 Ond ydy teulu, dyna dwi'n iawn. Fe ydw i'n gwybod eich sesio, mae'n ddweud yma'n amlwyhu i'r ysgol a'r hyn o'r gweithio'r ddweud i'r aelod y gwirioneddau ac yn dod o'r gweithio'n gallu'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Felly, yn ymgylchedd yma'n ddweud yma'r ysgol. Ysgol yw'r ysgol yw'r prosiect sydd wedi bod rhai'r prosiect sydd wedi'i llwyth i'r prosiect ac mae oswn yn fawr yn ddiwrnod. Felly, yn y maen nhw oswn yn ei gweithio'r projekty yn ymgyrch gyda'r issue tîl ffondol o'r gwneud o'r hunain o'r cyfaint o'r cyfaint. I'r bwysig o'r ffondol ac o'r thysgau a'r unrhyw o'r cyfaint o'r tîl. Rwy'n gwybod i'r ffathau o'r cyfaint o'r awgau a'r cyfaint a'r cyfaint o'r cyfaint o'r ysgrifennu o'r ywgwysig o'r cyfaint. a gael y cyfnodion gyda ni'n ffordd ac yn ystod y cwm o amseru yn ymgylch i wneud ymgylch yn y cyffredin ac y gallwn yn ymgylch yn ymgylch yn ymgylch yn ymgylch yn ymgylch Felly, yw'r project e wedi gweld ymgylch yn ymgylch yn ddysgu ymgylch, yr archaeolodi sy'n brosesol yn ymgylch yn ymgylch yn ymgylch ac mae'n cael ei ffawr i'r gyrfa cyfnodol o'r ymgylch ac mae'n cael ei wneud ...a'r gweithio'r woldfawr. Mae'r cwmhlygio'r argynwys ar hynny... ...y'r bobl mewn gwirio bobl yng Nghymru... ...i 3,600 o dynodol ac 3,600 o dynodol, ac yn Scotland... ...mae'r 3,900 o dynodol ac, fel ydych chi'n ddod, ffocos... ...ynddo'r dynodol. Mae'n cael ei wneud y gallwn cyfaint... ...cymdeithasol a'r dynodol... ...a wneud o'r wneud yng Nghymru... ...a'r llunio argynwys argynwys... I will not be talking about the former, the excavation in detail here. I want to look at and to discover whether the reasons behind erecting the meneas were really the same both in Germany and Scotland or whether there was some other driving force there. If there was a different kind of driving force what these differences might have been. It's really in this way I feel that we can begin to determine to what degree peoples across the seas shared the same belief systems as well as their architectural choices. So what can we already state I think is that while standing stone monuments often appear very simple, their cultural significance is very clear for that altered the natural places more enduringly than urban or wooden monuments that appeared shortly before and in fact concurrently. With these new constructions they continued for more than 2,000 years in both Germany and Scotland from about 3,000 BC to 900 BC in Scotland and Germany as I said earlier was more about 1200. There are some possible hiatys in Scotland. Significantly they were constructed over a far longer time frame than any other megalithic monument type in these two places highlighting their continual relevance for Neolithic and Bronze cultures. By the time really of the late Neolithic they were a megalithic monument that had become essentially a fully exposed monument. Despite this longevity and clear social relevance for prehistoric Germany and Scotland comparatively little work has focused on the hundreds of prehistoric standing stone rows, pairs or on their own those simple what I think of as simpler monuments. This is actually a stone row that's a representation thereof as the other two stones have fallen. So even though in more recent years there has been quite a reasonable amount of work and discussion on Scottish stone circles especially the largest circles, the recumbent stone circles and other encircling monuments around Cairns compared to the number that exist, the work that really work is done by very few people and they concentrate on very few monuments and they tend to like the complex monuments. You know that's a bit sexy but this little one standing on its own somewhere you know that doesn't seem to have the draw for a lot of researchers. So in Germany standing stone considerations are often also supplemented by research done on other monuments. For example tombs, one here, I have one here. Exceptions to this have been the production of detailed gazettears both in Britain and Germany usually by Grot and Bell in particular. Of these three gazettears Bell and Grot offer really detailed considerations and Grot which I haven't written down here in 1955 actually did a detailed research project and interpretive work on the genre of standing stones in Germany. However his was the last work, 1955. So to have a last UK type work for such a long time ago I think clearly exemplifies the gap and the need for further work in this area. So whilst these comments highlight the gaps in the relative regions and more importantly for this project I think there's really been a lack of comparison between the use of standing stones between countries and here of course I'm using as an exemplar Britain and Germany. Traditionally Scotland is most often compared with other western European cultures along the Atlantic coast due to the latter's striking standing stone monuments or numerable circles such as Ireland, Brittany and so on. But more importantly I feel that they've also have a sharing of the way they've adopted in a sense farming practices. Not so much Ireland but I'm thinking of Scotland and northwestern continent where they often had quite a focus on herding and pottery but maybe not intensive agriculture initially. I really feel that it's gone unheralded that by 3000 BC both Germany and Scotland were constructing simple standing stone monuments that were often also associated with the dead and there were thousands of them. We're going back to that one. Here we are. So here we have representations of particular cairns or beryl mounds with standing stones on them. You also get standing stones next to cairns. It's quite common too that you will actually particularly in Scotland I haven't heard of any emphasis of this in Germany yet and I hope to find out if we can prove this to be the case is that in the stone sockets of the standing stones in Scotland they actually put partial cremation remains in there along with lovely crystal stones. I find that quite fascinating. So the main differences between the two places being is that there's no confirmed nearly thick or bronze age stone circles at the moment in central or northern Germany. There's some debate over that but people like Johannes Muller would say categorically those circle like objects are not stone circles they're really a combined with graves or other forms of megalithic monuments. The other thing too is that Germany has a decorated mineers and in Scotland at this date if you were thinking about anthropomorphic stones we haven't yet identified any anthropomorphic stones in Scotland or the British Isles. Right so why were these distant regions choosing to erect similar standing stones? They were often even worked into the same shapes. So let's just have a look at fewer of those. I think really that they may well have been sharing some kind of understandings and really significances and we want to find out what they are. Are these shared significances possible evidence of concurrent shared values or are they a delay aggregation with some reformulation by the indigenous populations for example in Scotland? Does Scotland in fact have direct connections with Germany at this time or were the adoptions funneled through other cultures like Ireland? These are important notions to understand I think if we are to come to any understanding of life ways and values involved and melded across a greater Europe. Notions that are most relevant I think. Kirchner states that in his interpretive considerations that the phenomena of the monolithic monuments is really coherent across ancient Europe and he feels that there's no question about the that it's somehow an originally uniform basic idea that people shared at this time. But is it possible that this idea changes in the course of time for example? There's still erecting monuments but there's different reasons across time or places for what they mean and why they're using them. Basically I would like to test these ideas by comparing sites in Saxony Unhult and the Isle of Skye in Scotland. I really want to see what's going on in these two regions. As you can see here. So the dots up here. These are the sites actually I've already considered in my project in Scotland. About 125 sites and now we've the project expanding online with Vincent Montes in the audience. We're doing more work in here so there's many more points in this area now. The sites here in Saxony Unhult seems like there are very, very many and I thought yes, that's fantastic. I'm going to have this massive database but in fact there are only 15 that are in situ for sure. So that's why in fact I've chosen the Isle of Skye then to compare it with because they're about exactly the same number 15 that we know of there. So in the work done to date in the Fields of Standing Stones both in Germany and Scotland there's absolutely a clear lack of reference to the greater landscape or the application of GIS tools looking at simpler monuments only. In the past 24 years perhaps apart from myself there's not been a single significant study using these approaches as a major basis of the work in these regions in connection to Standing Stones. There is now then I think an opportunity to use geospatial technology to uncover relevant information about the location and use of Standing Stones in both these places and to carry out some sound comparative analyses. Essentially the study upholds that these places in the form of Standing Stones really represent landmarks for people in the past and something that is attached to them is the information about the landscape in which they're in as the people of the time saw it. Specifically what is missing in past studies then are investigations that can use Standing Stones or what we might call landscape perception studies. These informative landscape and social markers add a cognitive perspective to the study of monuments that were possibly originally deemed to be permanent markers of landscape understanding. In a sense then they are actually realisations of shared cognitions in the past and participate in collective engagement. So what I'm quickly going to go through with you now is what I've actually found in Scotland today is that we are racing through. Firstly in Scotland we basically looked at the orientation of monuments using statistical analysis and we found that the groups through here have very similar orientations towards the sun at the summer solstice but the most popular one is the moon at its most northern rising and southern setting points that only ever occur every 18.6 years and they've all been supported statistically so it's not like Areferio. Look at that point, isn't that nice? Maybe that one does too. We're talking now about 125 sites across this region and counting. Next thing we did was construct 3D landscapes of the entire horizon and the horizon itself has measured every 0.01 degree for accuracy. So we created these 3D landscapes and what we've plotted on there are the movements of the sun and the moon at very particular times and what we found in this process after looking at laying them all out on the floor but now we've done some statistical analysis but that's for another talk is that we discovered there are two landscape types. In the north of a horizon is closer than the southern and you get two peaks or if it's a curved mountain in this area. The summer solstice sun for example rises out of the closest northern horizon that's the most dominant in the northeast and sets in the most dominant looking horizon in the northwest. The same happens for the moon every 18.6 years. In the south it's distant, you'll also get water. We often get two little mountains here or hills but some often are here we only get three sets at these what they're called ordinal points south east south west and so on. So we have this setting up pattern. We also have the reverse occurs. So here's, I'll just quickly show you this. That's the site that I showed you in the Isle of Mell. This is a different site. Completely different. They're very similar. This is what I call the reverse site. The second form which is where the southern horizon is much closer and whilst this horizon is often quite flat it's closer and higher in the south overall than in the north the water is now in the north what also happens often in the south is you may get the curve of the hill through here and it will block out the entire winter sun for the day at the winter solstice. There's a lot of astronomical plays going on. That's just to give you examples of the reverse site. We call them classic sites. We're going very fast. So here's the last thing I want to show you and I'll give you a micro conclusion. We're now putting in our 3D landscapes and also our 3D panoramas at the standing stone sites to look for very particular things that people could see at that time say 1500 BC at the moment around the time that these monuments were built standing stones were only primarily built with simple ones between 1400 BC and 900 in Scotland for example. So one of the things that we discover is that any of the little prominent hills are actually backlit by the sun at the time of the solstice at the rising and setting of the sun and you'll forget if you have a full moon the summer solstice sun as it is rising the full moon is setting. So these are the kinds of things that they're looking at they're all in opposition and the opposite side of the sky. At the north at midnight on the summer solstice the sun sits directly just under the horizon so whilst we know that in a technical scientific sense you never realise at midnight we're going to get the sun glowing across these latitudes at this time and what is important is that now we're at most sites. It's no longer there. Finally, last one is that of what you call the bear? Did you see in there? Earlier in the day it comes around like this horizontally and then at 9pm it stands up vertically and this only again happens at the winter solstice. Okay so quickly in my conclusion because I'm already a little bit there. So these are the kinds of things I want to look at while I'm in Germany so whilst I've done some initial studies I find that the general sightings are looking similar local high ground looking over distant view into a valley or across water something similar so already I've started to see that there are some similarities going on. So in conclusion Bradley has argued that people began to build before they farmed and that such activity enabled them to alter natural places much more than they had hit the two done. I think that so far the project working in Scotland has shown that the reverence for the natural continues in the Bronze Age and in the Neolithic despite the fact that there's agriculture going on. Suggesting perhaps that either the actual form of reverence perhaps is not really changing at this point. The need for interacting with the super natural though has somehow intensified by the fact that they have to build standing stone monuments to show these places. Beforehand there may it seems there may be some evidence of this in the Mesolithic without standing stones. Through this project then I'm really trying to discover how people in these regions of Saxony, Arnhalt and the Isle of Skye use stone structures perhaps other material culture and certainly the dead I think that's very important landscape and astronomy to create places echoing their own world view. By assembling these forms of evidence a clearer picture will be built of the relevance of these monuments and the place they had to those who constructed them. Ultimately it will enable a greater understanding of the possible sharing of this human history and cultural activities across time within the European context. Perhaps across the seas.