Stonehenge can be thought of as a Flintstone-era funeral parlour. Its sales pitch was soul-releasing sky burial AND, by way of bonus, a compact take-away package of cremated bones.

 Yes, Stonehenge had a VIP tourist not so long ago who unlike us plebs was allowed to go inside the stone circle with those amazing lintels, raised up some 4,500 years ago with nothing but primitive technology.

Look to your left, Mr. President!  Maybe your people didn't tell you about the "elephant in the room".  (Or hovering just out of sight in the background, thanks to an unholy alliance between academia and manipulated mass media).

 

It was widely reported, needless to say by the media, for which sad to say this blogger has less and less time.  Why? Because apart from a near total absence of critical faculties, publishing anything dished out by news agencies and even our esteemed  publicity-seeking, fund-seeking academia, the mass media are anti-blog, and have been for many a long year, having quickly perceived the blogging community as a threat to their own desire to maintaining a monopoly not just on the reporting of current affairs, but interpretation too. Did you know that inside every MSM journalist, there's a highly erudite sage fighting to get out, permitting no competition whatsoever from the Great Unwashed of the blogosphere?

 Arguably Google is anti-blog too, judging by the second-class treatment accorded to our postings, at least by Google (like striking out one’s main search terms (Appendix 1), or heading lists of returns with eBay and Amazon ads that are no longer even labelled as ads etc (Appendix 2).

So there’s no attempt today to mimic a so-called 'factual, authoritative' media science report, despite this blogger being a retired professional scientist. This is essentially an ideas-fest.

 See also his specialist Stonehenge/Silbury Hill site

Nor will there be any attempt to make this posting Google (or other search-engine)- friendly. Where new uninhibited thinking is concerned, or in my case, not-so-new thinking (Appendix 3) search engines have degenerated year-on-year into a sick parody of the original, with wikipedia and its ideas-censoring thought-police not far behind (Appendix 4 in preparation)

This posting will attempt to tell it the way it is about Stonehenge and other ‘iconic’ sites scattered around the Wiltshire Neolithic theme park. There will be no sentimentality, no obfuscation, no attempt to engage in airy-fairy mystification – as archaeologists routinely do, seizing on some tiny artefact, building up an entire Universe, then wasting no time in rushing to the media with their “breakthroughs in our understanding”, their “profound new insights” bla bla.

To show my contempt for this endless media circus of obfuscation and/or lazy (or grant-provider-friendly) glossing-over and misinterpretation, I shall post this intro right now, despite this posting lacking any real content thus far. That will come as a drip-feed in the next few hours, maybe the next few days, and will be totally uncompromising in spelling out a clear message that the public does not, and probably never will get from that unholy fudge between academia and the compliant mass media. Basically it will flag up what this blogger considers (after some 4 years of research and reflection)  to have been the REAL purpose of Stonehenge and nearby sites. Nope. I don’t intend to stage-manage, or keep folk in suspense. So what briefly was its real purpose?

Stonehenge was the endstage development of what had been evolving by way of timber post circles initially, followed by stone circles over centuries, probably millennia, culminating in Stonehenge and its gobsmackingly ambitious OTT (literally) lintels, a stupendous feat of engineering if ever there was, given the limited technology available.  But let's not mince our words: it was NOT designed  as a landscape folly: it had a strictly utilitarian purpose, functioning as a durable, all season two stage cadaver-processing plant.

Stage 1:  speeded-up release of the Neolithic soul, as then perceived, from its confining prison of mortal flesh via “sky burial”  i.e  defleshing of the bones (by scavenger birds) followed by:

Stage 2 : cremation of the semi-cleaned bones, providing grieving relatives with a compact keep-sake, either for taking home, or, if more important, for internment in one of those many round or long barrows that punctuate the open Wiltshire plains and chalk uplands, still visible to this day, still with their stored bones, sometimes cremated, sometimes not.

Think of Stonehenge as a dual purpose site: bird sanctuary (the more voracious species of scavenger birds that is – rooks, crows, ravens, maybe those versatile, adaptable gulls too) AND late-stage crematorium (excarnated bones only, NOT entire body).

(Aside: I'm in discussion right now with the erudite Ken West MBE about the pros and cons of different scavenger birds as likely (or unlikely) agents of excarnation, my having discovered his brilliant and inspirational think-pieces, e.g."Stonehenge and Sky Burial" through googling (about which more later, probably a new posting).

 Yes, the target skeleton and bones did finally come clean. Pity that academia and the media refuse to do so where Stonehenge is concerned. I repeat: Stonehenge and its precursors were almost certainly conceived as bird sanctuaries serving as skeleton/bone-recovery plants. The technical term for it, rarely appearing in the media, and even quite difficult to track down via internet searching is that unmentionable E word. It’s EXC _______   N, which becomes EXCISION read marginalization/sidelining/de facto censorship in media reports. 

Yes, as indicated earlier, there’s an elephant in the room, correction, giant Neolithic outdoor funereal parlour,  where reporting of latest research findings from our Neolithic sites is concerned, and its name begins with that letter E. 

See my (obviously home-made) irreverent ‘photoshopping’ of the Obama visit to Stonehenge.

Here's another in the same vein, a foretaste of still more to come, this posting as indicated being a work in progress.

I say again, Mr. President. Look to your left! The agents of that poetically-named SKY BURIAL, Mother  nature's agent of so-called hands-off  "passive excarnation",  still frequent the site to this day. But don't expect academia or the timid unquestioning  "science reporters" in the mass media to so much as hint at the real reasons for Stonehenge's existence. Reputations are at stake (to say nothing of future research funding?)

Yup,  more to come. Much more, a series of snippets selected from the recent newspapers and internet sites, at best, factoids not facts, more often than not, though if the truth be told, better described as downright 'fictionoids', like those carved "duck figurines" unearthed just two miles from Stonehenge, or that similarly  nearby "House of the Dead" (allowing in some but not all Press releases a fleeting reference to the E word, it having reassuringly "preceded" Stonehenge, length of time unspecified) but which was probably not a house at all,  but a screened proto-Stonehenge, i.e. roofless bird sanctuary  without the bolt-on, afterthlought bone-crematorium.  ;-)

Yes, we''ll be back with those two for starters. Watch this space (if you dare!).

Apols btw for typos. Tracking them down takes time and effort, and I'd rather publish (and possibly be damned) and leave the correcting them for now.

New addition: Monday, 16:45

From the Mail, October 2011. Do they look like ducks to you? Nope, didn't think so...

Those "duck figurines":

The research was done by The Open University. It would appear that the description “ducks” was provided from that source. The Mail has not questioned that description, nor any of the other media outlets I’ve read so far. Yet the reaction on blog sites has been immediate and rightly sarcastic which mirrors my own.  Why describe them as “ducks”.  One website immediately entered (birds) after “ducks” and rightly so.(ref to follow).

Does it matter? Yes. Anything that shares a headline with “Stonehenge” and is a new type of artefact is important. The Mail is vague about precisely how far from Stonehenge, saying “near”. How near?

I had to browse a number of sites to find where precisely. It’s at “Vespasian’s Camp” just 1 mile east of Stonehenge with we’re told the bed of a spring. One’s left to assume that’s the original source of “water” into which the carved figurines were said to have been tossed  as an 'offering' .  (Evidence?). Vespasian’s camp, btw, is  fancifully named after a Roman commander, later emperor, which is a totally misleading name for the location, it being an Iron Age promontory 9soory to be so vague - am still researching the precise nature of this landscape feature). Again, one has to do one’s own rooting around.

Have discovered for googling that Ice-Age/bluestone specialist Brian John’s site did a posting on the birds, back in 2011, attracting some 74 comments in all (!) I’ve now read them all, some (not all) being quite thought-provoking.  I’m willing to bet that not a single “science reporter” has done so, and there’s no response either from academe, certainly no one from the Open University.

This blogger’s views on those “birds”? No, they don’t look in the least bit like “ducks” and I consider it extraordinary that the Open University chose that description, not merely because it sentimentalizes prehistory ("oh look, little ducks, how cute!")  but more seriously because it pre-empts serious debate as to what birds represented and, more importantly, for what purpose – artistic, religious or even utilitarian.

Yes, utilitarian. Here’s where one has to get speculative. Both look ‘bottom-heavy’ as if designed to be that way. Why? The low centre of gravity means that if knocked and tilted,say by a real bird taking a closer look and inquisitive peck,  they would probably tend to return to the vertical. Might they then have been designed as decoys, intended to attract other birds who mistake them from afar as their real cousins, or even come in to sate their curiosity?

Had these “decoys” been found closer to Stonehenge I would have suggested they were indeed decoys designed to attract birds, scavenging ones especially,  to the site, given its identification as an excarnation site.  Being two miles away does not of course invalidate that conjecture.

But keeping an open mind, and framing a possible hypothesis, means that future archaeologists should now be on the lookout for more of these figurines ESPECIALLY at any site with present or previous standing stones or timber posts, i.e.  ones with this blogger’s putative “bird perches”, maybe decoy-baited as an avian attention-grabber.

New addition: Tuesday April 26

The so-called  "House of the Dead ". (But where's the evidence it was a house, or even had a roof?)

We now shift to the Woodhenge site, or rather to some private land just 450m SW of it.

Don't expect to see a house. In fact don't expect to see anything. Here's a description (my highlighting) provided by the Historic England site:

The (long barrow) monument includes a levelled long barrow aligned north east-south west located some 450m WSW of Woodhenge on Countess Farm and situated on a west facing slope. The barrow is now difficult to identify on the ground. However, the ditches which flank the mound of the long barrow on its western and eastern sides, from which material was quarried during its construction, survive as buried features and are visible as parchmarks.

The red patch is the location of the long barrow on an OS map, with Woodhenge just visible as a collection of dots top right. The aerial view beneath is the satellite photo from Google Earth.

Now be prepared for a surprise, dear reader, since this unpromising-looking site was the subject of a blaze of publicity in 2014, after the magnetometer survey carried out by a joint team from Birmingham and Vienna, under the project name "Hidden Landscapes".


Here's a composite of the graphics that were carried in national newspapers, BBC documentaries ec.


What you see what some reports describe as a reconstruction of a 'mortuary house' aka "House of the Dead".

Reconstruction from location of post holes: the 'House of the Dead' 450m SW of Woodhenge.

The first thing to note is the odd way this "house" tapers on its long axis. It's described as "trapezoid" in shape, with only two sides, or rather ends, parallel to each other. Isn't that somewhat odd for a house? Yes, but we're assured that such structures have been described by archaeologists on the Continent, so that's all right then. But why would anyone want or need to have a tapering house?

What I haven't said so far is that the evidence for this house with its ridge roof rests on finding postholes. It's not entirely clear how much surviving timber was left - possibly enough for radiocarbon dating. But it's the number and position of those post holes that concern us now. They are shown we're told in the diagram, top left. From that the full above ground structure is 'visualized' (top right).
So what's the evidence for that roof then?

Lets's take a closer look at the 'footprint' of those postholes.
The first thing to notice is that the conspicuous solid white circles are NOT the footprint. They are the position of IMAGINED tops of timber supports. Leaving aside the question as to how their heights could be known, given that most if not all the timber had rotted away, it's important to realize that the pattern one sees, which at first sight might just possibly be suited to supporting a roof, looks entirely different if one descends from each solid white circle to the BASE of the supports.
Here's a close-up to which I've added yellow arrows.

 

Two of the supposedly taller "roof supports". Roof supports? Really?

In fact those taller post indicated, shown with their 3D rendering, are NOT in the right position to support the highest part of a ridge roof. They are NOT in the midline, but tucked up against the side of the structure, as can be seen by tracing back to the bases.

In fact, when one looks ate the number and distribution of the post HOLES one sees that they are :

1. In the wrong places to support the roof

2. In the wrong places for the inside of what is claimed to be a "house". Who would want or expect to navigate a forest of support poles when stepping inside a house, regardless of the function of that so-called house?

So, take away what would appear to be an entirely imaginary roof, and what is one left with? Not a house, that much is certain. One is left with a sturdy stockade of butted up posts inside of which is that scattered array of posts with no obvious function, and still an impediment to anyone inside.

But there's a clue, and it involves that E word, which to their credit the archaeologists have deployed, despite being less than 2 miles for Stonehenge where any mention of the E word is strictly taboo, or so it would seem, surveying the media and internet sites. Yes, it's E for excarnation, and here's a quote showing the site was not just viewed as a "mortuary house", which I consider a hastily-chosen and misleading misnomer:

 

Here's the account from the Guardian, one of just many i could have chosen, with a quote from the Viennese co-director:

One of the most striking monuments to emerge from the survey was a 33 metre-long burial mound containing a massive wooden building whose timber foundations – and a giant upright blocking its entrance – were spotted in the soil. Predating Stonehenge, the building is thought to have been a house of the dead where bizarre burial rituals were played out. "The rituals included exposure of the dead bodies, and defleshing on a large forecourt," said Wolfgang Neuber, at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute. The house was later covered in chalk and finally became a curious white landmark."

I say, steady on old chap. This is England. You can't just go slipping that E word into the conversation, not when talking to meeja. You have to obfuscate, to say nothing of consulting with your Birmingham opposite number on the delicate matter of 'grantsmanship'. Now  it would be entirely different were you to be hosting an obscure blog, like this one. Then you can say pretty well what you want, provided you stay clear of libel actions.

So, to the 64000 question: what was the purpose of that one-time open-air stockade, then ignominously covered over with a chalk and soil capping to become just another of those barrows that punctuate the plaisn and downs of Wiltshire, and even later to be ploughed level with the surrounding fields it would seem?

Answer: I say the site was a timber prototype for Stonehenge, that it was designed as a bird sanctuary, offering a sizeable number of tallish bird perches, maybe a couple of metres high,  on which flesh-scavenging species  (crows, ravens, gulls etc) could rest and intermittently feed on the corpses of the newly dead.


Why tapered ("trapezoid").  There may be a mundane explanation: the constructors may have realized they had insufficient timber to make it a perfect rectangle, so decided to economise by tapering the long sides to make the far end smaller than its opposite number. I'd want to taper too, while waiting for metal axes and saws to be invented...

 

Appendices:

1.

My first search term ("stonehenge") has been crassly scored out from all the returns shown, allowing entries  of an IRRELEVANT commercial nature, though NOT flagged up as ads. Google is now in free fall re its original mission statement.

2.

Again, the first search term has been deleted, and the first 3 returns are blatantly commercial. One of my postings finally gets a look-in, thanks to the coupling of stonehenge with a new descriptor (mine) i.e. bird perch.  This blogger's posting would not appear under a simple "stonehenge" search were it not for added descriptors. Google would much prefer to select and clutter up its pages with wacky click-bait ephemera whose prime purpose is clearly to drive e-commerce, it's real raison d'etre (forget the whiter-than-white guff).

Further appendices in preparation.

Why the need for all those Neolithic standing stones at Stonehenge and Avebury? Why were igneous bluestones required from the distant Welsh mountains?

Here's a little experiment I did earlier today with some spotted dolerite, one of the distinctive stone monoliths from which Stonehenge was constructed some 4,500 years ago on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England.

I'd have preferred to have done it with a chunk of the as-is material, not from Stonehenge obviously but from the outcrop of rock in the Preseli mountains of west Wales from which it has recently been confirmed as coming from originally (we can leave the question of how for another day).

Regrettably, all I had to hand was a polished specimen of spotted dolerite, purchased at the tourist gift shop at Stonehenge. Never mind. one has to start somewhere.

What I wanted to do was test its resistance to penetration by water, i.e. porosity, for reasons I'll explain in a minute or two.

Fig. 1:  That's the specimen next to my watch, before adding anything. That's a metal ring, top left, for attaching to a chain, in case you were wondering.

Fig. 2: Here I'm adding a few drops of water from a plastic pipette to form a puddle on the surface

Fig. 3:  Here's a close-up view, showing how the water puddles on the surface, which straightaway looks as if it's non-porous, non-absorbent.

Fig.4: Here we are again, just over 30 minutes later. The puddle is still there. the water has not soaked into the rock.

So what's the relevance of this to Stonehenge one may ask?

When or if you visit Stonehenge, you could be forgiven for thinking that the  standing stones are all made of the same kind of rock. One might even get that impression from looking at photographs from the internet:

Fig 5: At first glance the standing stones of Stonehenge may all look much the same, differing only in size. In fact the tall ones are local sedimentary sandstone ("sarsens") , while the dwarf ones to the right ar  igneous Welsh-derived bluestone.

In fact there are two main types in the above photograph.  The taller ones are the local so-called sarsens, which are made of a particular kind of sedimentary rock (sandstone) which has been subject to further chemical action by acidic water to make "silicified sandstone". But they are still classified as a  "sedimentary rock". But note the smaller stones.They are made of the same stuff as my gift shop "bluestone" which could  be spotted dolerite or something else (rhyolite) but there's an important difference between the small and large ones. The small ones are igneous/metamorphic rock that  was originally from the Preseli mountains or maybe other locations far away in west Wales. Ignoring how the stones got to the Salisbury Plain, why was that igneous rock used for the smaller standing stones, which some believe to have been the first ones to be erected on site?


No one knows for sure, nor does this blogger. But I'm not persuaded by the argument that our Neolithic ancestors regarded spotted dolerite etc as having "curative properties". Why not? Because apart from being entirely conjectural and not amenable to testing, it skips the question as to why one would go the trouble of setting up these standing stones in the first place. One thing's for certain. "Bluestone", despite its name, is not noticeably
 more attractive than sarsen sandstone, at least in its natural unpolished state. But it's water-repellent. Might that be part of the answer, for reasons we'll see in a minute?

So what made this blogger decide to do the simple test with water?

Answer: it was prompted by what he read as regards the local sarsen stone and its response to water. Here's what William Stukely said, writing a few hundred years ago when attempts had been made to build homes from broken-up sarsen stones.

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From wiki:

William Stukeley (1687-1765) wrote that sarsen is "always moist and dewy in winter which proves damp and unwholesome, and rots the furniture". In the case of Avebury, the investors who backed a scheme to recycle the stone were bankrupted when the houses they built proved to be unsaleable...

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Perhaps not surprisingly, sarsen stones, being a sedimentary rock formed by compression and cementation between solid particles, has a porous open structure that allows damp and water to penetrate.

Unfortunately,I have not been able as yet to do the control experiment with sarsen sandstone, for direct confirmation that it is porous, taking up water, in contrast to the bluestone which is non-porous. But their different origins as sedimentary versus igneous rock make that difference highly predictable. An igneous rock, formed with slow solifidification of molten magma beneath the blanketing Earth's crust, with no rapid outgassing of volcanic gases, would be expected to have a non-porous water- impermeable structure, and would thus be water-repellent, as seen above.

Relevance to Stonehenge? No obvious relevance if starting from scratch. But this blogger had a prior model in needing of testing, and the test with the bluestone and water confirmed a prediction. What then was the model?

Answer: it was flagged up earlier today in comments posted to two other internet sites. I'll simply paste them here for starters, in the belief they are self-explanatory, and maybe return later to see if there are any details that need further explanation.

First, my comment on the ancient-origins site:

• Reply to: The Monumental and Mysterious Silbury Hill   5 hours 25 min ago
  Comment Author: Colin Berry
  reply to comment
  Standing stones simply bird perches?
  I put up a post yesterday on my own Neolithic site, recently re-activated after a longish break, hardening up on a theory some 4 years in the making, one that offers an explanation for the close proximity of Avebury, Silbury Hill and the Long Barrow at West Kennet.
  https://sussingstonehenge.wordpress.com/2016/04/17/might-the-standing-st...
  Very briefly, it’s as follows. The reason for creating standing stones, e.g. like those at Avebury, was to provide places on which scavenging birds (crows, ravens, seagulls) could perch between meals. The meals were the recently dead, laid out for excarnation (aka defleshing aka ‘sky burial’). Silbury was the home of a ‘token gesture’ interment, probably the heart only – harvested before excarnation, probably intended to assist release of the soul from mortal remains. The excarnated bones were then taken home by the relatives, or for more important folk, deposited in the nearby Long Barrow.
  I’m working on a similar narrative for Stonehenge/Durrington Walls and hundreds of barrows with the cross-piece lintels arriving finally as a superior bird perch. I think I can explain the initial preference for the Welsh bluestones over local sarsen sandstone, prior to lintels, apart from them being smaller. Clue: they’re easier to keep clean, igneous rock being more liquid-repellent than sedimentary sandstone...  (go figure).
  Yes, it can make somewhat grisly reading, but the alternative options were difficult too (thin soil on chalk bedrock making grave-digging difficult, especially with pre-Bronze age antler picks, and shortage of firewood for cremation via funeral pyres).

Second: my comment on Brian John's Stonehenge/ Ice Age site:

sciencebod said...

Whether quarried, or simply picked up and carried away, whether by ice or by the unmentionable, there's another possibility re the use of that igneous, non-sedimentary rock. I've just flagged it up on the ancient-origins site.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/comment/18675#comment-18675

A full posting will follow in a day or two. Suffice it to say I reckon there's a simple rationale for all those standing stones, without or without lintels.

They served simply as perches for scavenger birds (crows, ravens, seagulls). What were they scavenging, within a Neolithic funereal context (excarnation, sky burial). Go figure.

The ideal material for a bird perch is one that is easily cleaned (non-porous rock...).

Colin Berry

18 April 2016 at 13:27

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Yes. I consider that the standing stones of Stonehenge, Avebury, maybe further afield (Carnac,Brittany etc) were intended be perches for scavenger birds, the latter required and indeed encouraged to visit in flocks for the purpose of passive excarnation (de-fleshing, aka sky burial) of the newly dead. Welsh bluestone was valued more highly than sarsen stone when the standing stones were the height of a man or less, ie. the tops clearly visible, since being non-porous it was easier to periodically rinse-off with water as and when they started to look unsightly (food remnants, fouling etc) as inevitably they would.

Neolithic Silbury Hill: communal earthworm-implanted compost heap for freeing trapped souls from mortal remains?

Screen grab of this blogger's article on the Ancient-Origins website, published April 7, 2016

Title: Was Neolithic Silbury Hill Designed as a Welcoming Home for Omnivorous, Upwardly-Mobile Earthworms?

Google has been quick to pick up my solution to the Silbury enigma: here's what one currently sees when entering (silbury hill) into the search engine.

More will follow here in a few days time, after I've had an opportiunity to deal with any comments that may appear on the ancient-origins site (though none as yet!).

The basic idea: Silbury Hill was designed as a community necropolis with multiple interments of one or more vital organs of the recently deceased (heart especially), together with soil from the deceased's locality, with intentional inclusion of EARTHWORMS. Composting action served to biodegrade the soft tissue, freeing the soul from mortal remains. Discussion of the fate of the skeleton, disposed of elsewhere, i.e. not within the hill, will be deferred for now.

Here again is a link to the article:

 Here's the URL in full:

http://www.ancient-origins.net/opinion-editorials/was-neolithic-silbury-hill-designed-welcoming-home-omnivorous-upwardly-mobile-020800

Today's task (Sunday 10 April) will be to update my Silbury Hill/Stonehenge site that blossomed briefly in the spring of 2012 - yes 4 years ago no less! It was a brief diversion from this blogger's long-running interest/research programme to do with the Turin Shroud.

Home page: this blogger's specialist Shroud of Turin site, 10th April 2016, with its posting summarising the proposed "flour-imprinting" model.

(Yes, I think I know how it was done by one very determined, very focused medieval entrepreneur).

Here's how the Home page of that Silbury site of mine looks right now, showing the last of 4 postings on 8th April 2012:

Shortly to be reactivated - this blogger's long-neglected specialist Neolithic Wiltshire site (Stonehenge AND Silbury Hill).

New topics to be addressed over there?  We, there will be some ideas/explanation for the mysterious sarsen stones (portable variety) that stud the interior of Silbury Hill, which have been likened to "raisins in a cake", not ignoring the presence of animal bones (ox ribs) next to one such stone. Yes, their presence, and orientation (concave side down) fits beautifully with my theory that Silbury Hill evolved incrementally as a communal necropolis for interring  human remains! The site will also be the logical place to recount details of my recent visit with wife to Silbury Hill, West Kennet Long Barrow and Avebury stone circle, but also Silbury Hill's smaller little-known sister a few miles east in the grounds of Marlborough College.

Marlborough Mound (this blogger's own photograph taken 22nd March 2016)

(Fortunately my wife and I arrived at the gate out of term time, and were allowed in where I was able to take pictures, and have since learned that Dr.Jim Leary of the University of Reading's Archaeology Dept., co-author with David Field of the excellent book on Silbury Hill, did some recent test borings into the so-called Marlborough Mound, confirming it be of Neolithic-era origin, not just a country squire's self-indulgent garden feature as some had imagined).

Late addition (April 12, 2016): see the latest posting on my re-activated Silbury/Stonehenge site, the first since 2012, but still "preaching the same message" re the utilitarian role that the proto-Silbury Hill appears to have played  on the chalk uplands of Neolithic Wiltshire.:

Link:


Here's a follow-up to the above posting, on the same site, posted earlier today (April 12): it addresses the question of why Silbury Hill is studded with rounded sarsen stones (local silicified sandstone), scores of them,   "like raisins in a cake" to quote the words of the distinguished archaeologist Richard Atkinson who oversaw the 1968 "dig", if tunnelling can be so described.

Link:

Is officially-approved smokeless “house coal” stinking out our neighbourhoods – despite its “low sulphur” designation?

Fig.1: Burning coal can produce flame, smoke AND smelly sulphurous fumes - even when well-supplied with oxygen. It's the result of DESTRUCTIVE DISTILLATION  of coal aka pyrolysis, in addition to simpler chemical combustion. Expect volatile sulphur compounds that are smellier than sulphur dioxide (SO2)  e.g. CS2, COS, H2S etc.

I shall keep this posting brief, it merely flagging up this blogger’s latest research project, with much reading and research still to be done.

The title is prompted by the experience in recent years of walking into town – a distance of a mile or so – and being hit once in a while at one or even two places by an overpowering stench of coal smoke, not just any old coal smoke, but sulphurous smoke, smelling of bad eggs or worse.

How can that be, one may ask? Even if one does not live in a town with the strictest restrictions on what kind of solid fuel can be burned – in a boiler or open fire – there are still regulations on what can and cannot be burned. Typically they are that the coal has to be:(a) smokeless and (b) low sulphur – max.2% of dry weight.

Here’s where it gets interesting – or should that be ominous? On every occasion I’ve walked into a sulphurous fug, I’ve looked around carefully at all the chimney pots, and never seen a trace of smoke!

How can that be? Has the fug come in from somewhere distant, and then suddenly dropped to ground  level? Unlikely, because already I’m finding certain locations tend to have the fug, not others, suggesting the source of pollution is local, despite the absence of visible smoke.

That leaves us with another disturbing possibility, namely that coal is being marketed as smokeless, as indeed it may be, and meeting the regulations on maximum sulphur content, but is putting smelly, noxious sulphur compounds out into the atmosphere that are invisible. How likely is that? If likely, is it a result of simplistic chemical thinking that assumes that because a particular coal is smokeless and has low sulphur content, it cannot be a pollution hazard in the sense that it its combustion products are odourless or largely so?

Let’s look closely at what is meant, or rather assumed by “combustion”, because what happens in the real world may be a far cry from what happens in a chemistry laboratory under ideal conditions.

First, when one looks at official documents on coal for domestic use, one sees time and again the assumption that the sulphur in coal ends up in the atmosphere as sulphur dioxide, SO2. In other words the sulphur has become highly oxidized through reaction with oxygen.

[S] in coal  + O2 (from air)  ->  SO2

Sulphur dioxide, especially from coal-fired power stations, one may recall is the gas held responsible for acid rain  and acidification of distant lakes (dissolving in water to form sulphurous acid, and later oxidizing to the much stronger sulphuric acid). Sulphur dioxide gas also irritates the airways, causes asthma attacks, and was a major contributor to the 4000 or so premature deaths in the 50s from the killer smogs due to domestic and other coal fires. It was that experience that led to the Clean Air Acts, the most recent in 1993, specifiying the maximum sulphur content of coal and other domestic solid fuels derived therefrom.

OK, so there’s always going to be some SO2 when one burns a “house coal” right, and one has to live with that. End of story as regards sulphur? No, far from it, and anyone who says otherwise is either chemically naive or if not is failing to tell the whole story.

The fact of the matter is that when one sets light to coal, say with kindling, one does not get immediate combustion with complete oxidation (C to CO2, S to SO2). That may be true for the surface layers, where there is plenty of oxygen and a flame (from wood) to ensure that gases oxidize completely. But there’s another chemical process that goes on called PYROLYSIS, aka destructive distillation ( a more descriptive term).

When coal and other organic materials (paper, wood etc) are heated, the first thing to happen is that the complex molecules (cellulose, lignin) break down into fragments that are liquid or gaseous. That’s the process called “pyrolysis” – splitting into smaller more volatile fragments.

Here’s where it gets interesting. If there’s a naked flame and oxygen, then those pyrolysis gases ignite, and one gets a bigger and better flame. The fire takes hold as we say; the kindling does its job of setting the coal alight (or rather, not the solid coal initially, but the pyrolysis gases).

But what if those pyrolysis fumes manage to evade the flame and/or cool before they have had been able to mix with air and oxygen? What then? What happens to them? Answer: they go up the chimney, and out into the neighbourhood, and no, the sulphur will not be in the form of SO2, with its hopefully limited odour and toxicity. It goes out in the form of pyrolysis products of the sulphur in the coal, the presence and nature of which is rarely if ever acknowledged in the official literature. Indeed, one has to search the chemical literature on coal combustion, complete versus incomplete and especially “destructive distillation” to find out what they are. It would be no exaggeration to say one hits a brick wall, and starts to wonder why.

Fortunately there’s a near obsolete literature to which one can turn to get some clues. It’s to do with the manufacture of “town gas” aka coal gas that occurred prior to the introduction of North Sea natural gas in the 60s onwards. One is referring to gas works chemistry (and oh boy, were gas works smelly places, as the writer can personally attest).

Fig. 2 and acknowledgements: 

 

Making gas from coal (by pyrolysis, aka destructive distillation)

http://www.nationalgasmuseum.org.uk/making-gas-from-coal/

Graphic and caption from the National Gas Museum Site. This is a description of destructive distillation of coal, aka pyrolysis, NOT combustion. Note the need for a purifier to remove the volatile sulphur compounds from the gas stream before the latter could be piped to people's homes. IMPORTANT: we are not talking about sulphur dioxide, SO2, but MUCH SMELLIER SULPHUR COMPOUNDS (see earlier). That distinction between destructive distillation - which can take place in the absence or presence of air - and combustion, complete or otherwise, is crucial if one is to understand how the"cleanest" of coals can pollute if still containing sulphur and burned under non-ideal conditions.

In gas works, the coal was not “burned”. It was placed in retorts, open at one end only, and heated where it underwent pyrolysis, i.e. destructive distillation. The impure coal gas was mainly hydrogen and methane, but had smelly  sulphur compounds too. But here's the difference with the domestic coal fire, lacking oxygen. The coal gas was cleaned up to remove the sulphur impurities. It was called flue gas desulphurisation and used “scrubbers” that contained alkali (slaked lime etc) to take out the sulphur compounds. Domestic fireplaces do not have scrubbers needless to say. Expect chimney smoke from coal fires to contain sulphur compounds that are NOT entirely sulphur dioxide as seems to be the assumption in the UK's Clean Air legislation and regulation.

Expect to see an appendix at the end for more detailed chemical information in a day or two for some of the objectionable sulphur compounds. For now, let’s list the main culprits, which were likely to be one or more of the following in varying proportions: hydrogen sulphide (H2S), carbon disulphide (CS2) and carbonyl sulphide (COS). The hydrogen sulphide could be a primary product, but is also formed as a secondary product when carbonyl sulphide reacts with water in moist air (of which there's no shortage in the UK) to form H2S and CO2.

So what’s all this to do with the “clean green” house coal that folks are having delivered to their homes, often brought thousands of miles (naming no countries of origin!) on account of its impeccable credentials (easy to light, burns with bright flame, burns longer and hotter, low ash, and yes, the all-important tags: smokeless and low sulphur).

Answer: not a definitive one, at least not yet, more a suspicion, a hunch, that there’s been a terrible oversight on the part of the regulatory authorities: they have assumed that the low sulphur of these super-smokeless fuels goes up the chimney and into the neighbourhood as sulphur dioxide.

But does it, especially when the solid fuel is burning under less than ideal conditions, and indeed is not burning in the true sense, but undergoing pyrolysis/destructive distillation?

Might it be possible that a coal that is smokeless and possessing other desirable characteristics in the grate does NOT combust to SO2. Might it be predisposed to become less oxidized sulphur compounds like the ones listed – H2S, CS2, COS etc?

Have these much-touted super-smokeless fuels ever been tested to see what happens to their intrinsic sulphur when ‘burned’ under real-life conditions? Have their emissions from chimneys ever been monitored and analysed for SO2 and OTHER SULPHUR COMPOUNDS?

Do we need to worry about them? Yes. H2S, despite being easily dismissed as a “bad egg smell” is in fact highly toxic. Weight for weight it’s said to be more toxic than hydrogen cyanide. Carbon disulphide? So far I’ve not been able to find much except that it can (details to follow).  Carbonyl sulphide – again , hard to track down detailed information, but such as exists is not reassuring – it produces ‘neurological damage’. What, one might ask: like Parkinson’s disease,  Alzheimers and other dementia conditions of that nature?

 No, I don’t wish to appear alarmist, but neither should one be complacent when dealing with a class of compounds that are notorious for their toxicity at low levels (reminder: mustard gas of WW1 was an easily-vaporisible sulphur compound  - C₄H₈Cl₂S,  bis(2-chloroethyl) sulphide).

So what are the next steps, being a responsible citizen, or so I like to think?

First, one needs to build up a stock of anecdotal evidence that certain 'hotspots' in  this blogger's home neighbourhood are regularly afflicted with the particular ‘sulphurous stink’ as distinct from that of ordinary coal smoke. By "ordinary" I mean the kind one encountered in one’s childhood with the sharp but not disgusting SO2 smell, NOT the gaswork's "rotten egg" type. 

Secondly, the jackpot, attempt to spot smoke from a particular chimney, even if the merest wisp, that would identify the property as burning particular varieties of house coal. 

Thirdly: inform the local authority, urge them to pay a call and see whether (as I suspect) the coal being burned IS approved for use. 

Fourthly: press for proper and thorough analytical tests be run on the combustion/pyrolysis characteristics of allegedly ‘clean’ solid fuels marketed as approved house coal to check them out for possible release of noxious sulphur compounds under realistic conditions – NOT just those that are designed to ensure complete combustion under ideal laboratory conditions.

I shall of course be sending my local Council a link to this posting. What would be nice would be for the Council to become proactive in checking out the hypothesis presented here. I shall also send a link to my contact at a national newspaper, one whom I recently assisted with a different chemically-related issue.

Chemical appendix (more to follow):

The red box contains some chemical reactions that can take place in a bed of hot coal to produce (a) sulphur dioxide (b) hydrogen sulphide (c) carbon disulphide and (d) carbonyl sulphide. Irrelevant reactions to the present discussion scored out.

 These data were taken from the following recent and splendidly detailed paper:

2012 Paper by J. Preciado et al.

Also from this blogger:

1. A solution to the enigmatic Turin Shroud?

See most recent posting on specialist Turin Shroud site:

https://shroudofturinwithoutallthehype.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/modelling-the-shroud-of-turin-with-white-flour-olive-oil-and-a-real-face-in-pictures/

2. A solution to the enigmatic Silbury Hill? 

See preview in comments under this posting on the ancient-origins site:

http://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/not-great-place-pass-night-haunted-mounds-prehistoric-times-004878?nopaging=1

 

 SUMMARY OF POSTING

So what’s the nub of the hypothesis? How is it different from what has appeared before, and is it grounded in authentic, dare one say authoritative chemistry?

1. “Smokeless” coals have an internal structure that allows the coal to be heated without releasing “puffs” of microparticulate carbon, read soot or smoke.

2. But that predilection to ‘hang onto’ carbon makes the sulphur of the coal behave differently on heating. In ordinary smoke-releasing coal, the sulphur is liberated in a form that is easily oxidized to sulphur dioxide.

3. In smokeless coal, the sulphur is NOT easily liberated in a form that oxidizes to sulphur dioxide. Maybe it is retained, in a manner similar to the carbon, and NOT released in puffs that are easily oxidized to SO2.

4. Instead of being easily released and oxidized to SO2, it is retained, at least for a bit longer, and instead of being oxidized to SO2, it participates in entirely different chemical reactions that convert it to other smellier sulphur compounds, notably carbon disulphide, carbonyl sulphide, hydrogen sulphide etc.

In other words, the properties of being “smokeless” and “releasing sulphur as SO2” are not mutually exclusive, as seems to be assumed by the regulatory authorities. One cannot go selecting coals for their tendency to burn without smoking, while assuming that the sulphur burns off normally and conventionally to SO2 as if an entirely independent process. 

 It was not sufficient to select for smokeless property and (merely) low sulphur content. The fate of that sulphur in the domestic fireplace should have been investigated experimentally. It was wrong to assume that the sulphur in a smokeless fuel burns off as sulphur dioxide. 

Alternative chemical pathways, not requiring oxygen, could predominate in smokeless fuels, giving rise to volatile sulphur end-products that go up the chimney and may well proceed to stink out the immediate neighbourhood far more than would be the case if SO2 had been the main endproduct.