# Ancient monuments



## maxiogee

As we recently passed the vernal equinox I was wondering about where people here live and what monuments there are nearby from ancient times.

Whoever was living in the Ireland of 4000-3000 BC seemed to be a knowledgeable and skilled people. They also had the wealth necessary to release vast amounts of labourers from the task of hunting/foraging/farming to provide for themselves and instead devote their time to building many incredible monuments - most of which appear to be aligned with solar phenomenon. Probably our most famous site is Newgrange, a passage tomb which is aligned with the winter solstice.

Not far from Newgrange is Loughcrew which is another neolithic construction. This is aligned with the vernal equinox. These things were built before the Pyramids (and although we are proud of their age, we acknowledge that they lack the 'finish' of the Pyramids and many other ancient monuments.

One of our oldest sites is "The Céide Fields" a recently discovered series of walls and fields, which, although not religious or astronomical in meaning, 
are the oldest surviving enclosed farmland in Western Europe. These fields are on the extreme west coast of Ireland - which may account for their survival.

What unknown-by-the-world-at-large wonders does your region hold?


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## mansio

In Alsace where I live, we have on a mountain a 10 kilometre long wall, built with 300 000 huge stones and about 2 metres thick. Nobody knows who has built it and when. It may pre-date the Romans.


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## maxiogee

mansio said:
			
		

> In Alsace where I live, we have on a mountain a 10 kilometre long wall, built with 300 000 huge stones and about 2 metres thick. Nobody knows who has built it and when. It may pre-date the Romans.



That's interesting mansio - can you post a link to any photographs or details of it?


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## Hakro

No one ever knew that Finland was inhabited before the last Ice Age until the "Wolf Cave" was found just ten years ago. People lived there possibly 120,000 years ago. This link gives information also in English, German and Swedish.


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## maxiogee

That's incredible, Hakro. I wonder have the scientists extracted any DNA from the bones found, and does it say anything about the connections with the Neanderthal bones.


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## Hakro

maxiogee said:
			
		

> That's incredible, Hakro. I wonder have the scientists extracted any DNA from the bones found, and does it say anything about the connections with the Neanderthal bones.


Is far as I found out, there are no human bones. The proof of human existence are only the stone tools and the carbon residues from bonfire (I'm not sure that these terms are correct). The connection with the Neandertal man is based on the dating. All the scientist do not agree. The examination is going on.


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## steffiegomez

Maxiogee: 
I also remember the "Dolmain Pholl Na Brón" (Pulnabrone Dolmen), Co. Clare, which is not that famous, and not of an "astronomical nor religious interest" but very interesting for my husband & myself. It took us a long drive to find it, got VERY lost, and were about to quit when we just jumped into it! A great example of life 4000 years ago. 
Changing continent: last couple of years we have visited the "Lacandon jungle" in Chiapas, Mexico. There is a lacandon reserve where you stay with the community in cabins they have arranged for visitors. There is a walking tour and a canoe tour that take you to "unknown piramids" literally in the middle of knowhere, except for insects, monkeys, birds, etc. 
But as we say in Mexico: every little hill, mountain, and church has a piramid underneath!!


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## panjandrum

We take these things for granted.
I thought, no we have nothing relevant around here....
Then I remembered the Giant's Ring at Ballynahatty and looked for some stuff to post here.
This is a short write-up and some pictures.
You can't quite see me waving from my house, just beyond the top right of the second aerial photograph.

And then there's Legananny Dolmen.


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## cuchuflete

Monuments? Ancient?  
Well, at first I thought this 'new' territory had no such thing, but then I remembered the shell middens:



> ). "Oyster shell deposit in *Newcastle*. ...On that rich and beautiful peninsula, was their encampment. Here they lived, and died, and were buried. All the marks of savage life found at clam shell deposits are found here. In this place they cooked and eat their oysters; and the shells were carried out and deposited in a precisely similar manner that the Indians did the clam shells at the mouths of the various rivers.


http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:C6wtizicSsgJ:www.davistownmuseum.org/bibNorCont.htm+Newcastle,+Maine+%22middens%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

The local Indians made (I don't know how many centuries or millenia back) huge piles of oyster and clam shells. Monumental? You decide.  Middens


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## Chaska Ñawi

The First Nations people were nomadic until comparatively recently (last couple thousand years), so they weren't into monoliths.  They did leave petroglyphs, mostly done in red ochre, all across the pink granite of the Canadian Shield.

They felt that areas where different elements came into contact were areas of special power, so many of their paintings were done from a canoe, just above the waterline.  Cracks in the smooth granite, seen as entrances to the underworld, were also sites of particular power and show many paintings.  Particularly sacred sites had all of these ingredients:  a crack on a cliff dropping into the water, just where the waves would break against it.

They believed that snakes had the power to travel into the underworld, so the snake appears in many of these petroglyphs.  As in Celtic mythology, horned and antlered figures also appear at many of these sites:  shamen transformed themselves into these figures during different their trances, and marked these events in red ochre.

Many of these are still only accessible by canoe, and the journeys are not always easy.  It makes encounters with them all the more meaningful.

Here's one such petroglyph.


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## jinti

Well, this isn't exactly my neck of the woods, but....

Between 220 and 66 million years ago (Late Triassic Period and the entire Jurassic and Cretaceous periods), dinosaurs lived in what is today Arizona and New Mexico. While they later moved to Hollywood in order to become movie stars, they left behind their footprints and fossils. 

My brother just returned from doing some hiking out there in Chaco Canyon, and he showed me his own pictures of dinosaur tracks, as well as more recent vintage (about 1050 AD) petroglyphs, one of which is said to depict the supernova that created the Crab Nebula (also recorded in similar petroglyphs in China dating from the same time, according to my brother, who is, he informs me, always correct).


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## mansio

Maxiogee

You can have pictures of the Pagan Wall, as it is known, on the following site: mur-paien.fr (in French)


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## badgrammar

Hey, this got me thinking...  It only dates back to the 17th century, but we have a very imposing aquaduct in our little town...  There are some other smaller ones as well, that may well be older....

Current day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cachan
17th century illustration http://www.cs.uu.nl/~wilke/aquasite/paris/foto11.html


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## diegodbs

There is another aquaeduct in Segovia (80 Km. from Madrid) built by the Romans and dating back to the first century.


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## maxiogee

Impressive, badgrammar!


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## maxiogee

diegodbs said:
			
		

> There is another aquaeduct in Segovia (80 Km. from Madrid) built by the Romans and dating back to the first century.



The things Romans did for a bath! No wonder they never came to Ireland. We were probably far too 'highly scented' for them!


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## diegodbs

The simplest and, at least for me, the most impressive is this human hand painted on a wall in the "Cuevas de Altamira" in northern Spain. 15000 years B.C.
Sometimes I wonder who that human being was. He no longer is, but he is a part of us all.


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## Chaska Ñawi

Chaska Ñawi said:
			
		

> The First Nations people were nomadic until comparatively recently (last couple thousand years), so they weren't into monoliths.



I just realized that I should clarify that last post. 

Many tribes remained nomadic throughout their history, until they were forced into settlements and reservations by the English (the French settlers had a different point of view).  The Iroquois confederacy and their predecessors, however, were (comparatively) settled by at least the 900's and probably much earlier; the clans on the west coast also had permanent settlements by this time.


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## fenixpollo

Native Americans in Arizona left petroglyphs, adobe buildings, cliff dwellings as well as buried ruins and all of the archeological artifacts that go with them.


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## Outsider

In Portugal, you can see modest sized dolmens and cromlechs here and there, rock art in the Côa Valley, and ruins of Celtic or pre-Celtic villages called _castros_.


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## mansio

The original question is "What unknown-by-the-world-at-large wonders does your region hold?". 

"Region" means the area where you live, not your country .


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## Hakro

mansio said:
			
		

> The original question is "What unknown-by-the-world-at-large wonders does your region hold?".
> 
> "Region" means the area where you live, not your country generally.


 Very close, right in front of my house, just about thirty metres from where I'm sitting right now, goes a road called the King's Road. It's the first continuous road in Finland, and one of the oldest roads in Northern Europe, as it has existed already in the 14th century. Part of it is in Sweden and Norway, and the Finnish part goes along the southern coast of Finland, finally ending in St. Petersburg.

The kings of Sweden used this road for their inspection trips in Finland. However, in those days the road was called "the Great Coastal Road".

Of course (and luckily) the road is not in the original condition anymore and there are only short parts here and there left in the original sites. The part that goes by my house is about 9 kms; it has now tarmac on it but it is as twisty as it was centuries ago.


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## Miguelillo 87

On Mexico people celebrate the arrival of spring on the pyramids of Teotihuacan and on the south on the pyramids of ancients mayas.  http://www.caminandosinrumbo.com/mexico/teotihuacan/index.htm


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## ireney

Well I live in Piraeus which is the harbour of Athens. Up the wazoo in ancient Greek monuments really most prominent of which is of course Acropolis and Parthenon  (Piraeus is also actually built over the ancient city of Piraeus; however, although there are quite a few ancient ruins of buildings, defencive walls and whatnot, nothing compares to what we've found in Athens which is some 25 mins with the metro from Piraeus)


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## Pivra

I don't know which ancient monuments in Thailand are unknowned to the world, but in northeastern Thailand there is this place called Banchiang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Chiang, http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=575

 I don't know if anyone knows about it or not.


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