NEOLITHIC CURSUS DISCOVERED ON ARRAN | Lidar expands archaeology on Arran
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- čas přidán 26. 01. 2021
- ⏰ LIVE - 27th January, 2021 at 20:00 GMT ⏰
Cursuses, or 'cursus monuments' as most archaeologists prefer to call them (more on that in the programme), are potentially one of the most telling phenomena about life in the neolithic. However, they are also - to date - one of the most enigmatic.
Cursus monuments, which were constructed during the Neolithic period (4000 B.C. to 2500 B.C.) are long rectangular earthwork enclosures, sometimes many kilometres long, comprising parallel earthen banks and ditches.
The discovery of this form of prehistoric earthwork on Arran is significant because although cususes are quite common in Britain and Ireland, they are rare towards the west coast of Scotland. It also brings focus to the wealth and expands the breadth of the already extensive prehistoric remains on the Isle of Arran.
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Do you realise how rare it is to hear adult, non-condescending conversation? Whee! You refresh my brain!
And no aliens or secret societies too! wahey
@@reductioabsurdum4074 where did you see competitive undertones?
@@reductioabsurdum4074 Of course you wouldn't. That's called a cop-out.
Hahaha "Do you realise how rare it is to hear adult non-condensing conversation."
Squeals like a 5 year old... 😅 Love it!
Arran is the first thing I see each morning when I'm making my first cuppa of the day.
No matter what the weather is like, seeing Arran always makes my day.
Mine to 😍👌
I bet it looks different every single day, too - knowing the quality of light in Scotland
@@nightlyshift definitely.
I've been to Arran and it rained so hard it was difficult to see anything.
Greenest place I ever saw
@@julianshepherd2038hopefully you and everyone else who is not allowed to live atm can enjoy it when its nice and sunny.
I've not been since I was a little girl, but friends stayed there a few yrs ago at another friend's house and it was raining for the whole trip, but the house was right by the water and they got to see the dolphins that were just an arms length away playing together.. so I hope to get to see them too one day.
I love your sense of the practical uses of landscapes. It is quite funny how quickly some people offer up ritual as the explanation of a feature without having any finds to support that interpretation. It is quite possible that the common man of those ancient times spent far more energy on gathering and preserving food, for example, than in some religious fog considering ritual. I imagine they attended to rituals when it seemed urgent like people do today and otherwize thought about far more practical concerns, such as making weapons, knowing when to plant and harvest, knowing when the game would be arriving in the nearby woodlot and so forth. It was delightful to hear one group of diggers marvel at what a large non-burial barrow could have been, when all they had found was deer antlers in the ditches. Well it was a place where the deer were driven to be kept until it was time to butcher them. Everyone loves fresh meat.
These places in ancient Europe were called bucks or bokes. It had to do with deer burgers, not ritual of any kind. No doubt there were certain prayers one said while drawing the deer into the boke, or while aiming the arrow or spear, or while butchering deer and removing its antlers to make tools. Those were the activities that sustained life and prosperity so of course there were blessings to be said. And reverences to be made to the ancestors who had taught them how to do those things. But to call that a "cathedral" makes one giggle so it is a delight to watch you giggle and laugh along.
Another favorite is some people's suppositions about the uses of banjo enclosures. The larger your herd, the longer the entrance way to the cattle yard, especially when it is shearing time, or when predators have been spotted nearby and you need to count the animals. Ritual entrances? Giggle, giggle. I don't think so.
Wrong. Religion was incredibly important in the lives of people. Every village has at least one church which until 100 years ago you had better be attending every Sunday or else. Wars were fought over which version of christianity was the right one. People died horrendous deaths for disagreeing about some point of religious teachings. If you did not attend church frequently and devoutly then maybe you were the cause that the ship went down.
Oh and fire hardened antlers were used as picks axes to dig ditches. You don't throw away antlers, they are used to make tools like needles, walls and other things.
@@lenabreijer1311 I don't see where your reply disagrees with the original comment.
@@lenabreijer1311 I never said religion was not important to people, I said it does not explain everything they built and everything they used.
How did we get from discussing prehistoric people to churches and holy wars? There were many thousands of years in between.
Yes, I am aware of violence in the name of belief. one of my ancestors was welcomed to volhynia, Poland by Catherine the Great of Russia, but when the Cossacks took over, he was abducted by Cossacks and never heard from again. We hear Christians in Nigeria are being executed these days. At the same time it is no longer a death penalty for changing beliefs in the Sudan.
@@Fox1nDen religion is religion. The idea that prehistoric people were less religious is crazy when you compare it to historical times. Churches are an example of ceremonial and ritual spaces. Even most sports facilities are ritual and ceremonial spaces. So are theatres. So when you look at a modern city most of the biggest spaces are ritual.
@@lenabreijer1311 when did I say the prehistoric people were less religious? You are having a hard time hearing what I actually say. I wonder why that is.
We know thee natives in the Americas were very reverent in every phase of their daily lives. I expect the prehistoric peoples had their beliefs and religious experiences and related them to their children, they just did not have churches to do them in, and it is wrong to interpret everything they built as a church.
Just as we have today, I suspect there people among them who were less connected to the religious behavior they were taught than their parents. Built into human experience is a desire to differentiate from generations before. Why should it have been different then?
Did their beliefs keep them from seeing their environments and relationships clearly? We have no evidence of that. In any religious service you have people invested in it and people whose minds are wandering far into doubt and disbelief--they may be just going through the motions for whatever reasons. If you are not aware of this, wake up. Everyone in a church is not reverent. Some leave their reverence in church and their daily lives do not conform to professed beliefs. So we may appear to be far more religious than we actually are.
The trouble with archaeology where written texts are absent we have to guess about levels of reverence and beliefs and religious uses of landscapes. The presence of an altar does not guarantee that most people alive them used them to make sacrifices.
Not every building of the neolithic and mesolithic periods is a church. They did have stables, barns, chicken coops, refrigerators, malting floors, threshing floors, pottery sheds, smelting areas, mines, mausoleums, and places for butchering meats. these were not primarily places of worship.
Why try to make them more religious than people today? They were more concerned about food production and storage than we are but they also engaged in trade and the consumerism of our age is rooted in that same desire. It is wrong to suppose everything ancient people did was religious ritual. They performed lots of secular activities, too.
What a nice video to watch for me today. It was such a stressful day and this is my medicine.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you for this, fascinating as ever! - I found that the point Rupert makes about what constitutes a "monument" is a very important one: monuments are made with remembrance of important things in mind.
Looking at our present environment, a cathedral is a "monument", while a shopping centre is not. A plaque or statue documenting an event of whatever kind (even a football game) is a monument, while even the most elaborate office building or agricultural building ist not. Etcetera. The difference lies in the intention, and this is essential.
Agreed. A school, an office, a hospital or an abattoir are not monuments but buildings put up with a practical purpose.
A statue, a Cenotaph, a pillar put up with a plaque to commemorate a battle, or a mausoleum, would be monuments.
A historic 'monument' can be any ancient structure or man made landscape feature, intention is not part of the definition.
Hi guys as a recent subscriber I would just like to say how much I'm enjoying this channel but what I found really refreshing was to hear your thoughts on the use of the word ceremonial/processionary and monuments when it pertains to cursuses and your opinions to the burning of timbers, just nice to hear some locical thinking. Looking forward to getting through some more videos.
Welcome aboard! And thank you.
This us my second viewing of this video. I may watch it a few more times. I do that with lots of your material
I've always been of the mind that banked structures were common ground, or maybe more accurately neutral ground, places a variety of people could meet with conflicts and rivalries put aside. It's already been shown places like Durrington were meeting places as well as places of residence, and given the amount of people who would gather at such large places i'm pretty sure people with rivalries would have come together there, to share knowledge, trade, extend the gene pool etc, so neutral ground must have existed somewhere. Given the immense effort put into such large structures maybe the act of building them would have been an act of neutrality itself, binding the notion of commonality, whatever the shape of the banked structure. Can we say with any confidence cursuses and henges weren't the same thing? just differently shaped.
It's pure speculation of course, but (in my mind anyway) it makes sense. Maybe. :D
I agree. All you need do is look at modern shopping malls. I made a similar comment a while back on another channel; maybe the ditch was a ' check your weapons at the entrance', sign.✌️🐱
It'd definitely be interesting to see how they fitted in to the rest of the land at the time. Were they at a point where 3 or more territories met.
I know it's believed that some if not all of the bog body sacrifices were done at a tribes boundary where its believed another tribes boundary started so these boundaries were probably very important.
Just look at how animals act about their boundaries, wolves mark theirs, monkeys and apes defend theirs so why would humans be any different. I mean we're not so different today with all the fences, barbed wire, hedges, etc, etc.
Protecting, discussing and coming to an agreement about what is ours and what is yours must have been important, life and death I'd say so a meeting area that was neutral ground, with that neutrality defended by tradition, faith and a type of religion would make total sense.
Better to talk than fight if you can.
A great episode.
A slight correction: Arran isn't 'off' the west coast of Scotland it lies in the Firth of Clyde between Ayrshire and the Kintyre Peninsular.
Ouch, that is a very good point!!
Arran is the west coast of Scotland
Anywhere online I can look at the Arran LIDAR pics?
I'm Team Prehistory Guys on the cursus question.
Fascinating.
The straight lines to the left of the cursus @ 12:06 can be seen in the photo @ 12:38 , which looks south-east: a fence to the right, with a previous fence to the left, evident in the extent of the greenery predominant to the right/west of the current fence. So probably sheep and/or rabbit-proof.
Monument to me just means monumental, something big, something that took lots of people lots of time to build. I wouldn't refer to a path, even a path with small stones down the side as a monument, nor a small burial cairn.
Just 1 point, I know being pedantic but it doesn't matter how much the sizes, lengths differ or how many there are from 2 to 2000 there will always be an average. 🤔😁☺️😏 I know sorry...
Hello Chaps. Really sorry to have missed your live programme. FAB as ever! I think that the Stonehenge 'hidden landscapes' project identified two post-holes near to the two terminii of the Stonehenge cursus, presumably which housed two standing stones. These stones aligned directly with the winter (?) solstice when viewed from Stonehenge. Is this a one off or a possible alternative interpretation? All the best - Phil B
Found this detailed response from Professor Vince Gaffney about the recent discovery: "Well, rather interestingly we were working along the Stonehenge Cursus. This is a very enigmatic monument, it’s a linear enclosure, two and a half kilometres in length. It’s earlier than the monument you can see at Stonehenge. Generally there is very little inside it, however when we went back to look at the data after we returned back to Birmingham and our colleagues in Vienna were also looking at the data, we realised that there were two very large pits, one in the east end of the Cursus and one in the west end of the Cursus and to give you an idea of the scale of the thing we’re talking about, these are five metres across, at least one metre deep but we aren’t actually sure just how deep they are at the moment. So these things are big. Now perhaps that shouldn’t surprise you that something strange was found at Stonehenge. Pretty much everything around the Stonehenge landscape is strange in some way but what’s excited us was that we noticed that these pits which we presumed had some link with Stonehenge, only made sense when you considered that the area that they were in might be viewed from the Heel Stone. Now the Heel Stone is a rather enigmatic stone just outside the Henge, the circular arrangement of Stonehenge and at the head of a pathway, a track, entitled ‘The Avenue’ which moves to the north-east of Stonehenge. And what we realised was that if you stood at that point, these two pits effectively marked the rising and setting of the sun on Midsummer’s Day."
@@philbenaiges482 Thanks for this - evidence of the alignment to the pits (could these be part of the ring of large pits around Durrington Walls?) from the Heel Stone would make more sense then just 'Stonehenge' - suggests it could be one of the earliest sarsens on site and part of the reason the whole monument looks like it does or where it is. :)
Brilliant thank you very interesting. Can you imagine what it must have all looked like at the time. Especially if what some think is true and the surface was scraped off to show the white chalk all around and marking the various important areas and pathways.
I'd love someone to do a 3D timeline simulation of the area moving from the start all the way to end with the relevant structures and paths etc coming and going at the estimated date for when they were there and offering a choice of the different ideas about how each part looked.
Can you show a series of these please...I’ve just started recently to watch from Canada
Good day gentlemen, I realize I’m a couple years late to the party, but wanted to make a few comments anyway. I actually visited Kilmartin on a trip over from the states and found it very unique, and was wondering how much of it was original, and how much of it had been re-fitted to what someone thought it should be. The second time it is in regards to the burning that you say is often in it to the structures. Just curious if anyone has ever looked into whether the land had been cleared, using fire for livestock, or weather grassland fires could be attributed to the charring?
Really enjoying your series, thank you.
If they find rock piles every 20-30 feet apart it would really point to hunting. If you want to have animals follow along a line, rock piles will look enough like people that would only need to be scattered throughout to keep animals herding along. It is done still for Inuit.
Such a drive-line, dating to 9,000 years ago, was discovered 37 metres below the surface of Lake Huron. It stands on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, which connects northeast Michigan to southern Ontario, and was above water during that period. It is presumed to have been used to drive caribou herds into a line. In Canada, they are usually accompanied by v-shaped hunters' blinds, and a rectangular meat cache. Such structures were still being constructed on the Canadian prairies by plains tribes, and in the arctic by the Inuit, well into modern times. Pîhtokahanapiwiyin, an important character in Canadian history, was a Cree chief who acquired his first fame as the organizer and designer of such drive lines ("pounds") and was known in English as Poundmaker. A community he founded is now known as Poundmaker Cree Nation. A study of the Canadian pounds, both prehistoric and modern, might profit U.K. archaeologists in their interpretation of linear prehistoric sites.
What were cursus used for❓🤔 avenues with a ditch running either side, or not sound a lot like a narrow lane or gully used for herding livestock. Could a curses of been used for herding❓😺🐈👍
Enclose red deer?
That's a tall wall.
Omg really feels like they are discovering yajuj and majuj 😳
aren't the two exactly parallel straight lines on the Lidar pic just the space where two Lidar images are joined to one another?
I also wondered if it could be a digital artifact of the scanning or data processing.
Hi Sibylle! As I tried to explain in the show, the straight line feature in the lidar correspond to features on the ground, especcially the boundaries of the long plantation to the east of the cursus. It's a bit strange and needs an explanation. See what I mean on Google Maps: www.google.com/maps/@55.5180919,-5.334374,1886m/data=!3m1!1e3
Yesterday I tried to send you an Email but it was returned .How do I send you guys direct personal communication? I have some information about brochs.
Do you mean information on brochs or an opinion about brochs? I can't imagine there's any information that isn't already in the public domain.
@@ThePrehistoryGuys I have written an account about who I think was responsible for the building of the Brochs and I would like to share it with you. My research covers who and why and when and the evidence that I have found. It is a completely new idea which I would like to publish and I think that it would interest you, Something to blow your mind! Please accept that am not wanting you to discuss this on your CZcams site. I just want you both to consider that there may be a situation which has bypassed the usual way of thinking about the brochs. How do I present this to you? It also involves a connection with ALL the Standing Stones and Circles etc...But definitely not anything about Extra Terrestrial visitations or that sort of way out nonsense. It is a serious piece of study.
these structures are far older than they are saying. stones wearing like this on the tops is extremely old. some where in the hundreds of thousands of years. i need coordinates to date this.
Stone gets robbed and has been robbed from sites for hundreds and hundreds of years if not longer so why wouldn't they also reuse the wood when it'd save them so much time.
😍
Why not try editing the video!
because it's a live show with participation in real time
you guys need to go to Burning Man - so many documentaries - there was a structure that was burned - the archeologists crying 'why did they burn it?' - easy, so we can do it again!
To call these kinds of places 'monuments', or 'ceremonial complexes' or places where rituals were carried out is just so wrong. I would think to call a place a monument, it would have a "known' history, and a reason to be called that. These places, even though very important to our understanding early man, are little more in their name than, ie. an archeological area with maybe a collection of stones, or mounds or ditches, or any other feature that might still be seen that aren't natural. What I believe your stone arts in Europe same as here in the USA, are what I term as being some sort of a 'prediction calendar' of a year. But to be able to construct features like these, there is no doubt they had to have language between them, because they had to be able to give and take direction and be cooperative and to do that you have to know what the goal of all this is going to be. The end goal for the features is for survival, maybe only to predict when the animals will come back, when winter is over or maybe when it will begin, maybe to know when NOT to lay with your woman so as not to have children in the winter!
Charles Spiva. You are 2000 lightyears behind the facts.
@@Foxglove963 Foxglove, if you know so much, why haven't you reached out, I'm not the only one that doesn't know. Ohh, I see why, 'behind' is spelled like this, 'behind'!
The seam looks like a filtering artifact.
Congratulations it could be 2.900 y. B. C. E.
Olympic style sheep games? I'm only half joking.
what a lovely idea… my ewe is faster than your ewe…
places for sheep dog training...
Gave you thumbs up to get you off 666😂
horse race tracks...... obvious!
Bring back shep
What do you call an Arran man who has been dead for 5500 years ?
Peat