Posted on her blog:
“Stonehenge was a Welsh monument from its very beginning. If we can find the original monument in Wales from which it was built, we will finally be able to solve the mystery of why Stonehenge was built and why some of its stones were brought so far.” Mike Parker Pearson, archaeologist who led the study.
What do you think?
I think that’s a very interesting theory
however i do think it will be very difficult to find out how & why stonehenge itself was built in the 1st place if not impossible
I think it has something to do with monkies and bananas. The last time I was at Stonehenge all I saw was monkeys walking around aimlessly taking pictures of rocks. I was extremely disappointed.
Thank you, r30 - I really appreciate your interest. I agree, Darkshade, that it will be very difficult to find out how and why Stonehenge was built without a time machine, and that I do not have. Pity. Archaeologists have pretty good ideas about how, but my research is all about why. The quote above is a very small portion of the whole theory.
Firstly, I show that the method of loci is used by non-literate cultures all over the world. Our Australian Aboriginal cultures - a continuous 50,000 year tradition - use songlines which are essentially memory journeys through the landscape from location to location. At each location they repeat songs and stories which encode practical knowledge. The Native American trails and Inca ceques fit the same pattern.
Non-literate cultures manage to memorise what are effectively field guides to all the animals and plants, navigation routes, genealogies, astronomy, geology, rules, resource management … the list goes on and on. I then looked the the physical devices used - hand held memory devices such as the Australian tjuringa and African lukasa, as well as the landscape pathways dotted with loci.
The question then became - what happened when they settled and were no longer moving in regular patterns around the landscape but didn’t yet have a built environment like the ancient Greek orators? The obvious thing to do was to replicate the landscape journeys in the local environment to ensure the knowledge built up over thousands of years was not lost. All the stone and timber circles - thousands of them all over the world, were built in that transitional stage and would work a treat. Objects which would work as handheld memory devices are found at all of them, such as the Stonehenge chalk plaques.
Stonehenge changed a great deal over the 1500 years of use. Everything in the archaeology is consistent with it being a memory space adjusted to suit the changing needs of a non-literate culture moving from a predominantly mobile hunter gatherer culture to a small scale farming community. The model is imagining mobile Australian cultures settling to be like small scale Native American, African or Pacific farming communities. The same pattern is found in Neolithic and Archaic sites all over the world. But it took a PhD, an academic book and now the book for the mainstream market to make the entire case.
I use a whole range of the indigenous devices to memorise masses of information. They are all essentially a version of the method of loci - just lots of different implementations.
I hope that gives a little more idea of what I write about.
Lynne
I wasn’t familiar with the “bluestones” and “sarsens”, this image should explain it.
A computer model of the whole site:
Stonehenge_area
I always though the stonehedge had some connect to the layout of stars.
Anyways,why wold they need to use them as anchors to store information? Couldn’t they just use the journey method and use previous locations to store info? Especially for orators, couldn’t they use the same locations that they used in other speeches because if they are giving an old speech, the old locations are still useful.
What an intriguing theory.
I have long been interested in the history of mnemonics, but it never occurred to me that mnemonic-like activities would have gone further back than perhaps the Chaldeans. But, the more I think of it, the more elegant Lynne Kelly’s idea appears. What an insight.
This idea has been quietly consuming all the spare bandwidth in my default mode network the whole day. This evening I got to wondering how deeply entrenched in evolutionary history our relationship with loci goes as I was walking my dog and she pulled me from one locus to another as she insistently sniffed and contemplated every tree, pole and fire hydrant we encountered on our journey.
The images above are the way Stonehenge looked 500 years into its life. That’s a very long time after it was first built. The first stage was just a ring of the Preseli bluestones in the outer circle of holes indicated in the second diagram.
Thank you for your interesting comments, Parkouristx. Firstly the link to the layout of the stars. Many archaeologists believe that there is enough evidence to claim this, and I suspect this is highly likely. The certainty is that Stonehenge aligns with the sun, in particular the winter solstice. The Neolithic Brits even realigned the avenue by 5 degrees to give perfect alignment when the big stones, the sarsens, came to the site from 30 km north. All non-literate cultures use the sun, stars and other indicators to run a subsistence or agricultural calendar as well as to regulate the timing of the ceremonial cycle - the latter being, in artofmemory.com terms, the cycle to ensure all the knowledge is repeated to ensure accurate recall. But the astronomy is only part of the system.
As for using their previous locations - mobile cultures such as our Australian Aboriginals, will move over hundreds of miles during a year, following seasonal resources, attending ceremonies and so on. They sing their navigational paths, known as songlines or singing tracks. Some songlines are restricted to those initiated higher into the knowledge system, some are taught to all members of the tribe. If they settle and farm, they can’t afford to leave fields and stock to travel these distances, although some elders will still do so, such as when the Pueblo and other Native American elders follow pilgrimage trails. For hunter-gatherers to settle, they need to replicate this huge landscape locally in order to retain the knowledge and stay settled to farm. This transition happens very slowly over many generations. There are earlier monuments, cursuses and causewayed enclosures, who reflect the stages before henges.
In all oral cultures, the knowledge of all plants, animals, laws and so on, are retained in an integrated information system, the stories which encode the practical knowledge being retained as vivid narratives, just as we mnemonists do in our memory journeys. In indigenous terms, those narratives are referred to as mythology. The aspect of mythology I concentrate on is that it serves as an incredibly effective mnemonic tool. Non-literate cultures anchor their mythology in landscape locations, on portable devices, on rock art and portable art, and within built environments.
I hope that answers some of your questions.
Lynne
Thank you tarnation. Your reaction has made my day!
There is a group of evolutionary biologists who have got very excited about my theory and the way it plugs a gap in their work on the evolution of human knowledge systems. I have not been able to get too involved in their work because it would be yet another steep learning curve, and this one has exhausted me. It has been 8 years of obsessive work since I first stumbled over this idea. The 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine went to researchers who showed how the human brain is hardwired to link information to place. So my claiming it is the basis of memorising knowledge throughout the history of modern humans is not really as radical an idea as it seems at first.
It has never occurred to me that animals may work the same way, but what you are saying makes perfect sense. Although research on rats has shown that, I think. Oh no, not another new direction to get obsessed about.
Would love to hear what your bandwidth consummations have led to!
Thank you again.
Lynne
Hi Lynne,
I am not sure I can verbalize yet what it is I have been thinking about, but it would have to do with another topic that has interested me for years–game theory–and how it might manifest itself as shaping force of evolution.
In particular, there were some ideas by Thomas Schelling (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)) that I feel might intersect nicely with the kinds of memory locus theories we are discussing here. His idea of a coordination game, I think, is important.
Anyway, it is long past my bedtime and I am still struggling with an amorphous, possibly nonsensical, intuition that these sets of ideas should be brought together. I suspect I will be better off not embarassing myself by trying to seem more coherent than I am. If I have a thought I can explain later on, I will be glad to share it.
Take care,
Darn
Hi Lynne,
I woke up this morning thinking that Schelling’s idea of a focal point very much supports your idea and helps tell the story of how and why humans, and human civilization, would gain a huge evolutionary advantage through coordinating activities on interesting loci. His ideas even seem to me to explain why my dog sniffs eveything that sticks up vertically from the ground.
In short, I believe his ideas strengthen your arguments and show that your statements about how even non-literate societies would have used loci for menemonic and other purposes are not just a bunch of locus-focused hocus-pocus. I think they show that you are very likely on the right track.
The wiki page on Schelling and his focal point idea explains his focus point idea pretty nicely (Focal point (game theory) - Wikipedia), although anybody interested in game theory should read his book, The Strategy of Conflict. It’s actually a great read and very accessible to non-mathematicians.
I don’t know if Schelling thought about applying his ideas to matters of evolutionary biology, or if evolutionary biologists read up on game theory, but it seems to me to like a natural fit. I have often wondered if some of the quantitative aspects of game theory can be shown to have played out on the historical record.
Thanks,
Darn
By the way, another related topic thing that has been using up my DMN bandwidth is how these ideas might play out in the development of another very intelligent and highly social species, namely dolphins.
The ocean seems to me to be a largely featureless place (though Flipper and his friends may not see it that way). I wonder if they are as locus-focused as humans and dogs, and whether these ideas might hold significant clues to the differences between human intelligence and dolphin intelligence (and communication).
Perhaps that is another question for the evolutionary biologists, but anyway, I just want to say thanks. This discussion has taken me from thinking about Stonehenge all the way to the evolution of dolphins. (Hmmm, do you suppose dolphins built Stonehenge? ;D ) I see it as an extremely intriguing idea with a huge amount of explanatory power. Right or wrong, it has given me a lot of enjoyable thoughts to wonder about.
Many thanks,
Darn
It’s always kind of disappointing when mnemonics and or mental calculation and mental illness and/or old fashioned miracle peddling are conjoined.
I think their is a good chance that the practice of both these skills from an early age would be beneficial to most people not only from the perspective of the skills but from the simple act of intentional practice of basic thinking. Conjoining this with blathering wingnuts is never helpful to the cause.
Somewhere in the early 1900’s it seems like these skills were mixed in with the lies of the “think and be rich” and other self help crap. Then later(earlier? ) it became attractive to the psychic charletons and magic crowd. Then came the new agers, the aliens, the Nehalem… The ■■■■■■■■ gets relabelled and resold each generation. Magic elixirs…
Neither mnemonics, nor mental calculation should have fallen prey to these quacks but they have been so abused that at this point they aren’t even part of a child’s educational curriculum.
Sorry for the rant but even in general chat it makes me sad to see this. My apologies to those who are simply feeding the trolls and enjoying the lols.
Carry on.
Quick reading at Stonehenge wiki page:
Stonehenge 1 (ca 3100 BC): the outer circle of ditch and bank were dug (they buried their people there)
Phase 1
Within that circle are “Aubrey holes”. Pearson has suggested the holes were used to erect bluestones (which then were centuries later moved to the sarsens, forming our nowaday image of “Stonehenge”). What is sure is that later the holes were used for burying people.
Theories of purposes:
Burial and ritual (healing; astronomical properties; gods worshipping)
Built as a symbol of “peace and unity” (the construction happens to coincide with the time period of cultural unification among Britain’s Neolithic an people)
Interesting fact: some stones have “unusual acoustic properties” —when they are struck they respond with a “loud clanging noise”. In certain ancient cultures rocks that ring out, known as lithophones, were believed to contain mystic or healing powers, and Stonehenge has a history of association with rituals. The presence of these “ringing rocks” seems to support the hypothesis that Stonehenge was a “place for healing”.
Two conflicting articles about the origins of bluestones:
Two bluestone quarries discovered
Bluestones were brought to Stonehenge from somewhere in the Preseli Hills, but only now has there been collaboration with archaeologists to locate and excavate the actual quarries from which they came. The geologists have been able to lead us to the actual outcrops where Stonehenge’s stones were extracted.”The Stonehenge bluestones are of volcanic and igneous rocks, the most common of which are called dolerite and rhyolite. Dr Richard Bevins (Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales) and Dr Rob Ixer (UCL and University of Leicester) have identified the outcrop of Carn Goedog as the main source of Stonehenge’s ‘spotted dolerite’ bluestones and the outcrop of Craig Rhos-y-felin as a source for one of the ‘rhyolite’ bluestones.
The special formation of the rock, which forms natural pillars at these outcrops, allowed the prehistoric quarry-workers to detach each megalith (standing stone) with a minimum of effort. “They only had to insert wooden wedges into the cracks between the pillars and then let the Welsh rain do the rest by swelling the wood to ease each pillar off the rock face” said Dr Josh Pollard (University of Southampton). “The quarry-workers then lowered the thin pillars onto platforms of earth and stone, a sort of ‘loading bay’ from where the huge stones could be dragged away along trackways leading out of each quarry.”
Quarries were not “quarries” posted a week later:
But we cannot accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry here without firm evidence - and in our considered opinion there is none. 'The archaeologists admit that there are no artefacts, bones or tools at the site.' Specifically, the group does not accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry in the Preseli Hills and said the supposed signs of 'quarrying' by humans at Craig Rhos-y-Felin were entirely natural.
This all is very interesting. To build and modify a huge site of stones and earth for thousands of years with stone age tools…
tarnation - your comments are incredibly intriguing. I have studied game theory a bit - I have post grad maths level. I have not looked at Shelling, but reading the little bit on Wiki is really enticing. I really wish I could follow it up - but I am getting ideas from all sorts of directions and I have this horrible limit of 24 hours in a day and three papers / book chapters I have promised to write. I am very keen to hear any further ideas you may have.
I am still intrigued by the link you are making to animals and their mental maps. If only I had the time to follow up on this. Please keep me informed on where your ideas take you.
Lynne
More interesting facts, r30. In non-literate cultures, knowledge is all integrated, as are rituals in which knowledge is repeated. You quote the various theories. In an integrated knowledge system, all those functions would be present in the one memory space - healing, astronomical observations, burials, acoustic effects … Those buried there would have been the most elite of the knowledge elders. There are only a tiny proportion of the population represented in burials.
The green image you have used above and many of the references in the Wiki article are to Cleal et al, “Stonehenge in its landscape” - the massive English Heritage volume collecting of everything known about Stonehenge. Dr Ros Cleal is now curator of the museum at Avebury. She has written an endorsement to be published in my book. She has told me that my ideas on the ditches is one of the strongest aspects of the theory. It is hard to get the cross-sections, but the ditches around henges have flat-bottoms. Why? They were massive - even more so at Durrington Walls and Avebury than at Stonehenge. I am convinced that they were performing the ceremonies at the base of these ditches. The argument requires on too much of the archaeology to be quoted here. But what I could not get was any experiments done on acoustics in stone ditches. I made some estimates from my own physics background, the results of which were compatible with the results found from the acoustics experiments which have been done on Neolithic monuments, some of which you quoted. Acoustic enhancement is one of my key indicators of a memory space. Rhythm and music are well known mnemonic aids used in non-literate cultures.
Thank you for the fun talking about this!
Lynne
Hi Lynne,
I completely get the problem with having too little time to pursue all the idea threads that interest us, no matter how fascinating. I regularly overwhelm myself with projects I want to devote my time to. Not sure why I was only given one measly lifetime. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of telling me to choose something and stick with it.
Since I, too, need to focus on other things, I thought it might do to roughly outline the direction of my thinking here. Then, later, when I have time, I will revisit it and see if it seems worth thinking about some more.
My main line of thought so far goes as follows:
I don’t have time to connect all the dots, but the thrust of my thinking is that Schelling’s idea suggests a flexible mechanism that could help a species gain an evolutionary edge by being able to coordinate behavior around loci or focal points, even if they do not have the immediate ability to communicate and cannot interact directly. These focal points gain value because of their informational properties.
Point E is important because it suggests an idea that might be worth examining if we want to look at how early in our evolution we started becoming locus-focused.
Both D and E might be of value in thinking about how variations would affect a species’, or society’s, development. For, example, a dolphin’s environment might provide very different varieties of loci than a human’s. How does this affect their social organization, interactions, thought processes, etc? I am just saying it suggests a basis for comparison of species, societies, etc.
Other discriminating factors may also come into play, such as how sensory modalities play into development. For example, dogs generally are highly focused on olfactory information, but visual matters, too. Contexts can change that.
For example, when I take my dog for a stroll around our suburban neighborhood, I get dragged bodily to every pole, fire hydrant, tree or bush we pass. In our neighborhood, these are spaced out a fair bit, so they stand out enough to have great value as information-loaded loci of the type we are talking about, and they have great value for dogs as coordination points for sharing information in the form of smells. However, when we go for a walk in the woods behind my house, there are so many trees that she doesn’t run and sniff every tree, and it would certainly be too impractical to pee on every tree, even for a cute, but crazy, dog. So, I think dogs may be making some of their decisions as to what constitutes a worthy focus-point through the use of visual information, but only when the visual environment provides the right “sparsity” or “density” of candidate loci.
The next time we go walking in the woods, I will pay more attention to how she is choosing the points where she stops to sniff in detail. Does she seem to use visual criteria to pick places, or does she continuously sniff her way from point to point?
Anyway, I apologize if I appear to be rambling. I am imagining this to be a rough draft of a framework of inquiry into the possibility that Schelling’s theory might explain how humans and some other social creatures could have evolved to become locus-focused and how differences in available categories of locus might help explain some differences the development of species and societies.
It is clear that Schellings’ focus points do confer a potential advantage to those who can make use of them. But it is not clear whether any advantages they confer would be sufficient to drive evolutionary changes that should, presumably, have influenced the development the brain itself. Even if we agreed that they did impact our evolutionary development, it is hard to say to what degree. How much of our present state would in some way be inherited from this advantage?
Your findings, particularly the idea that from ancient times human societies have used locus points in a similar (but more sophisticated) way, seem to me highly synergistic with my speculation. Your ideas help me think that my idea may be right.
Well, that’s it in a fragmented nutshell. All ideas need testing. In my case, the first test of my ideas is time itself. Often enough, my ‘best’ ideas turn out to be completely incomprehensible to me when I read them much later. So, with that in mind, I will set this idea aside for at least a few weeks before looking at it again. If I have talked nonsense, please be kind.
Many thanks,
Darn
Not rambling at all. My mind is buzzing with the images and I think that you may be onto something really revolutionary. I am really keen to hear where you go with this - even if it is just more anecdotes of the dog! Please PM me when you post new ideas so I don’t miss out on the next stage.
Lynne
@LynneKelly, this extracted portion of a Stonehenge photo caught my eye.
Original image at:
I can’t help but see a character with hands raised possibly dancing on the surface of the bluestone. That makes me wonder about the use of the site as a training academy where lessons were carried out visually with the bluestones each being a place where the instructor would draw out the scene of the stone that was already somewhat present in the mottled surface. All instructors need blackboards.
I know the trenches were likely a performance space from reading your books. But I’ve been looking for images that have enough detail for me to see features on the stones and haven’t found many. Are there any? And maybe you have a comment on the possible teaching aspect of the site? Or at least tell me that’s it’s just where a piece of graffiti was scrubbed off recently.
Thanks. Just finished listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast with you from a few years ago. Wonderful!
Oh dear, sincerest apologies @tarnation - I didn’t get back to your post. I get so many notifications from this forum that I must have somehow lost yours from my list.
Lynne
