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Some of the things archaeologists discover are pretty obvious,
people made wooden cups to drink out of, they made flint tools
for working with, as they learned metal craft they made metal
tools, but some of the things they find are much more
intriguing. The reasoning behind them is anyone's guess. Take
a look and see what you think...
The burnt flint pits
mystery...
around 8000bc when we
Brits were travelling hunter-gatherers, we used to dig special
pits and deposit burnt flints in them. No-one knows why. It
happened in England and in Scotland. In the dig that took
place under Heathrow T5, burnt flint pits were found overlaid
with later monuments suggesting that the pits had been placed
in areas of special importance/sacred space.
Copper age mystery...
Around 4000bc the rest of
the world was using copper, in the British Isles it is
conspicuous by its absence. Britain was well-connected because
it was surrounded by sea - a reliable means of transport in
ancient times when the road network was even worse than it is
today. Copper was kept out - for 2000 years - but why?
The cursus mystery...
Around 3500bc at
the time the pyramids were being built - massive monuments
appear in Britain many over a mile long. They lie like
sleeping logs raised across the landscape - they are dug dead
straight. Stukeley an amateur historian who was fascinated by
stone circles and other ancient monuments thought they might
be used for chariot racing, and it is from this they get their
name 'cursus'. Archaeologists now consider this to be unlikely
and suggest it could have been used for ritual journeys - what
do you think?
The stone circle
mystery...
And finally though there
has been much conjecture, no-one knows for sure what the stone
circles were used for. They were built over a period of 1000
years - that's a tradition of 40 generations - can you imagine
building things the way your great, great, great, great, great
etc etc grandfather did - why were these circles so enduring?
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