Vitrified Forts

[nick c]

Scotland, in the 19th C, was known for its vitrified forts but as researchers found; similar phenomena exists world wide:

For a long time it was supposed that these forts were peculiar to Scotland; but they are found also in Londonderry and Cavan, in Ireland; in Upper Lusatia, Bohemia, Silesia, Saxony and Thuringia; in the provinces on the Rhine, especially in the neighbourhood of the Nahe; in the Ucker Lake, in Brandenburg, where the walls are formed of burnt and smelted bricks; in Hungary; and in several places in France, such as Châteauvieux, Peran, La Courbe, Sainte Suzanne, Puy de Gaudy and Thauron. They have not been found in England or Wales.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Enc ... fied_Forts

Vitrification has been discovered in Australia, Easter Island, Pakistan, and other places around the world. Most of the locations are on hilltops. Of course, this would be a strategic location for a fort...also it is an ideal location for the strike of a massive electric discharge. Ordinary lightning can glassify lines in sand, but does not have the necessary power to achieve anywhere near what is observed on vitrified forts. When they were described in the late 18th C by Scottish geologist John Williams in his book The Mineral Kingdom it was suggested that they were volcanic in origin, or that the builders heated the rocks to fuse them, or that a conquering army burnt the fort. None of these explanations were viable.

The stones of these ancient forts have been subjected to extreme high temperatures such that rocks are completely or partially fused together. Some rock surfaces are glassified. Required temperatures for the effect are around 1500 degrees Celsius (2700 degrees Fahrenheit).

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2016/05 ... -thinking/

What could account for fields of broken glass shards like those in Egypt, large sheets of glass like “Darwin glass” from Australia, vitrified stone walls in Scotland and the fused pottery and melted ramparts of Mohenjo-Daro? In all these cases, it was probably gigantic plasma discharges in the form of lightning bolts and electric arcs that melted the ruins and fused the soils into glass. The timeframe is probably impossible to determine with any accuracy at this late date, but it seems evident that humanity had reached a high level of sophistication before being exposed to these cataclysmic events.

https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008 ... jodaro.htm

[nick c]

An interesting paper on this subject:

On The Orientation Of Ancient Temples And Other Anomalies, by Raphael G Kazmann, "Aeon", Vol. 2, #2.
The quotes below are from this paper.

The first half the paper concerns the orientation (East/West, so that on the equinoctial day, the Sun shone through a gate and illuminated an altar). What the author found was that many excavations showed that new temples were built on the site of the old temple, but the orientations of the new temples did not match with the orientation of the old foundation upon which it was built.

The problem of differing orientations has been of interest for more than a century. In 1894 Lockyer published a book in which the orientations of 20 temples was discussed. He too had no idea why temples built on the same site should be oriented differently.

But that is the subject for another thread, although the cause of this anomaly may be directly related or the same as that which caused the vitrification of many ancient forts.

The last half of the paper is devoted to vitrified forts.

Archaeology seems to have been a principle hobby of James Anderson, a Scottish landowner. In 1777 he published his observations of ancient fortifications in Scotland. These included what he termed what he termed were the most remarkable of Scottish fortifications, those forts whose walls were vitrified.

The author (of the Aeon article) visited one of the sites at Knock Ferrel and found that Anderson's 1777 description was quite accurate.

These walls consist of stones piled rudely upon one another and firmly cemented together by a matter that has been vitrified by fire, that forms a kind of artificial rock....

There are about 60 sites in Scotland and more in Northern Europe. The awareness of this phenomenon has led to more examples world wide. The capital of the ancient Hittite empire, Boghazkoi (Hattusa) had a wall that was 5 meters thick, what is left has at some point been vitrified.

A German archaeological expedition has been studying the site for more than half a century.

The explanation that the conquerors burnt the wall in the frenzy of their victory simply does not hold. The victors could just as easily torn down the wall, and there is no historical record of any victorious ancient army burning down brick or stone walls. And if they did, how did they achieve such high temperatures needed for vitrification? Some archeologists have suggested that the vitrification was part of the construction process. But that too, is flawed. Vitrification does not strengthen a wall, if anything it makes it weaker.

The author continues in his summary:

The paucity of defensible hypothesis points to a glaring deficiency in our current understanding of geological and cosmic phenomena.
[...]
Let us postulate a planet sized body that, for some period of time that might be as much as 2000 years, approached Earth periodically. The gravitational, electrical, and magnetic forces associated with such fly-bys could speed up the movement of tectonic plates, cause earthquakes, and could well result in rotating plates.
[...]
As to the hill-forts and the vitrified walls of Hattusa: These fortifications were built on the topographically highest points. Assume that there was a great difference in electrical potential between Earth and the heavenly visitor. As it passed overhead we can imagine that a series of gigantic lightning storms occurred, touching the high points briefly, much like the sparks in a rim fire spark plug.
[...]
The rock walls would be fused where the rocks touched. The rock walls of cities (and possibly some of the houses in them) would be fused by the violence of the energy exchange.