Topic ID #12116 - posted 6/3/2011 1:48 AM
Jennifer Palmer
Webmaster
Mystery mound in England turns out to be ancient monument
Jennifer Palmer
Webmaster
Mystery mound in England turns out to be ancient monument
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) on Jun 2nd 2011 at 9:00AM
England, Silbury Hill
England's prehistoric landscape has a new addition.
Marlborough Mound in Wiltshire has long been a mystery. The flat-topped cone of earth looks like a smaller version of Silbury Hill, pictured here. The bigger mound was finished around 2300 BC at a time when Neolithic farmers were erecting stone circles such as Stonehenge and Avebury. Now archaeologists have taken samples from Marlborough Mound and carbon dated them to 2400 BC.
Carbon dating, which measures decaying carbon isotopes in organic matter, has a slight margin of error that increases the older the sample is. Thus Silbury Hill and Marlborough Mound may have been finished simultaneously, or at least in the same generation. The two mounds are only about 20 miles apart, a day's walk for a Stone Age farmer or excited archaeologist.
Read more here.
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) on Jun 2nd 2011 at 9:00AM
England, Silbury Hill
England's prehistoric landscape has a new addition.
Marlborough Mound in Wiltshire has long been a mystery. The flat-topped cone of earth looks like a smaller version of Silbury Hill, pictured here. The bigger mound was finished around 2300 BC at a time when Neolithic farmers were erecting stone circles such as Stonehenge and Avebury. Now archaeologists have taken samples from Marlborough Mound and carbon dated them to 2400 BC.
Carbon dating, which measures decaying carbon isotopes in organic matter, has a slight margin of error that increases the older the sample is. Thus Silbury Hill and Marlborough Mound may have been finished simultaneously, or at least in the same generation. The two mounds are only about 20 miles apart, a day's walk for a Stone Age farmer or excited archaeologist.
Read more here.
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