Another Stonehenge Found in Russia?

Another Stonehenge Found in Russia?

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News


Nov. 17, 2004 — Russian archaeologists have announced that they have found the remains of a 4,000-year-old structure that they compare to England's Stonehenge, according to recent reports issued by Pravda and Novosti, two Russian news services.

If the comparison holds true, the finding suggests that both ancient European and Russian populations held similar pagan beliefs that wove celestial cycles with human and animal life.

Since devotional objects and symbols are at the Russian site in the region of Ryazan, their meanings might shed light on pagan ceremonies that likely also took place at Stonehenge.

Just as the location of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, appeared to be significant for the megalith's creators, so too did Ryazan for the Russian builders. The site overlooks the junction of two rivers, the Oka and Pronya. It was highly traveled by numerous cultures in ancient times.

Ilya Ahmedov, lead archaeologist of the Ryazan excavation and a researcher in the State History Museum of Russia's department of archaeological monuments, described the remains of the structure to Novosti.

Ahmedov said he and his team found ground holes indicating a monument with a 22.97-feet diameter circle consisting of 1.6-foot thick wooden poles spaced at equal distances from each other. Inside the circle is a large rectangular hole with evidence that four posts once stood in that spot.

The archaeologists believe the central structure would have led to spectacular views....cont'd

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041115/stonehenge.html

which is not very far from Stonehenge, but not so well known - because, like the Russian site, all that's been found is the post holes.

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/filestore/stonehengeinteractivemap/sites/woodhenge/02.html

(Spinal tap reference.)

Archeology fairly strongly indicates the early Indo-Europeans began their outward migrations somewhere around 4000BC and that that the proto Indo-European languages were unified until at least 3000BC, indicating a closely related, if not completely unified, pre-Indo-European culture across their lands. The languages and traditions began to diverge after 3000BC as the Indo-Europeans spread out across Europe, the Middle East, and into India, but it should be expected that religious traditions, folklore, scientific knowledge (including astronomy), and other details of their civilizations would have survived in a recognizably related fashion for at least another thousand years or so, and that some aspects of their shared heritage might have survived for thousands of years.

The last time I heard, there was an academic "controversy" about the proto-Indo-Europeans. One group maintains that their homeland was in the Caucasian Steppes (the so-called Kurgan Hypothesis) and another one that they came from Turkey.

I'm inclined to accept the Kurgan hypothesis. In fact, several of the major language groups seem to have originated to the north of the Silk Route.

--p!

For the most part, Gimbutas' assertions seem to be correct, but they assume a gradual outward migration that I consider unrealistic for a horse culture.

My pet theory is that the first part of the Kurgan Hypothesis is correct. The "Kurgans" originated in the vicinity of the upper-Volga somewhere between 5000BC & 6000BC as pre-historic nomads who adopted horse riding, and then migrated southward onto the Caucasian steppes. For some reason however, both Gimbutas and mainstream archeology seems to think that they just climbed off their horses and spent the next thousand or so years only growing slowly...something that I consider to be completely unrealistic.

I think that sufficient evidence does exist to assume that the circum-Caspian migration posited in the Turkish-origins theory did happen, but not the way that theory speculates. I believe that the Kurgans did NOT stop at the Caucasian steppes but instead continued southward (at least in part) through the Trans-Caucasus into modern northern Turkey. At that point they collided with the early pre-Hurrian peoples of eastern Turkey and were introduced to "modern" agriculture. This new fusion of cultures...a horse-based warrior society with a solid agricultural underpinning, then circled the Caspian...spawning the Hurrian/proto-Sumerian, Indo-Iranian, and Indus cultures as it went...until it ended up back on the Caucasian Steppes.

This new "super-Kurgan" culture, armed with horses, good weapons, a warrior culture, and full stomachs made possible by their agricultural base, then swept northward and outward, easily displacing the poorly-defended, underfed, and disorganized prehistoric "Goddess/Mother Culture" societies with their own paternally driven warrior culture. In an age where women and fertility were revered, and "wars" were limited to a few dozen people on foot from competing villages beating each other with clubs and shooting arrows at their opponents, the appearance of the Kurgans, with possibly hundreds of warriors charging on horseback, with bows and bronze axes, would have been an irresistible shockwave across Europe. The old way of living, with origins predating the ice age, died out in a relatively short period of time as the Kurgans defeated the Goddess/Mother Culture tribes, or the unconquered tribes "Kurganized" themselves in order to mount a reasonable defense.

Defense over the long term, however, simply wasn't possible. With wave after wave of Kurgan invaders pouring into central and northern Europe out of the Russian Steppes, and a second smaller wave of invaders sweeping across the Aegean out of Turkey into Greece and the Balkans, the Europe was transformed in just several hundred years.

As the Indo-Europeans swept outward, they took their religion, their astronomy, and their stone circle building practices with them. As the conquests ended and the Indo-Europeans fragmented into the pre-European cultures we recognize...the Greeks, the Celts and preceding Beaker peoples, etc...they took those practices and evolved them in very different, but still recognizeably related, ways. In Northern Europe the stone circles got bigger and more prevalent, but remained architecturally simple outside of the occasional lintel stone. In Southern Europe the stone pillars became columns, the lintels evolved into roofs, and the classical Greco-Roman temple was the result.

By the way, this is just a hobby for me so be kind if my conglomeration of theories has any holes (none of it is mine, but it is a collection of several other theories). This has always been an interest of mine as I have always been fascinated at just how closely related we all really are and what a fluke modern society is. History as we know it encompassing every great society and empire from Europe, across the middle east, and into Asia, got its start because a few hundred nomads in central Russia figured out how to ride horses and decided to take a trip south. Everything after that, quite literally, is history.