Sunday 14 February 2016

Designs in a Neolithic passage grave.


 The early passage graves/tombs of which this is one are dated from 3700BC/BCE. Or 5716 years ago give or take. To put it another way, 1000 years older than the pyramids a fellow was making this Art.




9 comments:

  1. That top shot is AMAZING!!!
    Are the designs in the other shots on the stones of the top shot or elsewhere?
    The age of them is mind boggling. Older than the pyramids? Right in your backyard. That's really something.

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    1. There's a chamber inside those stones. If you hold the tips of your fingers together, your hands -palms and fingers- will naturally relax into a curve, with a slight arch to them. Now hold them out from you parallel with the ground so your elbow is away from your body and you've more or less got the overall shape of that one. And yes the designs are in that one. And it's facing the setting sun around the mid winter.
      The other passage is entirely different in that it's cross shaped where your fingers and palm would be in the other one.
      In both of them you cross a number of cills to get to the end.

      I was going for a bit of real and otherworldly in the landscape. And it about 8-10 miles ishy from me. I'll look it up on the goo later.

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  2. That's a long time, whoever is buried there got his/her money worth from the tombstone maker! An interesting site.

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    1. In all of them, here in Ireland and elsewhere, they are place for community cremations. It seemed the bodies were burnt elsewhere and the ash brought in and placed in the space. What's unknown if that meant the entire community or just an elite.
      In a way though that could simply be scholar bias. We divide and apartheid the living and the dead so the thinking goes they were likely to do also.
      To be honest I've always been sus about pronouncements after reading Evens and his Throne Room at Knossos.

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  3. Once again, the time frame just staggers me when in comparison to my home country.

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    1. Well, yes, but don't forget unless you are Sioux, Hopi or any other native people this is part of most people of the US too.

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  4. Fascinating! And I agree with Kimberly - that top photo is amazing. The moodiness of the distant sky mixed with the subject matter, yet surrounded by the brilliant green of life. I know I sound like I'm blethering, but I'm quite taken with the composition. But... is that your satchel to the left of the monument?

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    1. I had very high ISO so the grain was naturally going to come out. This get very filmic even though it's data file. I knew it would get some of the way to that look but I was quite pleased it went that far.

      And yep, that's my camera bag :-).

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