Trevor Cox and Bruno Fazenda at University of Salford and Susan Greaney of English Heritage found that reflections from the stones made someone speaking inside the monument sound louder to others inside. This, they suggest, could have been engineered by the ancient builders to improve communications during rituals and perhaps boost the status of speakers.
Wooden pipes and animal horns
The trio also found that music played inside the monument would be enhanced by reverberations from the stones – however, the reverb is much less than that engineered into modern concert halls. Nonetheless, they say that it would affect the sound of bone flutes, wooden pipes, animal horns and drums that are likely to have been used in Neolithic Britain.
They also looked for focused echoes in the monument that could enhance sounds at certain locations – something suggested by other researchers. However, they found no evidence for this.
You can read more about the study in an open access paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
“Driving at low speed on a bumpy road is dangerous” is something you might expect to hear from a petrolhead like Jeremy Clarkson – but it is the conclusion of Kazem Reza Kasyzadeh and colleagues at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow.
The researchers developed a computer model that describes vehicle body damage that is caused by fatigue failure. They used the model to calculate the damage to welds in a car moving at 5, 10 and 15 km/h over a very bumpy road. At the slowest speed, the model predicted that 100 spot welds would be damaged, whereas 40 and 50 were predicted for 10 and 15 km/h respectively.
You can read more about this counterintuitive result in this press release.