and the local Sudanese people declare the site to be sacred.
Early attempts to analyse the site resulted in dating of around 5000 BCE, which would put it in line with other sites in Asia and Europe. Radiometric dating and geoelectric testing done in 2012 seemed to confirm that date, though they found, quite surprisingly, that the site doesn’t actually sit on a hill. It is the hill.
Gunung Padang is a pyramid; one of the few pyramids found in south-east Asia. The site was found to have chambers and shafts hidden under the overgrown terraces with walled areas and other structures buried under centuries of natural reclamation. The next step in the excavation was to drill core samples in various locations to try to nail down a more accurate age for the site. This proved to be a dangerous endeavour for three tomography researchers who were beaten and kicked by locals who objected to the work, citing the sacred nature of the site.[1]
Nonetheless, the work continued and the results were astounding.
Analysis of core samples of the hill and structure began to reveal greater and greater age the deeper they looked. From 5000 years, to 8000 years, to 10,000 years and all the way up to a reported 23,000 years old. These numbers are incredible! The implication is that this site is the oldest known structure of any kind on Earth.
“The results of radiometric analysis of the content of the carbon element in some samples of cement in drill core from the depth of 5-15 meters which was conducted in 2012 at the prestigious Laboratory, BETALAB, Miami, USA in the mid-2012 shows its age with a range between 13,000 and 23,000 years ago.”[2]
Those results are contested, of course. Whenever data takes a drastic detour, one not expected by experimental guidelines, the first conclusion has to be that some mistake has been made. Experts on either side of the debate, however, are thus far unable to identify any problems in the coring procedures or in the radiometric dating that could account for such a drastic deviation from expected results. Currently the official age of the site is listed as “older than 5000 years”, which is maddeningly unhelpful, but research is continuing.
One of the most interesting things about Gunung Padang, aside from its age, is that during coring it was found that much of the buried structure was reinforced with a type of cement. This bonding agent, which has been used as a mortar and sort of glue in certain parts of the site, consists of 45% iron ore, 41% silica and 14% clay. It’s said that this mixture provides for a very strong and durable mortar base, and is surprising evidence of the level of sophistication of the building technique.
It should come as no surprise that some have claimed this discovery in the name of ancient aliens, but the more interesting claim in that regard is in support of the One World Origin Theory.


Artist's impression of Gunung Padang as it would have looked in antiquity (© Pon S Purajatnika)

Famed Fortean author Graham Hancock has proffered a hypothesis featuring Gunung Padang, wherein he suggests that this site may hold evidence of the lost city of Atlantis.
In a piece on Signs of the Times, Hancock tells of experiences he had with Danny Natawidjaja PhD., senior geologist of the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. The two visited Gunung Padang and discussed the implications of these discoveries.
According to Natawidjaja, the site is indeed more than 22,000 years old.
“The geophysical evidence is unambiguous,” Natawidjaja says. “Gunung Padang is not a natural hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of construction here go back long before the end of the last Ice Age. Since the work is massive even at the deepest levels, and bears witness to the kinds of sophisticated construction skills that were deployed to build the pyramids of Egypt or the largest megalithic sites of Europe, I can only conclude that we’re looking at the work of a lost civilization and a fairly advanced one.”[3]
It’s difficult to argue with him, and his research had led him to believe that the lost civilization in question is indeed Plato’s high civilization at the height of the last ice age, as documented in the Greek philosopher’s dialogues Timias and Critias (these dialogues are the only source of information on Atlantis, and all speculation is based on Plato’s description).
There are obvious parallels, not the least of which is the coincidental time frame. If the dating is correct, then much of the Gunung Padang site was constructed and in use during the peak of the last ice age. This is a time when the area of Indonesia and south-east Asia was very different. Ocean water levels were drastically lower, by as much as 400 feet, making what are now islands part of the mainland and drying up rivers. Natawidjaja believes that this made possible the advancement of a sophisticated culture which flourished in the region, and Hancock believes these unconfirmed facts are evidence that modern archaeology, as an entity, is covering up the existence of a previously unknown advanced civilization.
Critics, of course, point to the uncertainty in the dating results and cry foul over their use as evidence that the site originates from the 22nd millennium BCE or earlier, and claim that there is no cause to connect the site or the region with the lost city of Atlantis.
There is much still to learn about Gunung Padang, and of Göbekli Tepe and many more ancient megalithic sites, but the answers seem tantalizingly close.
[1] Yayan Sopyani Al Hadi. Situs Gunung Padang Berdampak pada Kebangkitan Kebudayaan (Site of Mount Padang Impact on Culture Awakening). RMOL.co http://www.rmol.co/read/2013/09/06/1246 ... ebudayaan-
[2] The Site of Mount Padang is the Evidence of Architectural Masterpieces of the Ancient. Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia http://setkab.go.id/en/news-8100-the-si ... cient.html
[3] Graham Hancock. Gunung Padang: The Lost Record of Atlantis. Signs of the Times http://www.sott.net/article/271881-Gunu ... f-Atlantis

[Hammer of Los]

...

... the answers seem tantalizingly close.

Awesome.

Go Graham!
...

[seemslikeadream]

The Stone People of New Zealand

Parallel Community's founder, Hamish Miller, passed away on 25th January 2010.

This obituary was written by Nigel Twinn, whose biography of Hamish, A Life Divined, is published by Penwith Press.
Pictures by Palden Jenkins. Dowsing and near-death videos by Tim Walter of Knights Rose. Lecture by Megalithomania.


Obituary
Hamish Miller
Cornwall-based Author, Dowser, Philosopher, Activist, Blacksmith.


Hamish Miller, one of Britain's best known, most highly respected and certainly best-loved dowsers, has died at his home near Lelant in Cornwall aged 82.

He was born in Bo'ness, Scotland, in 1927, the son of a dentist. In the 1940s, he attended St Andrew's and Edinburgh Universities and subsequently started his own furniture manufacturing company in Sussex. By the early 1980s, he had become a highly successful businessman, but in 1982 he suffered complications during a major abdominal operation and effectively died on the operating table. The Near Death Experience (NDE), with which he later came to terms, changed the course his life radically and irrevocably.

He left behind the world of commerce and engaged a completely different outlook, with far-sighted goals and values. One aspect of this new life was to make him a household name, with an international reputation - it was his involvement with the niche world of dowsing.

Hamish joined the British Society of Dowsers in 1983, and rapidly became a stalwart member and regular lecturer. He strongly supported the organisation and was actively involved in its annual Conferences right up to 2009.

Originally inspired by the equally legendary Fountain Group founder, Colin Bloy, and by the clairvoyant and healer Michael Colmer, Hamish made a series of groundbreaking dowsing discoveries during the 1980s and 1990s, which are described in his collaborative works, The Sun and the Serpent, The Dance of the Dragon and In Search of the Southern Serpent. These books captured the imagination of a whole new generation of practitioners. In so doing, he played a significant role in bringing the arcane art out of its relative obscurity, and in presenting it to a wider, younger and more ambitious audience, hungry for both a practical and an intuitive understanding of the emerging field of Earth Energy.

Hamish realised the immense value in teaching others to dowse, both as a skill in its own right and as a means to exploring a portal on to a completely different way of looking at reality. He took great personal pleasure in organising dowsing courses, many of which were held at his Cornish home. He also produced a comprehensive beginners guide to the subject, in 2002, entitled The Definitive Wee Book of Dowsing.


While Hamish is renowned across the globe for researching and lecturing on dowsing-related topics, he will also be remembered for two other important strands of a multi-faceted life.

Resulting from his changed world-view, Hamish engendered the formation, in 2006, of The Parallel Community - an organisation dedicated to linking together diverse groups in a number of countries that are seeking to build a more caring and a more positive future for mankind. With over 1,000 members around the globe, Hamish regarded the establishment of this group as a significant step in translating his own practical experience of the world beyond the five gross senses into action in the here and now.

His other claim to fame was in realising his boyhood dream of becoming a blacksmith. He made both functional and sculptural ironwork to an exceptional standard, one example of which was presented to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Kiev. He also established a one-man production line of hand-forged dowsing rods that will be greatly treasured by many of us.

Hamish wrote a premature autobiography, It's Not Too Late, in the 1990s, but many of his more important revelations were yet to come. A second volume, A Life Divined, describing his life and his discoveries largely in his own words, was published later in 2010.

He was both a genial and generous figurehead and an incandescent inspiration for international communities of dowsers and activists - and while several well-known dowsers have passed over in recent times, he will leave a rather larger gap in the pantheon than most.

Hamish Miller had a head start on most of the rest of us in understanding the world beyond the five senses, in that he had not one, but three out-of-body experiences on which to draw. He was quite convinced that he knew what would happen after his eventual demise - because he had already been there!

In his own words he found the prospect of passing over as 'quite exciting', and that he was 'rather looking forward to it'. With that sort of attitude, it is perhaps not too surprising that he didn't seek to put off the end of this cycle indefinitely.

[Hammer of Los]

...
Is that the guy was on the totally un amazing Randi's show broadcast in the UK in the '90's clearly demonstrating his "extra sensory" perception of underground water supplies?

You deliberately synching me there Slad?

If so, keep up the good work!
...

[seemslikeadream]

Stonehenge Rock Source Identified
The site however raises further questions about how the stones were transported from their source to what is now the monument

|By Tia Ghose and LiveScience


Scientists have found the exact source of Stonehenge's smaller bluestones, new research suggests.

The stones' rock composition revealed they come from a nearby outcropping, located about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) away from the site originally proposed as the source of such rocks nearly a century ago. The discovery of the rock's origin, in turn, could help archaeologists one day unlock the mystery of how the stones got to Stonehenge.

The work "locates the exact sources of the stones, which highlight areas where archaeologists can search for evidence of the human working of the stones," said geologist and study co-author Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales. [In Photos: A Walk Through Stonehenge]

Mysterious megaliths

The Wiltshire, England, site harbors evidence of ancient occupation, with traces of pine posts raised about 10,500 years ago. The first megaliths at Stonehenge were erected 5,000 years ago, and long-lost cultures continued to add to the monument for a millennium. The creation consists of massive, 30-ton sarsen stones, as well as smaller bluestones, so named for their hue when wet or cut.

Stonhenge's purpose has long been a mystery, with some arguing it was a symbol of unity, a memorial to a sacred hunting ground or the source of a sound illusion.

But for decades, researchers agreed upon at least a few things. In 1923, geologist Herbert H. Thomas pinpointed the source of one type of the stones, known as dolerite bluestones, to a rocky outcropping known as Carn Meini on high ground in the Preseli Hills of western Wales. He became convinced the other bluestones (made from other types of igneous, or magmatic, rock) came from the nearby location of Carn Alw. That, in turn, lent credence to the theory that Stonehenge's builders transported the stones south, downhill, to the Bristol Channel, then floated them by sea to the site.

Different origins?

But a few years ago, Bevins and his colleagues found that at least some of the bluestones came from a slightly different region of the landscape, at lower elevation, called Craig Rhos y felin. If true, this would have meant builders would have to the stones uphill over the summit of the hills, then back downhill before floating them on rafts to the sea, Bevins said.

Another competing theory argues glaciers carried the bluestones to the general region of Stonehenge during the last Ice Age.

The researchers wondered about the origins of the dolerite bluestones that Thomas had identified, and took a second look at the mineral composition of the rocks. In general, when rock forms from molten magma, some minerals known as incompatible elements remain outside the crystallizing magma in residual magma, whereas others get embedded within the crystallizing magma. Past work identifying the origins of the rocks had used the presence of only a few incompatible elements, Bevins said.

In the new study, the team looked at the minerals, such as chromium, nickel, magnesium oxide and iron oxide, which are part of the crystallizing structures forming in the original magma. The researchers found that at least 55 percent of the dolerite bluestones came from a location, known as Carn Goedog, which is farther north than the location Thomas had proposed in 1923, and about 140 miles (225 km) away from Stonehenge, Bevins said.

That, in turn, made the raft-theory of transportation more unlikely, Bevins told Live Science.

Transportation mystery

The new findings raise more questions than answers about how the rocks could have made it to Stonehenge.

But pinpointing the exact location of the stones' origins could help archaeologists looking for other evidence of ancient human handiwork near the area, which could then shed light on the transportation method, Bevins said.

"For example, if we could determine with confidence that the stones had been worked by humans in Neolithic times, then the ice-transport theory would be refuted," Bevins said.

[seemslikeadream]

Stonehenge bluestones had acoustic properties, study shows


Stonehenge, Wiltshire
A study has discovered that rocks in the Preseli Hills, the source of some the stones at Stonehenge, have a sonic property

The giant bluestones of Stonehenge may have been chosen because of their acoustic properties, claim researchers.

A study shows rocks in the Preseli Hills, the Pembrokeshire source of part of the monument, have a sonic property.

Researcher Paul Devereux said: "It hasn't been considered until now that sound might have been a factor."

The study, by London's Royal College of Art, was to try and record what "Stone Age eyes and ears" would have heard and seen in a prehistoric landscape.

Since the 1920s, it has been known stones quarried in Mynydd Preseli were hauled 199 miles (320 km) to Wiltshire by its makers. But, trying to establish why has been more difficult.

'Like a bell'
With this study, thousands of stones along the Carn Menyn ridge were tested and a high proportion of them were found to "ring" when they were struck.

"The percentage of the rocks on the Carn Menyn ridge are ringing rocks, they ring just like a bell," said Mr Devereux, the principal investigator on the Landscape and Perception Project.

"And there's lots of different tones, you could play a tune.

"In fact, we have had percussionists who have played proper percussion pieces off the rocks."

Carn Menyn ridge, Wales
Thousands of stones along the Carn Menyn ridge were tested and a high proportion were found to "ring" when struck
According to Mr Devereux, the discovery of the "resonant rocks" could explain why they were selected for Stonehenge.

"There had to be something special about these rocks," he said.

"Why else would they take them from here all the way to Stonehenge?"

'Pre-historic glockenspiel'
Built between 3,000 BC and 1,600 BC, it has remained a mystery why the monument's bluestones were lugged all the way from north Pembrokeshire.

But Prof Tim Darvill, who has undertaken hundreds of excavations at Stonehenge, insists "pre-historic attitudes to stone" must have been very different to those of today.

"We don't know of course that they moved them because they rang but ringing rocks are a prominent part of many cultures," he said.

"You can almost see them as a pre-historic glockenspiel, if you like and you could knock them and hear these tunes.

"And soundscapes of pre-history are something we're really just beginning to explore."