英国巨石阵探秘

在古老的英国,有两个古老、神秘、风景相当优美又令人非常神往的地方。这就是“尼斯湖”(LOCHNESS)和“巨石阵(”STONEHENGE),前者被评为世界自然遗产,后者被评为世界文化遗产,都是世界级的景区。它们各据英国的南北“,尼斯湖”在英格兰最北部地区,之所以闻名天下,是从公元7世纪开始就传说该湖有体形庞大的“湖怪”出现,并详细记录有各种类型的目击者,但就是无法拍到清晰的照片及科学工作者探测的证实,使其增加了十分神秘的色彩并越来越闻名于世界;另一个神秘的境地是位于英国西南部的“巨石阵”,这是在方圆数百平方公里范围几乎是…     

Valuing different road options for Stonehenge

Abstract

Stonehenge in the UK is one of the best-known and most important archaeological sites in the world. Unfortunately the site suffers considerable intrusion in the form of two busy roads which pass close by on either side of the stone circle, which provide an ‘excellent’ view of the site in its landscape. It is not a priori certain that closing one road and burying the other, as was proposed by those charged with managing the site, would actually improve social welfare.

A contingent valuation survey was undertaken, in which willingness to pay for the construction of a two kilometre tunnel for the A303 road where it passes Stonehenge, along with the closure and dismantling of the A344 road, was contrasted with willingness to pay to retain the current road layout. The survey was reinforced by means of computer-enhanced photographs and maps. The results of the survey indicate that while most respondents would prefer to retain the current scenario, most are not willing to pay to do this. Those who prefer the. construction of the tunnel seem far more financially committed. The net heritage benefit arising from the construction of the tunnel turns out to be £114 million.     

Two Traditions of Bronze Age Burial in the Stonehenge Landscape

A study of the size of round barrows in relation to their position in the Stonehenge landscape allows us to define two types of mound, here termed 'Conspicuous' and 'Inconspicuous'. Conspicuous barrows are large and prominently located, whilst inconspicuous barrows are smaller and less strikingly placed. Inconspicuous barrows were associated mainly with funerary urns and were constructed throughout the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. Conspicuous barrows contain a wider range of grave goods and were mainly built in the later part of the Early Bronze Age. The Conspicuous barrows were impressive features of the prehistoric landscape and may have been built there because of the long-established significance of some of the local monuments, including Stonehenge itself. They contain exotic grave goods and could have been the burial places of a wider population. By contrast, the Inconspicuous barrows appear to be associated with settlement areas. They contain a range of ceramic grave goods which extend throughout the Early and Middle Bronze Ages and may have been built by the people who were living in the area. The latter tradition is the longer lived and retained its importance into the Middle Bronze Age when more conspicuous mounds were no longer built.     

Provenancing the rhyolitic and dacitic components of the Stonehenge landscape bluestone lithology: new petrographical and geochemical evidence

The source of the bluestone component found in the Stonehenge landscape has long been the subject of great interest and considerable debate. The bluestones are a mix of lithologies, the standing orthostats being predominantly dolerites, variably ‘spotted’, with only four of them being of dacitic and rhyolitic composition and the Altar Stone being sandstone. However in the 1920s the spotted dolerites were sourced to outcrops which comprise tors in the summit regions of the Mynydd Preseli in north Pembrokeshire, west Wales. There were also speculations about the possible sources of the dacitic and rhyolitic components, ideas which were elaborated on in the early 1990s when the original petrological provenancing was supplemented by whole-rock geochemical analysis. Most recently, new petrographical investigations have been combined with zircon geochemical data to determine the possible source of one type of rhyolite, the so-called ‘rhyolite with fabric’, found abundantly as débitage in the Stonehenge landscape (but not composing the four orthostats) to outcrops in the vicinity of Pont Saeson, especially a large craggy outcrop called Craig Rhos-y-felin, located in low ground to the north of the Mynydd Preseli. In order to test this provenance whole-rock geochemical analysis has been undertaken on samples of débitage from the Stonehenge landscape and from the Pont Saeson area, including Craig Rhos-y-felin. These data are then compared with other new and existing geochemical data for dacitic and rhyolitic lithologies recovered from the Stonehenge landscape, including the four orthostats, as well as geochemical data from outcrops of the same lithologies from the two main volcanic horizons exposed across north Pembrokeshire, namely the Fishguard Volcanic Group and the Sealyham Volcanic Formation, both of Ordovician age. This study concludes that previous, 20th century, attributions of provenance to a number of dacitic and rhyolitic outcrops in the north Pembrokeshire have been in error whilst the new data for the Pont Saeson rhyolite accords well with elemental contents recorded in the ‘rhyolite with fabric’ lithology from the Stonehenge landscape débitage. This study therefore endorses the proposal that the Pont Saeson area is indeed the source of the ‘rhyolite with fabric’ lithology recovered from numerous sites in the Stonehenge landscape, and is the only reliable provenance for any of the dacitic and rhyolitic bluestone material collected to date. It also serves to endorse the use of zircon chemistry as a provenancing tool in archaeopetrological investigations.     

Moving stories: precarious work and multiple migrations

According to the United Nations over 3% of the global population or 232 million people currently live outside their country of birth. Their significance as a growing proportion of the labour force in many European countries is widely known. It is also evident that women – many of them young – are increasingly represented among economic migrants and asylum seekers. However, the longer term contribution of women, as migrants and as workers, is less well recorded. Here, I explore the connections between migration and employment, through the lens of oral histories undertaken with women who moved to the UK. Their life stories illustrate the growing diversity among female migrants as well as the changing nature of women’s employment. My key focus is, however, not on the work these women migrants undertook in the UK, but on precarious forms of waged work engaged in during the migration journey itself. I also reflect on oral history as a method and the problems of writing difference for feminist scholars working with and on women migrants.     

Stonehenge rhyolitic bluestone sources and the application of zircon chemistry as a new tool for provenancing rhyolitic lithics

The source of the bluestones at Stonehenge has long been debated, and while there is general consensus that the so-called spotted dolerites are derived from a relatively small number of outcrops exposed in the highest parts of Mynydd Preseli, in southwest Wales the source of the rhyolitic component has attracted relatively little detailed attention. This is largely because unlike the uniqueness of the spots in the coarser grained doleritic rocks, the rhyolites are fine-grained in character and lack any obvious distinctiveness, especially in hand specimen. This makes their provenancing difficult. A recent study, however, suggested that there was a close lithological similarity between the informally-termed ‘rhyolite with fabric’ bluestone component and rhyolitic rocks from the Ordovician Fishguard Volcanic Group exposed in the Pont Saeson area of north Pembrokeshire. This study aims to see if the chemistry of zircons, which are present in both sets of samples, could be used to support the petrographical association. Analyses for certain high field strength elements (including the rare earth elements) obtained by LA-ICP-MS showed that indeed the analyses were nearly identical when compared using a range of statistical approaches, including similarity coefficients, statistical distance, and principal component analysis, while showing clear differences to sample sets which had no reason to be correlated with the Pont Saeson samples. There are two important conclusions arising from this study. Firstly, the identification of the Pont Saeson source of the ‘rhyolite with fabric’ bluestone from outcrops in low ground to the north of the Mynydd Preseli will without doubt lead to fresh debates about the mechanisms of transport of this component of the bluestones to the Stonehenge site. Secondly, the chemistry of zircons may well prove to have a wider application in the provenancing of fine-grained rhyolitic rocks which have an archaeological context.