Showing posts with label English Heritage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English Heritage. Show all posts
Thursday, July 7
King Arthur's Tomb
According to popular lore, Arthur’s Stone, a roughly 5,000-year-old tomb in the West Midlands of England, boasts ties to King Arthur, the mythical leader of Camelot. One legend holds that Arthur found a pebble in his shoe while marching to battle and threw it aside, at which point it grew in size out of “pride [at] having been touched by [him],” per Atlas Obscura. Another story suggests that Arthur clashed with a giant whose elbows left massive impressions in the earth when he fell in battle.
Myths aside, the Neolithic tomb has long mystified experts and the public alike. Now, reports James Thomas for the Hereford Times, the first-ever excavation of the site is poised to shed light on its enigmatic history.
Researchers from the University of Manchester and English Heritage, the charity that cares for the monument, are unlikely to unearth the remains of the legendary king. But they do hope to find traces of the actual Neolithic Britons who built and used the chambered tomb. Though archaeologists initially suspected that Arthur’s Stone formed part of a wedge-shaped stone cairn like those found in South Wales and the Cotswolds, recent excavations indicate otherwise.
“I think it has considerable potential,” Julian Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester, tells the London Times’ Jack Blackburn. “It’s a monument of an entirely different kind to the one that we’d imagined.”
Per a statement, only the inner chamber of the tomb—made up of nine upright stones topped by a massive capstone weighing more than 25 tons—survives today. A previous dig conducted outside of the monument showed that Arthur’s Stone extended into a field to the south and underwent two distinct phases of construction. READ MORE...
Tuesday, August 10
Stonehenge Reveals Its Age
A long-lost piece of Stonehenge that was taken by a man performing restoration work on the monument has been returned after 60 years, giving scientists a chance to peer inside a pillar of the iconic monument for the first time.
In 1958, Robert Phillips, a representative of the drilling company helping to restore Stonehenge, took the cylindrical core after it was drilled from one of Stonehenge's pillars — Stone 58.
In 1958, Robert Phillips, a representative of the drilling company helping to restore Stonehenge, took the cylindrical core after it was drilled from one of Stonehenge's pillars — Stone 58.
Later, when he emigrated to the United States, Phillips took the core with him. Because of Stonehenge's protected status, it's no longer possible to extract samples from the stones.
But with the core's return in 2018, researchers had the opportunity to perform unprecedented geochemical analyses of a Stonehenge pillar, which they described in a new study.
They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were made of rock containing sediments that formed when dinosaurs walked the Earth.
They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were made of rock containing sediments that formed when dinosaurs walked the Earth.
Other grains in the rock date as far back as 1.6 billion years. READ MORE
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