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Posted on 06/25/2025 3:35:39 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Newgrange sits in Ireland's Boyne Valley, about 30 miles north of Dublin. Built around 3200 B.C., this massive stone monument features a long passage leading to a central chamber, all covered by a circular mound of earth and stones. For over 300 years, treasure hunters and antiquarians ransacked the site, making it nearly impossible to know exactly where artifacts originally came from.
This historical looting creates a major problem for the "king" theory. The skull fragment NG10 was found during proper archaeological excavations in the 1960s, but researchers can't definitively say it was originally placed in the tomb's supposedly "prestigious" right-hand recess. The soil had been heavily disturbed by animal burrows, and bone fragments were scattered throughout the chamber by both human and animal activity over millennia.
The chamber also contained remains from at least five different people, all mixed together in what archaeologists call a "commingled" burial. This wasn't a pristine royal tomb with a single occupant laid to rest with golden treasures. Instead, it appears to be more like a community mausoleum where bones were deposited over time.
(Excerpt) Read more at studyfinds.org ...
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[snip] There is thus much to critique in the assumption that the selection of specific bodies for burial within passage tombs in Neolithic Ireland was directly related to their status or biological relatedness. At every step of the way, uncertainty reigns -- from how securely NG10 can be associated with a particular recess in Newgrange to whether their identity in life was likely to be remembered, and from the choice of appropriate ethnographic comparisons to the identification of hierarchical relations in Neolithic Ireland. It is inappropriate to continue to focus so exclusively on forms of stable, individual rule, in Neolithic Ireland and elsewhere, when the evidence is insufficient to support such claims. Doing so perpetuates the myth that only important individuals (usually male) were socially active, and downplays the contribution made by collective action in the prehistoric past. As Carlin and Cooney (Reference Carlin, Cooney, Card, Edmonds and Mitchell2020) have highlighted, there is substantial evidence that social identity in the Irish (and British) Neolithic was highly fluid and relational, continually emerging through ongoing interactions with kin and non-kin and the environment. Simply put, a social model postulating rigid systems of social stratification in Neolithic Ireland is not a good fit with the evidence. Nor, we contend, is the alternative, in which societies are viewed as uniformly and unproblematically egalitarian. Neither structure is likely to capture the complex sets of relations and exchanges we see in the archaeological evidence for this period. [/snip]The 'king' of Newgrange? A critical analysis of a Neolithic
petrous fragment from the passage tomb chamber
24 June 2025 | Antiquity | Volume 99 Issue 405
Jessica Smyth, Neil Carlin, Daniela Hofmann, Catherine J. Frieman, Penny Bickle, Kerri Cleary, Susan Greaney and Rachel Pope
Makes sense since (I think) community mausoleums were discovered elsewhere in northwest Europe.
New Age author, the late Stuart Wilde said if one delves into history far enough, every king and queen began the lineage with a violent war against enemies which someone won and then was king or queen.
And the pagan style worship and idolatry got under way with gold carriages and jeweled crowns as lowly peasants obeyed them.
Those kinds of great events have humble consequences. I'm descended from at least one usurper, and some of my ancestors were made possible by the victories of other usurpers. So, y'know, mixed bag. :^)
We have a pile of dirt in the middle of our downtown area.
Apparently it’s a Holy Pile of Dirt.
They call it the “Temple Mound” because someone thought it would be a good idea for tourism.
There is no evidence that it ever had a ‘temple’.
But the city fathers built a wooden structure at the top that looks like a concession stand.
People could walk around on the pile of dirt and enjoy the cool breeze and the shade, since it’s covered in huge trees.
Then some local Indian tribe representatives complained that it was their pile of dirt and the white people were desecrating their temple heritage.
The city council in their wokeiest moments agreed and now the pile of dirt is closed to the public with a sign saying that you cannot walk on the pile of dirt any more.
Once or twice a year, the local Indians have a ceremony that allows them to ‘utilize’ the Pile of Dirt. They burn some smelly plants and walk around on the pile of dirt with a bunch of them waving and chanting.
About 3 miles down the road there is another pile of dirt.
But apparently it’s not a Holy Pile of Dirt. It’s got a lot of oyster and clamshells in it.
They call it a ‘midden mound’, a garbage dump, in other words.
It’s in a ‘nature park’ with trails and trees and a creek.
People walk around the Pile of Garbage and the park and enjoy the cool breeze and shade since it has many trees.
The city fathers, different city, want to do improvements to the park. They want to build a concession stand.........................
Good place for a surreptitious excavation.
Both places have already been surveyed by the local universities archaeology departments. Nothing was found, but they say these mounds date back a thousand years. They are still just piles of dirt.
The ‘temple’ part was never verified, as the tribes back then didn’t leave any traces. They were hunter gatherers and when the oysters were gone they moved on down the beach to Apalachicola..
It’s not unlikely that, even if artificial, their ancestors had absolutely nothing to do with its construction. More likely, their ancestors drove out or annihilated the descendants of those who did.
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