One of the great things about Google maps is that it is possible for one to verify hunches that one has had for a long time, but thought were too crazy to be true. Well, for me it appears that at least one hunch is true, and, indeed, it is very strange. This is one everyone can test out for themselves since it requires only Google and a few tools of the digital age.
Up until last night I had thought the the early British, who I refer to as the Ing people, or the hero worshippers, were very curvilinear in orientation. Now, I have to revise my view for the following reason. They appear to have done the impossible using surveying technologies to place centers in straight lines extensively across their landscape. At this point you should be saying wow, but you are probably saying, huh, or not another silly idea from Wooooohs Stream of research into the unknown.
My conclusion on looking at the evidence in the landscape relatively carefully, is that there is much more to nine stones circle near Maiden castle in Dorset than just nine stones in a small circle. What I now have to conclude is that there are nine ancient communities associated with the nine stones and these communities knew how to survey, or at least, some members knew how to survey across vast distances.
This puzzles me greatly, because when I reviewed the archaeological evidence in my copy of Colin Burgess's book The Age of Stonehenge, I was forced to conclude that these ancient people, the Ing people, had as Burgess suggests, formed stratified societies by the third millennium BC, over five thousand years ago. Now here is the mystery. In a world in which people are oriented towards curves and circles, why would they structure their society in a straight line running directly to the sea. That is what they appear to have done.
This is not a straight line running north south along the earth's north south magnetic field, but a straight line that links communities from Woodhenge, not far from Stonehenge, directly to peoples living by the sea. How weird!? What's more there appear to have been nine such early communities and they placed their community centers along the straight line, ending with the community not far from Maiden Castle in Dorset.
I am forced to conclude that not all the early peoples were curvilinear, but there seem to have been a strong deposits of early Ing people that thought along straight lines. I would agree with Burgess in saying that it would seem likely that these people were fairly well established and organized. They, after all, appear to have had some very superior surveying technology. And, this leads me to another bone to pick with the notion that the Romans were the ones who designed the straight roads of early Britain.
I have to conclude that the Romans must have organized the early tribes of Britain to live along a straight line and have their main centers located along a straight line, but we know that this was not the case. Romans of early Britain received information from the locals about straight surveyed lines that already crisscrossed the landscape, but why were these lines there, and for how long? It seems amazing that the straight lines may have already been tracks across the landscape from community to community.
My second conclusion is that the straight lines were lines of communication between early social groups and had something to do with continental peoples, possibly to coordinate celebrations of some form. Burgess suggests that the people in the South of Britain were communicating with continental peoples by way of travelling across the English Channel. Perhaps, what we don't realize is how strong such communications were at a fairly early age in the history of this area of the world. Communications may have been by the lighting of fires along a straight line to the sea. If people settled near the points at which the fires were created, then you would have a logic for people settling along an extensive straight line across the landscape.
Because of my interest in Wuh Lax and the people of the salmon, I was curious to see whether one of the communities along my nine stones line was a lax community bearing in mind that the lax community I am thinking of was a linear community predating the period of curvilinear peoples. In other words, there appears to me to have been waves of social logic and structure with a period in which linear and rectangular in terms of dwellings, and possibly settlements, dominating over curvilinear and circular. Possibly the linear period, as Burgess suggests, predated the curvilinear. I have to say, however, that this may have something to do with the development of surveying and construction technology.
In my mind, linear peoples, such as the Romans are invasive, wide spreading and expansive, while curvilinear people are oriented toward enclosure, community, and locality. It is interesting that over seven thousand years of history, both forms of community had their periods of dominance. I can only guess that there may have been cycles or waves of dominance since we are considering a very long period historically.