Stonehenge...

The mysterious Upton Cave, a man-made granite chamber, is one of hundreds of such structures scattered across New England, according to an area historian.The caves -- ranging from Putnam County inNew York’s Hudson River Valley to southern Maine -- bear many similarities to "beehive" chambers built in Ireland by ancient Celtic tribes, said Barbara Toomey, the Massachusetts coordinator for the New England Antiquities Research Association. "They go back to the age of Stonehenge," she said of the Irish chambers. "There’s always the possibility that someonewho emigrated from Europe built it (the Upton Cave) in that style." Toomey said it is "entirely reasonable" the cave, a 10-foot by 10 1/2-foot chamber built into a hillside off Elm Street, is several thousands of years old.

. One theory reflects evidence suggesting ancient people crossed the Atlantic during the Ice Age, when waters were frozen over, she said. Artifacts found along the East Coast appear to have originated in Europe,further supporting this claim. The Upton Historical Commission is negotiating with the cave’s owner, Gerald Cuccione, to purchase the cave, hoping to use it for educational purposes and to further study its history. Access to the cave has been restricted since Cuccione purchased the 7 1/2 acres on 18 Elm St. in a September 2004 public auction. But the Rhode Island-based owner has said he is willing to sell the land to the town and has set an asking price of $550,000. Many theories regarding the cave’s history have been proposed in recent years: Historical Commission Chairwoman Barbara Burke is "sure" Yankee farmers used the cave for storage. It also may have been a sacred site for Native Americans. These theories, as well as the one Toomey suggests, are all supported on the NewEngland Antiqu......

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Copyright © TravelVideo.TVThe stones of Rajajil form a striking pattern against the clear desert sky, the fallen and tilting sand-colored slabs conjuring up visions of England’s Stonehenge. Nobody really knows why the 50 groups of about five pillars each are clustered on the edge of the Nafud desert in northwestern Saudi Arabia. Local legend says they are a lost tribe punished by God. Whatever their origin, local authorities hope the standing stones and the history-rich al-Jouf region will form the centerpiece of a new tourism drive.  "Because of the political situation, tourism has been low but the strategy is to revive it and we are hoping to make al-Jouf atourist attraction," said Hussein al-Mubarak, a former museum director who now heads a committee to encourage tourism. Archaeologists believe the Rajajil stones date from before 3,000 BC—when human civilisation first began to thrive in ancient Egypt and Iraq. The stones also have graffiti linking them to pre-Islamic deities such asthe female goddess Widd.  As with Stonehenge, there is no consensus on whether the site was a temple, a burial ground, a place used for astronomy or something else.

. Scholars believe Stonehenge was built between 3,000 and 1,600 BC. Mubarak says the stones were placed on the desert’s edge deliberately, probably to worship the sun. ”The sun was worshipped in the north of the Arabian Peninsula and the moon was worshipped in the south. High ground wasnormally chosen for worship,” he said, surveying the site near the Skaka oasis, 1,200 km (750 miles) from Riyadh. ”Some people say it was a tribe turned to stone for doing unclean things, like using bread to clean with or washing with milk,” Mubarak said. “But these are just myths. We don’t want to connect the site now with religious things since we want to encourage tourism.” Rajajil could be related to “rijal”, modern Arabic for men. Disputed Origins ”We have several mysterious sites all over the Arabian Peninsula...but we have failed to know the reason why they were made and who made them,” said Majeed Khan, a Semitic script expert who has spent 30 years studying Arabian sites. Khansaidt......

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Copyright © The IndependentStone Age Britons had a sophisticated knowledge of geometry to rival Pythagoras – 2,000 years before the Greek "father of numbers" was born, according to a new study of Stonehenge. Five years of detailed research, carried out by the Oxford University landscape archaeologist Anthony Johnson, claims that Stonehenge was designed and built using advanced geometry. The discovery has immense implications for understanding the monument – and the people who built it. It also suggests it is more rooted in the study of geometry than earlyastronomy – as is often speculated.Mr Johnson believes the geometrical knowledge eventually used to plan, pre-fabricate and erect Stonehenge was learnt empirically hundreds of years earlier through the construction of much simpler monuments. He also argues that this knowledge was regarded as a form of arcane wisdom or magic that conferred a privileged status on the elite who possessed it, asit also featured on gold artefacts found in prehistoric graves.The most complex geometrical achievement at Stonehenge is an 87-metre diameter circle of chalk-cut pits which mark the points of a 56-sided polygon, created immediately within themonument's perimeter earthwork. Mr Johnson used computer analysis and experimental archaeology to demonstrate that this outer polygon was laid out using square and circle geometry.He believes the surveyors started by using a rope to create a circle, then laid out the four corners of a square on its circumference, before laying out a second similar square, thus creating an inner octagon.

. The points of the octagon were then utilised as anchors for a surveyor's rope which was used to "draw" arcs which intersected the circumference so as to progressively create the sides of a vast polygon. Indeed, his work has demonstrated that a 56-sided polygon is the most complex that can easily be created purely through square and circle geometry using a single piece of rope. It is likely that this basic limitation determined the number of sides of Stonehenge's outer polygon – and may also have led to the 56-sided polygon concept becoming important within wider European religious belief. Ancient Greek classical mythology associatedjust s......

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Copyright © The GuardianAs a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet. "This place is a supernova," said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."Behind him are the first foldsof the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-coloured sea, stretches south hundreds of miles. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones towerat least a metre above their peers.

. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters,not farmers. "Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilisations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of anthropology who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's best known neolithic site, since 1993. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time." With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavation, Gobekli Tepe's significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think it was the centre of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the centre of each circle representing a man and woman. It is a theory the tourist board in nearby Urfahas......

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