An
intriguing combination of items came up in today’s rattling around the
web. The more things change the more
they remain the same. Both are quite
short but in terms of time between very long, one being the Neolithic, the
other current nonsense,
The first
attempts to explain what will happen in East London
once the circus has ended and the caravans departed from the Olympics
“village”. It seems that there is to be
a major property development which will amount to a private new town.
It will not
operate under any of our present arrangements for local government or other
similar inconveniences which raises the question of who it is for and who will
be the financial operators. Guess what? There are no clear answers and nobody appears
to be in charge.
The second
is that recent research suggests that the causewayed enclosures that were
constructed during the Neolithic period did not take hundreds or thousands of
years to be built. Indeed, it is argued
that it took only 75 years or so for them to spread across the Atlantic Isles.
What is a
source of wonder is when you calculate how much work had to be done and what
was involved then just what was the size of the population then and who were
these people?
This is a Europe we know little or nothing about, notably who the
people were, what or who they worshipped, how they communicated or what their
social organisation was.
But to
build on this scale and with this rapidity, organise food supplies to maintain
the population and to know the heavens as they seem to have done suggests a
very able, intelligent population connected with others over a wide area.
What
happened to them? Perhaps, in the future
when the diggers find the remains of a 21st Century transformation
of the Atlantic Isles from one form of political organisation to a collection
of privately owned fiefdoms into which a servile population had been herded
they might wonder why.
We may know
the answers to that but those in the future may not.
Truly necessary safety for the group - defences against invaders. Ability to move on fairly quickly. What about the even older peoples, who created in e.g. Malta, much much older more isolated stone places of safety, and this continued in similar ways across the Mediterranean islands, in Brittany, up the west coast of Ireland, Lewis, Orkney, and the fabulous Shetland Islands. Things don't look too bright.
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