Not sure if it’s been mentioned before, but this is a nice introduction to ancient history in the Mediterranean region. I like the presenter and I’m not sure why he hasn’t done more series.
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I’m assuming that must be from a proto-Celtic civilization
I know there are some Mike Duncan fans here, so does anyone know of a good podcast on Ancient Greece comparable to his on Rome?
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Pizza in Pompeii. Such a fascinating archeological site.
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@Klopptimist, I though I’d reply in this thread rather than de-rail the UK politics thread.
I think you be underestimating some of the technical advancements that were made in the years between Stonehenge and the Pont du Gard; Iron tooling, beasts of burden, written language, formal education, guilds of craftsman, mortar, concrete… the wheel! Granted some of those things were around in other parts of the world but not in Britain.
Agree Stonehenge is not visibly that impressive, even after the Victorians raised some of the stones! It’s the intrigue and mystery that surround it that capture the imagination. Personally I love it, did a two day walk from Avebury to Stonehenge couple of years ago - a far better way to approach the stones than the English Heritage visitor centre!
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At one time you could just walk straight up to the stones. I had an aunt and uncle who lived around an hour away from it. We used to stay there occasionally in the summer and would do it as a day trip.
What I do find interesting about Stonehenge is the fact that the stones were moved there from Wales. There are stone circles (or their remains) dotted around the UK and quite a few notable ones on the Scottish islands. It’s not know exactly what these were used for but they are often aligned with the progression of the sun throughout the year.
The question with Stonehenge having been moved is whether they bothered to check the alignment afterwards or if they thought the stones themselves contained some sort of magical property.
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Have you seen the documentary on iplayer where they find the spot where the stones originally stood? Would have been a huge undertaking to move them, whatever motivated them to do that must have been equally as huge.
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The story goes that when Newgrange was finished the work kinda dried up ,so as has happened since the dawn of time the lads headed off to england via wales where they picked up the materials they needed for the job before moving on to build stonehenge.
BTW ,how it is now,it wasn’t like that when we left it.
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Yes, I saw that and it got me wondering as these types of structures (Orkney, Newgrange etc) are usually aligned for observation - typically solar. That does make sense as given that a huge amount of effort goes into building these but the ability to predict seasons and so on is hugely beneficial.
With Stonehenge, the fact that they moved these huge stones to replace their wooden structures seems to indicate some sort of magical thinking. Or where there really no suitable stones on Salisbury plain?
Yeah, first time I went, very early 80s you could walk all round them. Last time (and that must be 20 years ago) it was binoculars time.
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I grew up in the area where the stones are said to have come from. It’s only place in the country where that type of blue stone is found. It has this really interesting almost glass like ability to reflect light when it’s shined up and once you’ve seen it you can understand why it would have been sought out for ceremonies related to the sun.
What is interesting is that region of Wales is understood to have been an important hub of Druidistic culture and people often just blithely connected the two. But installation of the stones into the landmark predate the emergence of druids in Britain by 1500 years or more.
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Isn’t that kind of a guess because we don’t know?
(the druid part, not the timeline- as in we don’t know what they did or believed with any clarity 1500 years before ‘druidistic culture’ emerged?)
Not really much of a guess, because the druids were Celtic. Celts arrived in Britain not much earlier than 1000BC. The latest part of Stonehenge is at least 500 years before that, the oldest probably 2000. The original construction in time is as close to the Celts as we are to the Colosseum of Rome.
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Ah, so the Celts and druids were simply trying to reproduce the grandeur of of the pre-Celtic times!! 
But point remains, couldn’t the culture the Celts found on Britain have been similar to the one they brought? We speculate it’s different, and it probably was, but we don’t really know, correct?
Doesn’t really change the point made, but the Celts weren’t really a people that moved into Britain it was a culture that spread across Europe and eventually came to Britain. The actual people remained the same.
That is a theory, but I don’t believe it is the most commonly accepted one. The older ‘invasion’ model is less accepted now, but archaeological genetics has established that there was significant migration into southern Britain in the Bronze Age from Central Europe, more or less the ‘Hallstatt’ cultural area.
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Yes there was a big study a couple of years ago right that showed genetic evidence for different waves of immigration, but as far as I know none of those tie in with the shifts in culture we see around the time of the Celts.
Seems very likely that they were connected. There is evidence of several different ‘peoples’ having built Stonehenge. The oldest appear to be migrants from Anatolia, then after them the Bell Beaker people - the Bell Beaker people all but completely replaced the older Neolithic people who started Stonehenge construction. That people/culture (seems to have elements of both) connected into but was distinct from the earliest Celts - both culturally and genetically.
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No, it seems very likely that from the ‘Beaker’ period forward, there was migration, but also spread of cultural practice. Not quite as dramatic as the old invasion model.
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