Posted on 11/10/2008 5:21:12 PM PST by SunkenCiv
An ancient Scots religious site predating the Pyramids and Stonehenge may have been abandoned because of climate change, according to archaeologists. Kilmartin Glen, in Argyll, has one of the most important concentrations of Neolithic and Bronze Age remains in Europe.
The glen -- a place of sacred rites from 3700BC or earlier -- contains at least 350 ancient monuments, including burial cairns, rock carvings and standing stones. The most spectacular of the remains is the fortress of the Scots at Dunadd, capital of the kingdom of Dalriada.
But archaeologists have identified a period of almost 1,000 years in which no monuments were erected and the population virtually disappeared. Alison Sheridan, head of early prehistory at the National Museum of Scotland, said: "Kilmartin Glen is one of the richest archaeological areas in Scotland, with a very high concentration of ritual sites." She added that the earliest activity dated back to hunter-gatherers about 4500BC, who left behind nothing more than a few pits, charcoal and some flint. It was a sacred landscape from at least as early as 3700BC until as late as 1100BC.
Dr Sheridan said: "It was a place for ceremony, for burying people, and observing the movements of the Sun and the Moon. We are not too certain what happened between 1100BC and 200BC. A hoard of swords has been found and a few artefacts buried as gifts to the gods in the late Bronze Age between 1000 and 750BC. But there are few structures and no settlements. When you start getting settlements again around 200BC they are in little fortified settlements ... It was no longer a happy valley, and people raided each other."
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
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What?
.
ping of interest
Next we’ll figure out why the Mayans declined... along with dozens of other major, advanced ancient civilizations.
Seriously, when an academic speaks like this, I wonder how long before someone else makes their PhD by saying the direct opposite.
Am I missing something? I read the entire article, and I didn’t see what kind of change doomed them. Was it too hot, too cold, too damp, too dry, or something else? Or was it like the Climate Change Crisis of this year and they faced cooling due to warming?
Not a single mention of the climate history of that area in the article.
I HATE journalists.
Argyll Ping.
I’d planned to ping ya, but you were too fast, or maybe I was just too slow.
I wonder if the same period climate change had an impact on Kashmir...
I have a “pashmina” shawl...silk and cashmere...I suspect the shawl would have been much warmer, back then...with the climate change and all...
Goats would have been VERY busy trying to keep warm...
Not sweaters, the people who sing, “Alley Oop.”
;’) The “Hollywood Argyles” — they must have been from Hollywood, they couldn’t spell.
This wiki-wacky page is pretty cool for a change:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Oop
It probably rained that day. ;’)
I’m not even gonna *ask* how they do that...
The goats are randy from what I hear. I suspect millennia have not changed that...;o]
They certainly got their scaremongering done in the title ‘climate changed doomed’...
The Scotsman was a little more responsible with their headline “Was climate change responsible for driving ancient Scots out of glen?”
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Was-climate-change-responsible-for.4674280.jp
They also have a weather claim the other article did not have {guess ‘colder weather’ references are still banned in some press}
“They claim this period is marked by the start of a colder, wetter climate.”
two references...
“”Certainly, in some parts it seems to have become colder and wetter after about 1,200BC, and the people may have moved away.””
and more
“Neal Ascherson, visiting Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, said climate change brought an end to “this strange, idyllic period of late Neolithic and Bronze Age in this area”.
He said: “The weather, which was dryer and finer than it is now, seems to have come to an end around 1,000BC, when it began to change and the whole ecology began to alter. At the same time, culture changed.”
Thanks for that, especially the link.
Also some interesting remarks re: Hekla eruption, before it devolved into an AGW crevo type “debate”.
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