
'World's oldest calendar' discovered in Scottish field - pg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-23286928
======
arethuza
Interesting to note that this was built not that long after the end of the
Younger Dryas period (also known as the Loch Lomond Re-advance here in the UK)
- so the landscape would have been quite different to what can be seen today,
in particular this is _before_ the pine forests of Scotland has a chance to
re-grow.

~~~
aerique
Could you expand a bit of what I am supposed to be reading between the lines
here? (If there's anything to read between the lines. I'm not trying to be a
smart-ass going for karma here, I'm genuinely curious.)

~~~
arethuza
The Loch Lomond Re-advance was a relatively short period of colder weather
than happened after the warming at the end of the last major ice age - this
ended ~11,500 years ago.

During the Loch Lomond Re-advance there was a large ice sheet in Western
Scotland and smaller ones elsewhere but the country was mainly ice free.
Obviously, the conditions during this time were much colder than today so
flora and fauna were quite different and it took quite a long time for the
species we think of as being "natural" for Scotland to re-establish
themselves.

So the landscape that these people would have been living in was still
"recovering" from glaciation and may have been quite different to what we see
today - which I find fascinating.

NB I had a copy of "Land of Mountain and Flood - The Geology and Landforms of
Scotland" handy when I was reading HN over breakfast.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas)

[http://www.slideshare.net/aland/loch-lomond-
readvance](http://www.slideshare.net/aland/loch-lomond-readvance)

[NB I am from the North East of Scotland and fascinated by geology and
archeology - so I was pretty excited to see this on HN!]

~~~
aerique
Thank you!

------
DanBC
Here's a link to the rough area in Google Maps.

([https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=7390+9670+Crathes+Castle,+C...](https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=7390+9670+Crathes+Castle,+Crathes&hl=en&ll=57.062834,-2.441239&spn=0.014304,0.037336&sll=57.060553,-2.431401&sspn=0.003576,0.009334&t=h&hq=7390+9670+Crathes+Castle,+Crathes&z=15))

Google Maps can't find Warren Field.

I thought it was under the river, but this link shows it's near Miller's Ward
Wood.

([http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/36670/details/crathes/](http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/36670/details/crathes/))

([http://www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/smrpub/shire/print.aspx?refn...](http://www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/smrpub/shire/print.aspx?refno=NO79NW0013))

([http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=6134](http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=6134))

Are there any crowd-sourced "find crop marks" programmes?

------
timlukins
Interestingly, other early monuments in the locality - such as Rothiemay
recumbent stone circle - have been supposed to align with astronomical events
and, consequently, evidence of early horology.

[http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/details/1114898/](http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/details/1114898/)

[http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/17820/digital_images/ro...](http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/17820/digital_images/rothiemay/)

This is a later monument, but to my mind still an indication of "pre-historic
science" \- and just how advanced it could be.

As an aside, I was always pleasingly intrigued by the fact that Rothiemay was
furthermore the birthplace of James Ferguson...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ferguson_(1710–1776)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ferguson_\(1710–1776\))

~~~
arethuza
One of my favourite ancient artefacts in that area is the Tap o' Noth - a
large vitrified fort - the rocks making up the huge walls apparently having
been intentionally melted:

[http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/17169/details/tap+o+not...](http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/17169/details/tap+o+noth/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_o%27_Noth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_o%27_Noth)

The Tap formed my own mental image of Tolkien's Weathertop :-)

~~~
timlukins
Exactly my own visualisation of Weathertop when growing up in the area!

Personally, I think vitrification was a product of accident/attack rather than
direct intent...

~~~
arethuza
I was going by this Wikipedia page:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort)

"Most archaeologists now consider that vitrified forts are the product of
deliberate destruction either following the capture of the site by an enemy
force or by the occupants at the end of its active life as an act of ritual
closure"

I suspect the real answer is that nobody really has any idea how or why this
was done - which makes it all the more fascinating :-)

------
JacobAldridge
I walked among the stones at Stonehenge about a year ago - was a great
experience. I was particularly interested to learn that the focus of that
famous site was Midwinter not the Summer Solstice. Warren Field, based on this
article, seemed to have a similar seasonal focus for resetting the calendar.

At Stonehenge, the reasoning is that a midwinter, inter-tribal celebration
brought neighbouring tribes together at a time when they were not planting,
harvesting, or warring. The Winter solstice was also, perhaps, a time to
honour the dead.

Of course, there's a lot more to Stonehenge and I assume to Warren Field. But
I wonder if there are some parallels to be drawn?

~~~
lostlogin
On the off chance you haven't already done so and aren't aware - try Avebury.
I liked it even more. When I was in the UK, any place I was at for more than
about a week I bought an ordinance survey map of (think that's what they are
called). I saw so many small stone circles, cemetery's, churches, roman walls
and building, ruins, canals, etc, it was like a world existed just outside the
everyday one. Most memorable was biking to an old american airbase. Ruined
buildings, lampposts, but all the ground was grass with sheep wondering
around.
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury)

~~~
prawn
The two are easily done in part of a day too. Grab the Wikipedia page and read
it as you wander around or find somewhere to sit. Stonehenge is a far more
touristy experience, but more concentrated and quite impressive. Avebury is
good fun to walk around, across roads, through gates, around buildings, etc.

------
lmm
Is it me or does that picture look like a low-quality photoshop? I feel like
manipulated images should have a disclaimer on them.

~~~
RossM
Assuming you mean the first image, it does say "an artist's impression".

------
contingencies
Interesting. I sometimes wonder if the invention of timekeeping didn't do more
harm than good in the world, along the lines of: _Humanity 's first mistake
was counting time._ I wonder if anthropologists have found societies without
significant temporal verbosity and linked the absence of this property to
other cultural features. No research library access :(

~~~
dfc
This is probably a joke that i am not getting because this sounds like one of
the more ridiculous things I have read on HN in a long time. Keeping track of
time is remarkably helpful for farming, hunting and fishing. Not to mention
how frequently counting days/moons/seasons comes up in spirituality. I would
also have a hard time believing that the women from the "timeless culture"
would be unaware of menstrual cycles or normal duration of pregnancies.

Measuring time was probably the second thing mankind measured after
distance.[1]

[1] Recent bbc metrology documentary is the reference off the top of my head.

~~~
contingencies
All good points, though awareness is distinct from formal recording. I was
trying to get at the latter.

~~~
dfc
If you were "trying to get at formal recording of time" why didn't you mention
that in your comment? You only mentioned counting time and words for time.

~~~
contingencies
I think the line of thought was and remains only half-baked in my own mind, it
was more a ponderance than a well reasoned argument and I hadn't expected such
a scientific style interpretation in readers. My bad.

~~~
endersshadow
You might be interested in reading more about the development of "Railroad
Time" in the US:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_time#Railroad_time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_time#Railroad_time)

~~~
contingencies
Interesting. After living for most of a decade in China I've often thought
about the very (bureaucratically-)pragmatic decision made by the Communist
Party to normalize the timezone across the entire country. Of course, it
wouldn't happen today, but now it's a feature of the country and is unlikely
to change.

For a great deal more evolutionary temporal trivia see the _tz_ database
mailing list; along with many others tasked with implementation, late last
year I realised its seeming antiquity of scope and form, but this is being
ignored.
[https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-October/018297.html](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-October/018297.html)

~~~
dfc
You are still not convinced that what you are suggesting is:
[http://cldr.unicode.org/](http://cldr.unicode.org/) ?

~~~
contingencies
Err, if you read the thread, CLDR is a reasonable but different, bloated and
hacky library maintained by a completely different body, providing only subset
of the intended functionality ... and a whole lot of other stuff.

