Posted on 12/29/2008 9:53:57 AM PST by BGHater
OK. I’m just not as hung up on the slavery slant, obviously. There are stone walls all over Ireland that were about agriculture, not slavery. They cleared land of rocks to plant, and built fences/retaining walls with them. A very Celtic/European trademark. There’s no indication the people who are the subject of this article had slaves. That’s something you brought to issue.
Ya’ll can always come visit the Barony of Bryn Madoc hehe
Well, y’all might just see us! :-)
My pleasure. I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of it myself, and I’m sure there are hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of such enigmatic sites. The best known (I think) is Mystery Hill in, hmm, VT? NH? It’s a large site, although for the most part only the big structures on the crown of the hill are talked about. It has often been claimed (and probably still is) that it was built by some family as a “colonial root cellar” and foundation, but the fact is, it wasn’t — and verifying this is a radiocarbon date from a hearth inside the structure, yielding a 2000 BC date.
Well put. I love his discussion of “marks made by plowshares”.
Thanks!
Yup, seen 'em all too ~ only takes two different flights over the place at the right altitude to see just how covered the place is with stone walls.
To some degree the stone walls served as cattle fences. On the other hand, the guys who owned the cattle essentially "owned" the good ol'boys who dragged the rocks over to build the fences.
Neolithic lifestyles demanded a top down sort of structure where the noblemen at the top owned the servants at the bottom. Things improved a bit about 700 BC when the guys who'd conquered Galicia decided they could conquer the British Isles and did so.
I think they were the first to establish a sort of caste system that recognized priests, nobles, tradesman/mechanics, and finally the guys who followed the cows around.
Ultimately that created some social mobility in what had been an incredibly stratified society.
So, yeah, the stone fences/walls in Ireland were built, for the most part, by people who could not be differentiated from slaves. It's kind of an Indo-European pattern repeated society after society.
Other groups did the same thing.
They called these guys "subordinate tribes" , or "tributaries". Obviously individual tribe members having personal slave servants was not feasible in barbarian or tribal societies ~ after all, the slave would kill the master at the first chance. Only civilized people get to pull off the personal servant deal.
The Iroquois Indians had no problem referring to their years under the Huron with the expression "when we were slaves". The Jews report the same thing (See: Moses).
BTW, that's a good example of a top dog putting his slaves to work at backbreaking busywork ~ Pharoah tells the Hebrews to make bricks without straw. Must have been a rock shortage in Egypt that year.
Now, regarding slavery among native Americans, there are people who want to idealize them ~ others object to that and point out that human sacrifice and cannibalism was common in MesoAmerica ~ and guess who got to be eaten!
For your next trip... There’s a megalithic tripod (a large stone, more or less triangular in at least two dimensions, set on three smaller but still good-sized stones) right up on Lookout Mountain, in the tourist trap area. It’s attributed to glaciers, but that’s clearly b.s.
Having grown up in farm country, I remember well seeing windrows of rocks like this, put there by past farmers clearing them out of fields so they could plant. They had to put the rocks somewhere so they made piles of them along tree-lines and property lines. Some of them marked abandoned fields which had since overgrown with second growth woods, making the rocks look rather mysterious in their origins.
However, this early American stuff was done without benefit of draft animals.
Geez, you have issues.
What if all of this was about planting crops and simply surviving? And how did you know ** I ** would want to talk about the stone walls in Ireland. How did you know I knew anything about that and knew it wouldn't be long till I brought it up? And yes, I have taken at least two flights across the stone walls in Ireland, but you wouldn't know that.
I never made a "good example" of of topdog putting his slaves to work. That didn't come from my posts.
I won't reply to your next post because this is bizzare. In fact the entirety of the two posts you just wrote are bizzare. Slavery is one angle, agriculture and survival is certainly another. Since we weren't there, neither of us knows for sure. Do we?
I am familiar with stone walls around farm fields. Yes, they last a long time. In New England the old stone walls are still there even though the fields are overgrown with trees, but they were built by European settlers, and not by American Indians.
Look, argue your piece without the name-calling.
“...was about planting crops.”
Crops? With all of those trees in their fields?? ;)
I wonder if the serpentine shape was to collect any runoff from the hills and concentrate the runoff into rows?
Southern Indiana has an series of old stone fences that were turned into a sort of State Monument Site several years back and then repaired by volunteers.
Here's how you can tell the walls built by slaves from those built by free labor ~ if each rock is set in place nicely and with care, that's done by slaves working together. If each rock is just laid on top the others, almost haphazardly, with no effort made to "top off" the structure, that was built by free labor ~ usually one man working alone too.
Kentucky has some incredibly nice stone walls built back before the Civil War, mostly by slaves.
I guess your ;) was that the trees post date the stone walls by how many millenia. (??)
Those old timers must’ve had some darned intelligent farm implements....:)
Yes!
The link in post 37 is interesting. Shows a map of the wall with respect to the topography of the hill. Those dips in the wall could have been used to collect water perhaps. Interesting comments about the wall relating to astronomy, and other items from that area and time indicate they were somewhat interested in it.
Or - it was just where the rocks ended up after clearing their planting area. (Perhaps it is the trail from a very large mole!?)
Those “tripods” are called dolmens or cromlechs, among other things.
Google them.
Cool stuff....:)
In the woods beside my childhood home, there are three nearly rectangular boulders almost the size of “short buses” arranged in a triangle.
You can duck down and squeeze through a gap between two of them.
The dirt is tamped down and nothing grows there, not even moss.
I used to play in it as a kid and people have tried to tell me that “a glacier did that”.
Seems like it must have been a really determined and meticulous glacier, to me.
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