Neolithic Rousay:- The 'Egypt of the North' - A Journey Into the Past Part 2

 

 

Rousay

Rousay is a 'Site of Special Scientific Interest' with notable cliff formations and wildflower colonies, and has an RSPB bird reserve.

Rousay's Wikipeadia entry begins like this:-  Rousay (Old Norse: Hrólfsey meaning Rolf's Island) is a small, hilly island about 3 km (1.9 mi) north of Orkney's Mainland, off the north coast of Scotland, and has been nicknamed "the Egypt of the north", due to its archaeological diversity and importance.

Over 100 archaeological sites have been identified, but only a small fraction of them have been excavated and researched. The best known and most spectacular of the island's archaeological sites is the complex of Midhowe broch and Midhowe Chambered Cairn. Blackhammer Chambered Cairn, Taversoe Tuick, and Yarso are also important tombs on the island.

This is one of the archaeological treasuers of Rousay, it is the two chambered neolithic cairn of Taversoe Tuick. There is only one other known example of a cairn with upper and lower chambers in Orkney. The other is at Huntersquoy, on the island of Eday . 

Taversoe Tuick is a fanatstic monument constructed around 5,000 years ago. Not only does it have two chambers it also has a mini-chamber outside, the purpose of which is at the present time still uncertain.

The floor of the upper chamber at Taversoe is formed by the roof lintels of the lower, when the cairn was intact there was no communication between the two chambers, each having its own entrance passage on opposite sides of the cairn. It is tempting to see the twin chamber arrangement as evidence suggesting a multi-phase monument, but it is currently believed that the cairn was deliberately built this way in one round of construction. It is also interesting to speculate that there may have been segregation of deposition between the two chambers, certainly selective deposition based on sex or age has been discovered at other British chambered tombs of similar date. Unfortunately the destruction of most of the upper chamber at Taversoe means there is not enough material to test this hypothesis, but only cremated bone was recovered from the upper chamber and only unburnt skeletons found in the lower (some cremated bone found in lower entrance passage).

Blackhammer Chambered Cairn is another Neolithic cairn on Rousay of around the same age as Taversoe Tuick constructed around 3,000 BCE.

 Bones and pottery have been found here. It is an incomparable feeling to stand surrounded by Neolithic workmanship in these passage graves and other structures created at what was in reality the dawn of modernity in these northern latitudes.
Traces of the decorative stonework can still be seen at either side of the entrance and when the entrance was finally sealed, the cairn's users went to great lengths to ensure the stones used were set flush to the wall and matched the pattern of slanting stones on either side. The design skills of our Neolithic forebears never ceases to amaze and delight me. The enormous effort that went into building these cairns is especially true of the Knowe of Yarso, which is situated on a patch of moorland about 100 metres above Eynhallow Sound, is an elaboration on the basic tripartite plan. The remains of 29 adults were found there when it was first excavated in 1934. 

There are three compartments but the innermost one is considerably longer than the other two, so the cairn was made more or less rectangular to accommodate the additional length of the burial chamber.

Why are we driven to discover our far distant past? Scrambling around Neolithic passage graves may not be everyone's idea of a good day out, but the lure of archaeology is stronger than just a mere curiosity about the past. Famously or perhaps notoriously archaeology has been pressed into the service of various nationalisms over the past 150 years.

Zionism for example claims archaeological justification for the idea of a historical land of Israel. Many prominent Israelis including some generals became archaeologists, such as Moshe Dayan. When he was asked what he was looking for in excavations, Dayan simply replied, “The ancient land of Israel”.

In the United States the plundering of Native burial sites for museums and exhibitions and all over the world archaeology has been politicised throughout its comparatively short history.

My interests in prehistory is precisely the opposite in motivation as a matter of fact. I am interested in the joined up cohesion of human societies and the remarkable similarities between prehistorical societies around the world. The amount of interaction there was between distant communities of people. The map below demonstrates the distribution of genetic populations as they emerge from Africa during the Paleolithic or 'Old Stone Age' 170,000 years ago identified through their mothers DNA.

This journey of mankind suggests to me that there are some forgotten (or at least largely ignored) truths that emerged through this vast period of human social evolution that are worth attempting to catch a glimpse of. One of those to me is the eminentlty materialist notion of ancestor veneration and sometimes ancestor worship. It seems sort of proto-rationalist to include ancestors in the ongong life of fragile societies, bearing in mind that life expectancy is not what it is today, ancestors came along and disappeared a lot more frequently back then. 

From Paleolithic hunter gather societies to sedentary farming communities during the transition to the Neolithic 'The New Stone Age' the survival rate for adults actually went down.
The archeological record of the Eastern Mediterranean region reveals that male hunter gathers who reached adulthood had a life expectancy of 33 years, while females who reached adulthood had a life expectancy of 29 years. After the so-called Neolithic Revolution, the life expectancy of adult males fell to 32 and adult females fell to 25 years. During the same time peole got smaller males stature fell from 177 centimeters (5ft.10ins) to 165cms (5ft.5ins) and women from 165cms (5ft.5ins) to 152cms (5ft.0ins) as life became more labourious for the early farmers.

http://www.econ.ku.dk/okojwe/filer/Publications%20and%20Working%20Papers/Neolithic%20Revolution%20in%20a%20Price-Theoretic%20Perspective_Guzman%20and%20Weisdorf.pdf

The idea of an age of comparative innocence where the co-operation required to bring down large animals with only stone tools meant a more harmonious society than the rivalries that subsequently emerged and remain with us today. This may be a romantic fantasy rather like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the Noble Savage, but I prefer to think of that achetypal person as being my ancestor, than any less gracious view of those who paved the way to the world we have now inherited today.

So archaeology remains a political activity, but the flavour of the politics depends upon where we start the clock running from. For me I like the idea that it should be at the very beginnings and that is what keeps taking me  back to the things these ancestors made with their own hands and thereby comuning with them in the only way possible, by the fruits of their labours that made them (and us) human in the first place.

If you want to see the evolution of these northern people of the sea, Orkney is very good place to do that and Rousay is an equivalent of an Egypt of the north where secrets lie buried and where there is the lure of clues still waiting to be found and interpreted.

Total Truth Focus On Syria - Not The Arabian Knights?

 The Three Stooges

You have to ask yourself why Barack Obama, Francois Hollande and David Cameron are so desperate to attack Syria?

There must be a reason why they are behaving the way they are, which is not on the face of it rational. There are reputations at stake here of course. When Vladimir Putin dismissed Britain as ‘just a small island no one pays any attention to’ last week (this made me laugh out loud) at the G20 summit of world leaders he was deliberately adding insult to David Cameron's injury.

The whole show descended into acrimony over US-led planned military strikes on Syria and everyone took their ball home muttering threats under their breath.

But why does Mr Obama, Mr Cameron and M.Hollande so urgently want to start hostilities against Syria? What's the deal on Syria anway?

The crossing of the Obama red line by the use of biological weapons is obviously a ruse, the US used chemical weapons in Vietnam and more recently banned ordnance like white phosphorus and most infamously depleted uranium (with devastating affects on the civilian population) in Fallujah, Iraq and that's just a couple of examples of illegal WMD use by US forces in living memory (for some). 

So nobody is buying Barack Obama's moral highground argument... that one is completely dead in the water I think.

In order to put these events into some sort of perspective from an English point of view the first largely unspoken truth is that the so-called Syrian 'civil war' is really a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and its arch-rival in the regional power game, Iran.

The US, the UK, France, Russia, Iran and indeed everyone around the world is actually reacting to that fact.

Saudi Arabia is funding and arming Sunni rebels to take down the Shia Assad regime linked to Tehran, who of course is the real target of these appalling attrocities and the human catastrophe that has been unleashed in Syria and beyond and thanks largely to Washington, now engulfing the entire area in wall-to-wall destablisation and gaping power vacuums that may not always have outcomes that suit Washington's ends.

In the middle of all this there is a slightly uncomfortable Israeli regime who of course are the arch enemy of Iran, but who aren't apparently overjoyed to have these swollen ranks of well armed Islamic fundamentalists and CIA trained Sunni terrorists bedding down rather too close for comfort.

Neither is Jerusalem happy that the escalation of violence in the region means that Syria and Hezbollah may gain access to Russian weapon technologies that would spike the Israeli guns and change the calculus of military power in the Middle East to their disadvantage.

This is how an article by Michael Wilner in the Jerusalem Post in June this year summed up the situation thus:-

"Turkey’s parliamentarians say their country is – with great misfortune – deeply invested in the conflict. Israeli politicians are nervous about the flow of arms, particularly the threat of a delivery by Russia of the S- 300 missile system that would threaten Israel’s abilility to surgically strike Hezbollah weapons transfers and would compromise any future consideration of a no-fly zone by Western powers.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II presented the American president with a map of a potential future Syria, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, divided into fiefdoms with desert lands transformed into new al-Qaida training grounds."
 

LINK:- http://www.jpost.com/Special-Reports5/Analysis-Syria-becomes-multi-national-war-316676 

Turkey is trying to gain acceptance into the EU at the same time as trying to cope with the humanitarian disaster on its border with Syria and spreading conflict leaking over its frontiers making the Turks damned if they take either side and held responsible for the failures of Nato.
Since the Jerusalem Post was carrying a story taken from the Wall Street Journal (who'd be without a copy nowadays?) - it made sense to me to have a look at what the hedge fund managers and futures traders are telling each other about this Alice in Wonderland situation, with poor old Barack and John Kerry absolutely frantic to get the bombing started whatever anyone says, and soon they are working to someone elses timetable here, these great leaders of the western world......in his own little way David Cameron likewise!

I remember many years ago now a very well known British Communist telling me "always read the Financial Times, the capitalist class don't lie to each other like they do the rest of us" - that advice has always stood me in good stead, at least until the internet happened along... so now I can go to the Wall Street Journal website and read things like this:-

" They believed that Prince Bandar, a veteran of the diplomatic intrigues of Washington and the Arab world, could deliver what the CIA couldn't: planeloads of money and arms, and, as one U.S. diplomat put it, wasta, Arabic for under-the-table clout. Prince Bandar—for two decades one of the most influential deal makers in Washington as Saudi ambassador but who had largely disappeared from public view—is now reprising his role as a geopolitical operator. This time it is to advance the Saudi kingdom's top foreign-policy goal, defeating Syrian President Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies."   

 http://online.wsj.com/articl/SB10001424127887323423804579024452583045962.html

Prince Bandar previously involved in the US supported creation of Sunni fundamentalists like the Taliban in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention and has a close relationship with Washington, especially Democrat governments as it happens going back to Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter.

This very interesting article to which I have posted a link, goes on to discuss the personal emnities that exist between the Saudi royal family and the Assad government in Damascus, the whole drama begins to take on a Shakespearian twist as according to the WSJ article :-

Saudi King Abdullah, whose mother and two of whose wives hail from a cross-border tribe influential in Syria, tried for a decade to woo Mr. Assad away from Iran's sway. He failed. The king's attitude hardened in 2011 after the Assad regime, rebuffing the king's personal advice on how to ease tension, cracked down brutally on political opponents and did so during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The king then decided to do whatever was needed to bring down Mr. Assad, American and Arab diplomats said. 

This inter-tribal dispute which has resulted in Saudi Arabia giving the Gulf statelet Qatar the same sort of little island treatment as Russia gave Britain at G20 although obviously Qatar isn't actually an island I hope you take my point. 

The Saudi government doesn't want Qatar poking its nose into its dispute with Syria and avenging the perceived insult the secular Assad regime gave the Saudi king as the head of the Wahabi Sunni sect, local potentate and during Ramadan to boot.

The WSJ tells us that:-  

"
Prince Bandar has largely stayed out of Washington but held meetings with U.S. officials in the region. One was in September 2012. Sens. McCain and Graham, who were in Istanbul, met him in an opulent hotel suite on the banks of the Bosporus. Mr. McCain said he made the case to Prince Bandar that the rebels weren't getting the kinds of weapons they needed, and the prince, in turn, described the kingdom's plans. The senator said that in succeeding months he saw "a dramatic increase in Saudi involvement, hands-on, by Bandar." 

 In September and October, the Saudis approached Croatia to procure more Soviet-era weapons. The Saudis got started distributing these in December and soon saw momentum shift toward the rebels in some areas, said U.S. officials, Arab diplomats and U.S. lawmakers briefed on the operation. Officials in Croatia denied it was involved in weapons sales."

Enter Barack Obama already looking like a lame duck president because his health reforms are undeliverable and because nobody gave him any credence over the Snowden Affair that left him looking rather foolish on the world stage.

Worse still so far as he is concerned, loyal Washington shill David Cameron was defeated in a House of Commons revolt that wasn't supposed to happen, nobody I think was more surprised than Ed Miliband that the government was defeated on the bombing of Syria vote.

So now they are all terrified that despite GCHQ watching all of us normal people here, the Saudis who are obviously not on the Cheltenham radar will arrange for there to be a terrorist event as a reprisal, just like the deaths of thousands has been Prince Bandar's response to President Assad's perceived insult during the holy month of Ramadan.

This is why Obama, Cameron and Hollande are so incredibly jittery and ready to commmit war crimes even against the will of their own people and their own parliaments, so fearful are they of the global reach of Riyadh and the wealth it flaunts. 

But Cameron is doubly duplicitous because at the same time as his haste to please the Saudi royals he is hosting the world's largest arms fair in London this week.

A Russian government arms supplier accused of providing the Syrian regime with more than three quarters of its weaponry will be among 1,400 firms at the world’s biggest arms fair in London this week. That's how committed Cameron is to the cause of the peace in Syria and how deep his "sympathies" for the victims of US supplied chemical weapons by the terrorists the British support in the region.

.

The US and UK are rolling out the next generation of weapons for their wars at the Murder Fest in London this week, while the arms companies aim to set the agenda for still more exorbitant military spending.

The London arms fair brings together 28,000 international buyers and sellers. The deals that begin here fuel the arms trade the world over. Death, injury, fear and repression are exported from the arms companies doing their filthy trade right on our doorstep.

So as far as Syria goes then, I mean the deaths of thousands of men, women and children, the displacement of millions of people, the maimed and the sick, the poisoned and the crippled are all part of (1) a surrogate war by Saudi Arabia against Iran supported by the Washington regime; (2) a response to a perceived 'insult' to the King of Saudi Arabia by President Assad and (3) - a massive investment opportunity too good to miss for the speculators in the technology of mass murder and crimes against humaity.

What the people of this country, or any country want and expect is of absolutely no consequence whatsoever to the actors in this geopolitical theatre, in which the suffering is massive and almost beyond belief while the servile corporate media pumps out disinformation, the BBC cannot ever tell the the truth now since they announced the collapse of Building 7 on 11 September 2001 more than 20 minutes before it actually happened.

They are wedded to a lie that even the BBC paedophile scandal couldn't overshadow and which has cost the Corporation what remained of its evaporating credibility in the eyes of those who take an interest in such things.

As we approach the 12th anniversary of 9/11 all that is happening in the Middle East now makes more sense in the light of revelations exposed here, and over the years repeatedly on these pages, that 9/11 was in part an inside job, but the whole event should more probably be seen as an act of 'friendly fire' in actual fact I think.

Take a close look at Syria and the Middle East today. nothing has changed since 2001, Bush has been replaced by Obama, but in foreign policy terms they are exact clones of each other anyway.... so no advance there at all.

We live in a world governed by gangsters where nothing is what it is claimed to be.

Protesters with banners gather at a demonstration outside the annual Arms Fair being hosted at the Excel venue in London Photo: DEMOTIX

 LINK -http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/defence/10296422/Lockheed-Martin-offices-targeted-by-anti-arms-trade-protesters.html

Syria is the London Arms Fair's current advertising campaign and a showroom for the monstrous instruments of death and mass destruction on sale in the British capital today. 

We are all watching the promo ahead of the main feature, we are all victims of this crass barbarity of corrupted gangster capitalism and the immoral machinations of Obama, Cameron and Hollande.... the unrelenting oponents of peace and civilisation. Time now then to make a very big fuss indeed in the West and punish the real perpetrators of war crimes that really have crossed the red line in any decent and civilised society that is!