Anybody here go souvenier hunting lately?

[Ron Caliburn]

LONDON (AFP) - Vandals used a hammer and screwdriver to vandalize England's world-famous Stonehenge ancient monument, the first such incident for decades, officials said Thursday.

The night-time attack by two men last week involved the central megalith in the 5,000-year-old ring of standing stones, said the conservation body English Heritage, adding that they could have been looking for a souvenir.

A chip of stone about the size of a large coin was removed, while a 2.5-inch- (6.5 centimetre-) long scratch was left on the Heel Stone, at the centre of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, near Salisbury, southwest England.

"Thanks to the vigilance and quick action of the security team at Stonehenge, very minimal damage was caused," said a spokeswoman for English Heritage.

"A tiny chip was taken from the north side of the Heel Stone with a screwdriver and hammer, but as soon as the two men were spotted by security guards they escaped over the fence and drove off.

"This is now a matter for the police," she added.

A spokeswoman for Wiltshire Police said: "Two male offenders were seen disturbing the monument with a hammer and screwdriver... It is believed they could be two men seen acting suspiciously on a previous occasion."

Stonehenge is one of the world's best preserved prehistic monuments. In around 2,600 BC, 80 giant standing stones were arranged on Salisbury Plain, where there was already a 400-year-old stone circle.

Around two centuries later, even bigger stones were brought to the plain.

Today, only 40 percent of the originals remain. But around 850,000 visitors per year come to marvel at the 17 stones which are still intact.

The biggest stones came from a quarry some 30 kilometres (18 miles) away, while some of the others come from a range of hills in south-west Wales, a 250-kilometre (150 mile) journey away.

So what would you do with a small piece of one of the most powerful mystic sites on earth?

[Michael T]

Perhaps a misguided attempt to be cool? On a darker note perhaps a talismin or other mystic componet. I hope it is just a couple of drunk fools that got tanked and decided to do something stupid to prove they are cool.

Michael T

[Ron Caliburn]

We could only be so lucky.

[KonThaak]

This...

This pisses me off. >_<;;

[Ethan Skinner]

So what would you do with a small piece of one of the most powerful mystic sites on earth?

I've heard conjectures that just a piece potentially holds the power of the whole.

[Ron Caliburn]

That makes me feel so good.

[GhostSpider]

I've heard conjectures that just a piece potentially holds the power of the whole.

Well, technically, through the use of sympathetic magic, that would be true. Still, we are talking some seriously powerful mojo. Not something your everyday arcanist can do.

[Ron Caliburn]

So to tap it all from a litle piece, you'd need to be pretty powerful anyway . . .

So, anyone else not particularly reassured by that?

[Ethan Skinner]

I've heard conjectures that just a piece potentially holds the power of the whole.

Well, technically, through the use of sympathetic magic, that would be true. Still, we are talking some seriously powerful mojo. Not something your everyday arcanist can do.

I don't see what difference it makes. If the thief has the power, dang. If the thief doesn't, something with the right power can find it, and double dang.

[GhostSpider]

It narrows the suspects, if nothing else.

[Ron Caliburn]

Since we are talking Stonehenge

England's enigmatic Stonehenge served as a burial ground from its earliest beginnings and for several hundred years thereafter, new research indicates.

Dating of cremated remains shows burials took place as early as 3000 B.C., when the first ditches around the monument were being built, researchers said Thursday.

And those burials continued for at least 500 years, when the giant stones that mark the mysterious circle were being erected, they said.

"It's now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages," said Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield in England and head of the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project.

In the past many archaeologists had thought that burials at Stonehenge continued for only about a century, the researchers said.

"Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the dead," Parker Pearson said in a statement.

The researchers also excavated homes nearby at Durrington Walls, which they said appeared to be seasonal homes related to Stonehenge.

"It's a quite extraordinary settlement, we've never seen anything like it before," Parker Pearson said. The village appeared to be a land of the living and Stonehenge a land of the ancestors, he said.

There were at least 300 and perhaps as many as 1,000 homes in the village, he said. The small homes were occupied in midwinter and midsummer.

The village also included a circle of wooden pillars, which the researchers have named the Southern Circle. It is oriented toward the midwinter sunrise, the opposite of Stonehenge, which is oriented to the midsummer sunrise.

The research was supported by the National Geographic Society, which discusses Stonehenge in its June magazine and will feature the new burial data on National Geographic Channel on Sunday.

The researchers said the earliest cremation burial was a small group of bones and teeth found in pits called the Aubrey Holes and dated to 3030-2880 B.C., about the time with the first ditch-and-bank monument was being built.

Remains from the surrounding ditch included an adult dated to 2930-2870 B.C., and the most recent cremation, Parker Pearson said, comes from the ditch's northern side and was of a 25-year-old woman. It dated to 2570-2340 B.C., around the time the first arrangements of large sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.

According to Parker Pearson's team, this is the first time any of the cremation burials from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated. The burials dated by the group were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

In the 1920s an additional 49 cremation burials were dug up at Stonehenge, but all were reburied because they were thought to be of no scientific value, the researchers said.

They estimate that up to 240 people were buried within Stonehenge, all as cremation deposits.

Team member Andrew Chamberlain suggested that that the cremation burials represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty.

A clue to this, he said, is the small number of burials in Stonehenge's earliest phase, a number that grows larger in subsequent centuries, as offspring would have multiplied.

Parker Pearson added: "I don't think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge — it was clearly a special place at that time. One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials."

The actual building and purpose of Stonehenge remain a mystery that has long drawn speculation from many sources.

And not all archaeologists agree with Parker Pearson's theory.

Indeed, the June issue of National Geographic Magazine quotes Mike Pitts, editor of the journal British Archaeology, as saying some details of the theory are problematic with gaps remaining to be filled. Uses of the landscape in the area for farming and grazing, for example, do not seem compatible with a ritualized place.

"The value of this interpretation is not just the idea of linking stones and ancestors, but that it works with the entire landscape," Pitts was quoted as saying.

I don't think this is a surprise for anyone, but it adds some not so happy implications about the recent theft.

[Clarity]

_____Why didn’t they put the right people back into the ground? Their families will miss them, won’t they?