The Geologists rely on the archaeological finds to date the geological segments, which in turn is dated by the archaeologists relying on Geological dating – this is known a a circular argument.
Yes you’re right - it’s nonsense, as neither the Geologists nor the archaeologists know the date of these flood plans as they rely on each other for the dates. Consequently the flood plans could be any date in the past 70,000 years including the dates just after the last ice age.
What is most interesting is that 90% of all the tools found in the Avon River Terrance investigation were found on Terrace number 7 - the exact same height that matches our hypothesis - a coincidence??
If our hypothesis is correct not only must the river Avon be much higher in the past than today, but ALL the rivers in Britain during the Mesolithic (10,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE) in PARTICULAR the rivers that are the Avon feeds before reaching the Sea and one of these Rivers is the Thames.
CASE STUDY - “The Holocene Evolution of the River Thames”, Jane Sidell, Kieth Wilkinson, Museum of London 2000.
River Thames in the Mesolithic Period
River Thames during the Roman Period
In 2000 the Museum of London, published a book based on the research undertaken when the extension to the Jubilee Line was being planned.
This research was written by Jane Sidell, Keith Wilkinson , Robert Scaife and Nigel Cameron, all experts in their field working for either the Museum of London or associated Universities. The book ‚The Holocene Evolution of the London Thames’, did not raise much interest even though the conclusions should have alerted the archaeological world to the fact that the Holocene (immediately after the ice age) environment was much changed from today.
They found that the Thames was 10 times larger in the Mesolithic Period directly after the Ice Age than today and Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were on an island called ‚Thorney’. Their report showed that the Thames was even much bigger just 2000 years ago compared to today when the Romans first discovered our capital city.
This is why the first roads were built via Thorney Island as the City of London was impossible to cross without a boat. Later when the Romans had need of deep water harbour, the city of London was used and bridges were built to span the river.
They found masses of `alluvium’ in the mouth of the Thames indicating the size of the river when it was first created. This could be accurately dated as the Thames as we see today did not exist until the end of the last ice age cut the new channel as we have seen from other case histories from America.
As the River Thames is fresh water and in the Mesolithic Period the Sea water levels were 65m lower than today - where did all that water come from to fill the Thames to that extent?
And the ONLY answer to this question is `groundwater levels’ and rivers that feed the Thames directly. Consequently, these volumes will in turn need to be ten times greater than today. So with all that extra groundwater and swollen rivers - how would Britain look in the Mesolithic Period?
The River Thames is feed by many rivers including the Kennet and River Avon, both of which would needed to be 10 times larger to feed the Thames the water it needed to create the ‚alluvium’ our archaeologist found in the Lower Thames. This means the River Avon would go from being 65m high at Amesbury to 97m high. At this height Stonehenge would become a peninsula surrounded by groundwater and the Mesolithic post holes, found in 1966, would have been on the shoreline - for they were used to moor the boats that brought the stones from the Preseli Mountains in Wales - a simple and direct route in the Flooded Mesolithic.
The River Thames clearly shows that water directly after the ice age raised groundwater levels in Britain and therefore proves my hypothesis that the landscape was flooded in the early Mesolithic period. Although the evidence from the roman occupation shows that some 10,000 years later the Roman still found the River so high that it took another 400 years before the city of London started to take shape as we know it today.
This slow drop in groundwater levels after the great melt can be seen very graphically in our second case study on the South Downs. In this case study we can see that these high groundwater levels still affected our land even just 500 years ago.
Proof of Hypothesis No.4
The river Thames was ten times larger in the Mesolithic period than today and of ‘fresh water’ as the sea level was 30m lower. This river had to be feed by other rivers to obtain the necessary volume to exist. Therefore, the rivers that feed the Thames were also ten times larger than the same rivers today. This could only happen if the ground water levels were higher.
Case study – RIVER OUSE
The Ouse is one of the four rivers that cut through the South Downs. It is presumed that its valley was cut during a glacial period, since it forms the remnant of a much larger river system that once flowed onto the floor of what is now the English Channel. The extent of the inundation it experienced after the last ice age can be observed in the lower valley which would have flooded; there are raised beaches 40 metres (Goodwood-Slindon) and 8 metres (Brighton-Norton) above present sea level. The offshore topography indicates that the current coastline was also the coastline before the final deglaciation, and therefore the mouth of the Ouse has long been at its present latitude, but as the height was up to 40m higher the width of the Ouse would have been like our other study the river Thames, ten times wider at its narrowest.
Archaeological evidence points to prehistoric dwellers in the area. Scholars think that the Roman settlement of Mutuantonis was here, as quantities of artefacts have been discovered in the area. The Saxons built a castle, having first constructed its motte as a defensive point over the river; they gave the town its name. But the most interesting aspect of Lewes is that it is seven miles from the current shoreline at Newhaven, until recent history (last 2000 years) it was the main port of the South coast as it had a huge natural shelter inland of the stormy seas.
Today the River Ouse is just a sleepy river running through the café bar area of the town yet in the recent past the town would have been a fishing port with boats moored up next to what we see as the High Street today.
Port of Lewes in the Late Neolithic Period
According to geologists the sea levels have been rising since the great flood after the last ice age and that the Isostatic uplift from the same event is now in reverse and lowering the landscape to compound the sea level rises - so why is Lewes gone from a sea port to a small idyllic river with café bars?
At Domesday (1086), the Ouse valley was still a tidal inlet with a string of settlements located at its margins. In later centuries the Ouse was draining the valley sufficiently well for some of the marshland to be reclaimed as highly prized meadow land. At this point in history the outlet of the Ouse at Seaford provided a natural harbour behind the shingle bar.
However, by the 14th century the Ouse valley was still regularly flooding in winter, and frequently the waters remained on the lower meadows through the summer. In 1422 a Commission of Sewers was appointed to restore the banks and drainage between Fletching and the coast, which may indicate that the Ouse was affected by the same storm that devastated the Netherlands in the St Elizabeth’s flood of 1421. Drainage became so bad that 400 acres (1.6 km2) of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s meadow at Southerham were converted into a permanent fishery (the Brodewater) in the mid-15th century, and by the 1530s the entire Lewes and Laughton Levels, 6,000 acres (24 km2), were reduced to marshland again.
Prior Crowham of Lewes Priory sailed to Flanders and returned with two drainage experts. In 1537 a water-rate was levied on all lands on the Levels to fund the cutting of a channel through the shingle bar at the mouth of the Ouse (below Castle Hill at Meeching) to allow the river to drain the Levels. This canalisation created access to a sheltered harbour, Newhaven, which succeeded Seaford as the port at the mouth of the Ouse.
The new channel drained the Levels and much of the valley floor was reclaimed for pasture. However, shingle continued to accumu
late and so the mouth of the Ouse began to migrate eastwards again. In 1648 the Ouse was reported to be unfit either to drain the levels or for navigation. By the 18th century the valley was regularly inundated in winter and often flooded in summer.
So we can see quite clearly, even with rising sea levels the natural groundwater under this part of the South Downs is 15,000 years after the great melt and flooding still causing problems and it’s only the industrial drainage of this area still keeping it from flooding. But was the flooding from the sea or from freshwater from groundwater under the South Downs.
This is an extract from a report on the viability of a new desalination plant in Newhaven. From ‘Geoarchaeological Assessment’ - (partial transcription from M. Bates in Dunkin 1998)
The Ouse basin is a medium sized catchment draining southwards in the southern Weald. The town of Newhaven and the investigation area lies at the mouth of the river where the lower course of the river has eroded a channel through the Chalk of the South Downs. The Pleistocene history of the river is poorly understood (Burrin and Jones, 1991) and remnants of older Pleistocene sediments (fluvial) occur upstream in the vicinity of the Brooks. Within the area of study Pleistocene deposits are restricted to head and valley fill sediments found on the valley sides and within the dry valley systems.
Holocene sediments dominate the valley bottom from the Brooks southwards to the sea at Newhaven. These deposits (mapped as alluvium by the British Geological Survey) include a wide variety of sediment types including marine beach gravels and sands, clay-silts, organic silts, peats and fluvial gravels and this zone has been described as the perimarine area (Burrin and Jones 1991).
Previous works indicated that some of these deposits contained freshwater and estuarine shells and that others reported pollen from these sediments (Thorley 1981) and a radiocarbon date of 6290+/-180 B.P., from a depth of –8.15m O.D. was reported from the Brooks (Jones 1971).
So geologists admit that the history of the Ouse (and other post glacial rivers) are ‘poorly understood’ which is the closest to a geologist admitting that the evidence does not fit the current theory. The evidence clearly shows that in 4290 BCE the Ouse valley was covered in freshwater. The only place to get this volume of freshwater would be the groundwater under the South Downs which must have still been so high that the valley remained flooded for over 10,000 years and not the few hundred year’s geologists currently suggest.
Proof of Hypothesis No.5
Sedimentary deposits from the South Downs, geologists believe to be from ancient rivers created during the last ice age having now been carbon dated to 4290 BCE. This indicates that these waterways were still active (wet) 7,000 years ago and not 17,000 as geologists have previously assumed.
Chapter 4 - Geological Maps of Britain
Superficial deposits are overlain on bedrock geology („solid geology” in the terminology of maps) is a varied distribution of unconsolidated material of more recent origin. It includes material deposited by glaciers (boulder clay, and other forms of glacial drift such as sand and gravel). „Drift” geology is often more important than „solid” geology when considering building works, drainage, sitting water boreholes, sand and gravel resources and soil fertility. Although „drift” strictly refers to glacial and fluvial-glacial deposits, the term on geological maps has traditionally included other material including alluvium, river terraces, etc. Recent maps use the terms „bedrock” and „superficial” in place of „solid” and „drift”4
Clear as mud really!!
Archaeologists have to rely on radiocarbon dating evidence to date prehistoric sites – no other credible method currently exists. Geologists however, do not use such methods and rely on dating by ‘strata’ evidence alone, as the rationale is that new soil is built upon the old strata (like rings on a tree) allowing geologists to date the strata.
The problem with this method is that if the surface in question is a river, the layers are interrupted by the ebb and flow of the water thus confusing matters. A recent study into perceived strata date did not match the real carbon dating evidence as shown in our next case study on the Mississippi delta.
Case Study - Anomalous Radiocarbon Dates
Problems associated with radiocarbon dating which can be both too old and in the wrong sequence, can be found in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences (Stanley,2001).
“ANOMALOUS RADIOCARBON DATES: In contrast with patterns of clustered radiocarbon dates at the base of Holocene sections, there is a weaker relationship between C-14 dates and core depths throughout most deltaic core sections. This poor relationship has been observed since early applications of the radiocarbon dating method to Mississippi Delta cores (Fisk & McFarlan 1955, Frazier 1967). A review of the literature indicates that most deltas for which radiocarbon dates are available, regardless of geographical and geological setting, record this inconsistent up section as stratigraphy.
Radiocarbon dates, both conventional and accelerator mass spectrometric (AMS), are not— as expected — consistently younger up core between the base and surface of deltaic sequences. In addition to age-date reversals up core, some dates in Holocene sections are clearly too old (some too late Pleistocene in age) and, not infrequently, those near the upper core surfaces are of mid- to late Holocene age.
In general, there is a modest to poor—and in some cases no—relationship among C-14 dates, core surface elevation, subsurface depth of sample in the Holocene sequence, material used for dating (i.e. shell, organic-rich sediment, and peat), and geographic position of a core site relative to the delta coast.”
As reported by Delibrias in 1989, “These findings are both remarkable and disturbing, because they call into question the reliability of both dates and method; they raise a concern regarding use of the radiocarbon method as presently applied to deltas. A literature survey indicates that deltas are by no means the only late Pleistocene to Holocene settings were dating problems are encountered.
Consequently, based on the fact that, as detailed above, geologists they question their own methodologies, it would be sensible to question the dates estimated by archaeologists using this same method of radiocarbon dating as with site on or near water. Evidence must be ‘put under the microscope and re-examined’ rather than simply assumed to be correct. Let’s look at our main case study site at Stonehenge and review the way geologists date the ‘dry river valleys’ of this area.
If we look at the geological map of this area, we notice that it is covered with what looks like rivers of ‘pink’ and ‘yellow’. The pink shows what is termed as ‘head’ and is defined as ‘variable deposits of sand, silty clay, local gravel, chalky and flinty in dry valleys’. The yellow is defined as ‘Alluvium, clay, silt and sand, locally organic with gravel’.
Not a lot of difference really except the alluvium and what is that you may be asking? Well it is defined as ‘Alluvium is typically made up of a variety of materials, including fine particles of silt and clay and larger particles of sand and gravel’.
Not confusing at all really!
BGS map of Stonehenge showing Head (pink) and Alluvium (yellow/white)
So when sand, clay and gravel is not part of a dead dried up water system hundreds of thousands of years old it’s called ‘head’ or ‘hill wash’ but not ‘alluvium’, which is the remains of an ancient river- this cannot be proven and is clearly utter nonsense as its impossible to differentiate between the two. The reality is that they are both part of the same thing, an ancient water system of an age as yet unknown.
What is more important is that these maps prove that once upon a time there was water in the dry valleys that surrounded Stonehenge. The next question we need to consider is how large were these waterways as the maps, show how wide spread these waterways were stretching from the coastline all the way inland to places like Stonehenge and Avebury. But how large were they as the maps show them to be quite narrow?
From the British Geological Society (BGS) website we have obtained data of
boreholes in order to judge the extent of the river width at the site’s base. According to maps provided by the BGS this ancient waterway has a thin (80 meters) ‘head’ at the Stonehenge bottom of our main case study site. But the boreholes tell us something completely different. We have taken the readings from boreholes made for the old proposed diversion of the A303 and examined them in detail to find out the real extent of these deposits in the dry river valleys and the results are quite astonishing.
The Stonehenge Enigma (Prehistoric Britain Book 1) Page 5
