Four Stunning Stone Circles ( besides Stonehenge )

                                    *****Drombeg  Stone Circle , Ireland****
Dormbeg Stone Circle in County Cork is a tight little colection of 9 meters (30 )feet in diameter. It's of a type known as a recumbent stone because the largest stone lies on its side flanked by two smaller ones.This is deliberte ; the stone didn't fall down. What this means is anyone's guess, although the local claim that it's a "Druid's Alter" is fanciful because the circle dates  to the Bronze Age , Radiocarbon dating on a burial  found in the center of the circle yieled a date between 150 BC and 130 AD.

                        The Ring of Brodgar , Orkney Isles , Scotland
The wind swept Orkney , Isles north of Scotland are covered in prehistoric remains.  The Ring of Brodney , is built of thin, tall stones on a narrow isthmus between  two lochs. Its architects obviously had an eye for dramatic setting. It dates to between 2500 and 2000 BC . In the northern most stone circle in the British Isles and also the third largest at 104 meters ( 341 ft ) in diameter. Like many major circles it's part of a network of sites, with tombs and single standing stones  scattered in the area  around it . Legend has it that the Vikings were so impressed with the Ring of Bridgar when they arrived in the nieth century AD that they worship their gods here. Some Viking Runes carved into the stones may suppoet this theory.

****Avebury , England************

Bigger than Stonehenge  , the site of Avebury just  17 miles north of Stonehenge     consists of a massive stone circle 331.6 meters ( 1088 ft ) in diameter with two avenues of stones leading to a pair of smaller stones  circles. Construction began around 2900 BC  , roughly the same time as its neighbor  . Other monuments , such as the mysterious artificial mound os Silbury Hill and the West Kennet Long barrow, an ancient tomb., an easy walk away. During the  Middle Ages the locals got religion and decided  this pagan monument needed to go. They knocked over several stones until one fell over  and crushed one of the vandals. Everone thought this was just a legend  until modern archaeologists dug up a fallen stone and found the skeleton of a man underneath with  some stone 14th century coins in his pocket !   

                          *******Rollright Stones , England **************

This stone circle makes a un day hike from Oxford . Most stone circles are pretty small. This one is only 33 meters (108 feet ) in diameter but has some interesting details. One stone has a hole through which you can see  a tall monolith called the King Stone in a nearby field. A nearby dolmen  ( a small roofed tomb of stone ) is called the Whispering Knights. Legend says the circle and these two outlying monuments are a king and his knights who were turned to stone  by a witch. Actually the circle and monolith were built by prehistoric people between 2500  to 2000 BC. The  Whispering Knights dates to about 3500 BC . In prehistoric times, the presence of one monument  encourged people to build more.

Every year thousands ot tourists flock to Stonehenge, the iconic stone circle on Salisbury Plain, England . While so much attention is focused on this site , especially with the recent discovery of another monument near Stonehenge, people often forget there's thousand more stone circles  in the British Isles  and continental Europe. Built during the Neolithic starting about 5,000 years ago, these sites are beautiful and have a lot of strange folklore over the centuries, like the mistaken belief that they were built by Druids or giants .

My Spin : Maybe ..just maybe, one day I will get to see  the stone circles...watch closely you may just see  my PiC and myself strolling along the pathway  looking at  the past . So come on and join us. It will be a hoot.

Kicking back and having fun....

Archaeologists Discover Stonehenge's Timber Twin

London (July 23) - Stonehenge,that ancient and mysterious circle of giant   obelisks   on England's Salisbury Plain, may once have had a  nearby wooden "twin," according to a pioneering new archaeological survey.

"The idea of finding something as significant and dramatic as this monument, so close to Stonehenge is just brilliant,"Harry Chapman, an archaeologist   at  the University of Birmingham and a member of the team that made the discovery, said."It will completely change the way we think about Stonehenge and the surrounding landscape."

The discovery of the timber henge (a term used to describe any British circle ritual site dating from 3,000to 2,000 B.C.) was made by a multinational team of archaeologists, who started surveying the land around Stonehenge two weeks ago with sensors that provide a high-definition 3-d view of what's under the ground. "Every time you excavate, you damage the site by moving material," Chapman says. "With the technology we use, such as ground-penetrating radar, there's no need to dig.

The sun rises behind Stonehenge in southern England on June 21. Nearby is so-called Woodhenge a monument once composed of six rings of wooden posts enclosed by an earthen embankment.

A week after they started examining the area, the team spotted what appeared to be a circle of 24 post holes under the ground, less than 3,000 feet to the northwest of Stonehenge. The ring measured about 82 feet in diameter - just 17 feet less than Stonehenge - and was enclosed by an inner ditch and possibly an outer bank.

"The post holes are up to a meter in diameter, which suggests that the timbers they'd have held would have been at least 10 feet high,"Chapman says. He adds that the towering structure  was likely built "about 4.500 years ago,on the basis  of  comparing it with other sites." That's approximately the same time that Stonehenge's world-famous trilithons  - a prehistoric structure with two upright stone blocks supporting a third placed across the top - were erected.

Curiously, the newly discovered monument mirrors a similar henge some 4,270 feet southeast  of Stonehenge, which was first uncovered in 1937. Like the newly discovered site, that circle overlooks the ancient stone structure  and has two entrances . All three henges appear to have been deliberately aligned.

The latest find throws into question previous assumptions about  Britain's most famous ancient monument. "Many interpretations have traditionally  placed  Stonehenge at the center of the site of isolation," Chapman says.  "But, what we're seeing is that Stonehenge, when it entered its very grand phrase, wasn't the only structure in the area. It was surrounded by other complex structures, that may have been used much like medieval cathedrals ." So instead of being the focus of all the ancient folks' attention, Stonehenge was likely just one - admittedly impressive - part of the religious landscape.

As the ancient Britons didn't record their thoughts, we'll likely never know exactly why they built Stonehenge and its smaller siblings. But Chapman says the latest discovery offers an insight  into their beliefs.He suggests that the "wood and stone" circles may have been placed close together  as two materials  had intertwined "symbolic meanings" for Neolithic Brits. That ties in  with the thinking of Mike Parker Pearson, a Shetfield University archaeologist and henge expert, who has suggested that the wooden structures might have been associated with feasts for the living, while stone circles were realms of the dead.

The discovery of the new wooden henge is likely just the first of many surprise  discoveries to come from Chapman and his fellow archaeologists. By 2014, they intend to have scanned about 5 square  miles of land around Stonehenge, which will then be collated into a detailed map.

"I  think in the next four (4) years, we're going to have quite a different understanding of Stonehenge ," Chapman Says." And we'll have a better understanding of the people who built it."

Holocaust Family Wins Possession of Ten Million dollar Relic

The family of a Long Island Holocaust survivor can keep a $10 million ancient Assyrian gold tablet he received in exchange for a few packs of smokes on the streets of post-war Berlin, a judge has ruled.
Attorneys for Berlin's Vorderasiatisches Museum had argued that the family of Riven Flamenbaum should turn over the 3,200-year-old thumb-size artifact from the reign of Assyrian King Tukulti-Ninurta I because it was looted by Soviet troops. But Nassau Surrogate John Riordan decided the museum waited too long to press its claim and the tablet -- worth an estimated $10 million -- is rightfully the property of Flamenbaum's three adult children.
"It is certainly understandable how the family would feel entitled [to keep the artifact] and offended by the efforts of the German government," said John Farinacci, an attorney for the Flamenbaum's estate.
"This was part of an immigrant's tale. It was one of the things he was able to get and put in his pocket to make a new life," he added.

Flamenbaum, a Pole and Auschwitz survivor, died at age 92 in 2003 in Great Neck. He left the tablet to his three children, Israel, Hannah and Helen. The 9.5-gram solid-gold tablet sat in the ruins of an Iraq temple about 150 miles north of Baghdad until 1913 when German archeologist Walter Andrae unearthed it. The next year, he shipped it to the Iraqi port city of Basra for transportation to Germany. But with the outbreak of World War I, the cargo freighter carrying the tablet was diverted to Portugal where the artifact remained until 1926. It finally went on display at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in 1934, only to be put in storage five years later with the start of World War II.

Museum officials believe the tablet was looted by Soviet troops in 1945. Sometime later, Flamenbaum bartered black-market cigarettes for it, according to Steven Schlesinger, another attorney for the Flamenbaum estate. In 1949, Flamenbaum emigrated to New York and began working at a Canal Street liquor store. Within a few years, he'd pawned the tablet, along with rare coins, to purchase the liquor store, the attorney said. But he soon paid back the pawn broker and reclaimed the coins and tablet.

Throughout the years, the family had no idea how rare the artifact was -- at one point an appraiser said it was worth just $100. Meanwhile, museum officials had all but forgotten the tablet existed and never placed it on its lists of stolen artifacts. It wasn't until Israel Flamenbaum contacted the museum that the family learned its true value and the museum decided to sue to recover it.

The family has no intention of selling the tablet, according to their attorneys. But it must give a sense of security to know there is a ten million dollar relic in the bank. I wonder where the tablet's journey through time will take it next. It has survived 3200 years and it will continue to survive long after we are all gone, even the Flamenbaums. Who knows, it may even end up on another planet some day, in the pocket of some distant descendant of the Flamenbaums.