Hob wrote:
Apart from the engineering aspects of you theory, have you given much thought to the logistics of operating such a construction?
It seems to me that the volume of grain needed to make such an endeavour worthwhile would be massive. It would take an awful lot of people an awful lot of time to transport enough grain to one site. Then it would take them an awful long time to get it back to where it was needed. They're on foot remember, probably carrying the stuff on their backs. There's got to be a certain radius around the site, beyond which it would be impractical to haul your grain. The area within this radius would presumably be the area within which you'd be able to recruit for building. It should be possible to indicate the population density needed, then by comparing the population density with the avilable amount of grain you could feasibly have grown in such an area, you'd be able to work out if you could feed enough people to make such a contrivance theoretically possible.
hob, yes, there have been a number of posts about how many people might be needed. only 30 to 40 would be needed to actually operate the actual mill at stonehenge. many many more would be necessary to harvest and carry the grain to the mill............
but remember, these people "hauled" great megaliths to the stonehenge site. sacks of grain are nothing to one of the trilithons....... for gods sake, if there were enough people to do the stone work, then there were definately enough people to operate such a mill as i describe.
as to whether there was enough food to feed them, far fewer people were needed to operate this granary than to erect the stones. and they all would have needed to be fed. obviously they were fed on something. i contend that a large part of their diet was the local grain at stonehenge.
and the people only processed grain at stonehenge once a year....
here's how i see it all operating. this theory purposes that religion and grain were connected as well as the stone circles. each year when the harvest was over, the light weight carousel of rope and wood would be taken down and stored away for the winter.
in may when the weather was warmer, the people would gather at stonehenge to begin the rebuilding of the carousel. take a look at the central pole of the mill in the video on my website. dosen't it look a bit like a may pole with its ropes twined around it? perhaps on may day the great pole was brought along the avenue and into the womb shaped horseshoe where it was erected with spring celebrations.
a modest group of craftsmen could then rebuilt the carousel after most of the people had gone about their business. then in summer the people could have regathered to harvest the wheat and transport it to the mill (easier than transporting stones). this would have been another reason for the people to gather at stonehenge on mid summer, to celebrate and begin the harvest preperations. carrying a sack of worked grain home for the winter would not have been a burden but rather an added reason to gather at the great sacred site.
odd that you would use the word hauled. for that is just what they probably did. these people were not fools or ignorant. they had raised the entire stonehenge monument by their wits. of course they knew how to carry weight from place to place either with sledges, travios, or yes carts.
perhaps they moved heavy sledges of grain on log rollers.
if they could move stone, they could move grain. i personally believe they had wheeled carts.
sorry to be long winded.
clyde
