"clipka" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.4a5e431673084296a95afc190@news.povray.org...
> "Chris B" <nom### [at] nomailcom> wrote:
>> Ah! Well I think it's difficult to be sure how well the stones were
>> originally finished.
>>
>> They were knocked about a good bit when tipped over and there's no 
>> certainty
>> that the reconstructions from the early part of the last century even got
>> the stones in the right place, let alone the right way round.
>
> Well, stones tipping over have a tendency to leave their "foot end" at 
> about the
> same place where it originally stood, right?
>

Ah!... but :-)

The people tipping them over were attempting to permanently destroy their 
religious symbolism or to cart stone away for building projects elsewhere. 
Somewhere I've got a picture of drawings from Victorian times and they're 
not all just layed out in a neat circle.

I read a piece yesterday that described an old standing stone just a few 
miles from Stonehenge. The archeologists were only made aware of it when the 
farmer was spotted by locals dragging it towards a dump where he was 
planning to bury it to get it out of the way of his farm machinery. The 
locals reported it, the council leapt in to stop him and made him drag it 
back to roughly where it was before. Until that time it wasn't even listed 
on the modern archeological records.

> Thus, if some stones lay outward from the suspected placement, chances are 
> their
> outer side ended up down in the ground. And if they lay inward instead, 
> chances
> are their inner side ended up buried.
>

Restorations in the past may have moved the stones because they weren't 
always interested in archeological authenticity. Most of this sort of work 
was done by businessmen wishing to present an imposing image to the tourists 
coming along the main roads from Salisbury and London. The guys with the 
crane in the photo from the 1930s  were probably most interested in getting 
the bits back down to earth without crushing their toes.


> So, if the stones tipped over outward show a better finish on the upper 
> side,
> while the stones tipped over inward show a better finish on the lower 
> side,
> this would be a clear indication how they were originally finished, as it 
> rules
> out any later manipulation as the cause of the differences in finish.
>

I suspect that, once a 30 ton stone was up in the air, turning on its cable, 
they were probably more focused on getting it to look good than to respect 
the original positions and orientations.

Some early archeologists may have had some influence during the more recent 
reconstructions. But we know that the Romans had a big tourist industry and 
the technology to move stones of that sort of size around, and I don't think 
there are any records of how they changed Stonehenge through the 10 
generations they were here. Likewise the masons of the middle ages and of 
the Victorian era both demonstrated the ability to move stone of  that sort 
of size and cpuld well have carted away stone for their buildings or may 
have rearranged the stones to suit tourists of their age.

Regards,
Chris B.

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