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 Head To Head The Modern Antiquarian Greenlee Lough Forum | Start a topic | Search |
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| That seems sensible. As I understand it, the rough rule of thumb that used to be applied in Ireland was a width of about 30cm, and depth of 15cm, and they had to be hemispherical (or as close as dammit). The idea of Bullauns possibly being enhanced natural features also appeals to me, as it kind of implies that these lovely hemispherical, smoothed out Irish basins may have been worked on for millennia, with a vague continuity of activity that stopped over here (maybe when the romans got here?), so Brit Bullauns are still unfinished, appearing more like enhanced natural features. Regarding the pic of the mountaintop basins, I reckon they're natural, I've been up top of Cairngorm and it's a strange alien rockscape. But that doesn't mean they would not have maybe had significance to prehistoric folk, your idea of artificial basins being replicas of natural features, but in more convenient places fits with the way us humans work. If I were to allow imagination to go off on one, I'd waffle something like the idea that post glacial nunatak features may have inspired late paleolithic folk, and a muddied, chinese-whisper-ified version of whatever they were doing with the glacial-rolled basins may have eventually filtered into the mesolithic as cupmarks, ending up with artificial basins by the time people were settling down in the neolithic. The folkloric/ritual/tradition stuff could have continued right up to the present day in Ireland. How's that for a sense of continuity*? Who the heck knows. Not I. But as ever, it's fun to speculate on such an obscure category of artifact. *Pretty unlikely I know ;) Reply | with quote |  15th January 2008ce 23:05 In reply to: Re: Bullauniness assessment required (StoneGloves) |
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