Chris Murray
Posted on 06/28/2020 12:43:43 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A former Royal Navy diver and Dornoch native has discovered an almost completely intact 5500-year-old cup, hidden in the mud of a loch in the Outer Hebrides... on the Isle of Lewis on Friday...
The location has been kept secret at this stage, but Mr Murray described it as "a beautiful example" of the Neolithic age and was the first person to drink from it in thousands of years.
Mr Murray has also previously discovered similar bowls around mysterious man-made islands in the Outer Hebrides which have led to a "startling" re-writing of history.
The structures - known as crannogs - date back to more than 1000 years before Egypt's pyramids and Stonehenge...
"The archaeologists don't know why they were throwing these pots into the loch nearly 6000 years ago - was it a sacrifice to water gods? I just decided to dive on them out of curiosity and I couldn't believe my eyes. Some lochs were full of pottery. It was incredible, a real archaeological treasure trove."
The search was first sparked in 2011, when Mr Murray recovered a set of remarkably preserved Neolithic treasures submerged around a crannog.
These artificial stone built islands were previously assumed to have been inhabited between the Iron Age and the post-medieval period.
But according to findings published in the journal Antiquity it is now evidential that at least four crannogs in the Outer Hebrides were lived in c.3640-3360 BC, demanding a re-dating on the crannog historical timeline by some 2000 years.
The ancient inhabitants of Scotland were building artificial islands thousands of years earlier than we thought, ancient pottery discovered in the lochs suggests...
(Excerpt) Read more at northern-times.co.uk ...
If I found something ancient, I wouldn’t say a word. It would just become a family heirloom.
Glad he found it and not you.
Finders keepers.
“The ancient inhabitants of Scotland were building artificial islands...”
Interesting
artificial islands = defendable position - easier than digging deep moats on rocky ground.
A little more challenging than snorkeling in the Keys.
This is the isle and town where Donald Trump’s mother was born and raised.
Hi.
Was there a bottle of Scotch found too?
Important question don’t you think?
5.56mm
"I swear Og, you drop one more water pot into the lake and I am throwing you in after it!"
Just watched that episode last night. Pretty interesting.
Someday archeaologists are going to go crazy about all the beer bottles found in the sandbars
I’m guessing as the water continued to rise they just kept piling the rocks up over the years/centuries? Of course that meant starting off with a 10 acre island and ending up with a 3 acre one.
And maybe the sacrifices were to the ocean God. “Okay - give it a pot so it doesn’t take anymore of our land!”
Were they artificial islands or pre sea-level rise hill forts?
My thoughts exactly...
I got a key stuck in the snorkel one time, it was rough.
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