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This is not a book about a period or a place; it is about an idea. Why did so many people in prehistoric Europe build circular monuments? Why did they choose to live in circular houses, when other communities rejected them? Why was it that those who preferred to inhabit a world of rectangular dwellings so often buried their dead in round mounds and worshipped their gods in circular temples? The best way of introducing such questions is through a specific example. Certain monuments exert a special fascination. Beside the road at Uisneach in the Irish Republic is a signboard which makes some remarkable claims. This was the ‘site of the Celtic festival of Beltane’ and ‘an ancient place of assembly’. It was associated with ‘the Druidic fire cult’ and the ‘seat of Irish kings’. The notice makes a still more intriguing assertion, for the Hill of Uisneach was also the ‘sacred centre of Ireland in pagan times’. The archaeology of the hill is hardly less remarkable, and it is easy to see how it has suggested such ideas. Some interpretations of the site are based on its distinctive topography, and others on literary evidence (Schot 2006, 2011). The hill is an irregular plateau which rises out of an extensive plain. It is also at the junction of two different landscapes. To the east, there have been many discoveries dating from the prehistoric and early medieval periods. To the west, where the soil is less fertile, they are comparatively rare. Uisneach dominates the view from all directions. It also commands an extensive vista on every side. Indeed, Macalister and Praeger (1928) who studied its archaeology over eighty years ago published a map showing the land that can be seen from the hilltop. Although it is claimed that twenty Irish counties are represented, the area does not extend as far as the coast (Figure 1). Not all those regions can be observed from a single point. In order to appreciate the full extent of the view, it is necessary to move between a series of ancient monuments.

The starting point for this chapter is a work by the German artist Joseph Beuys. ‘7000 oaks’ is an installation which he inaugurated at Kassel, a city that had been damaged during the Second World War (Scholz 1986). Each tree was paired with a basalt stele which was quarried locally. In Beuys’s conception, the installation would change its character over time. For the first few years the standing stones would be the dominant feature, but they would become less conspicuous as the oaks grew to maturity. After that, there might be two very different outcomes. Either new trees would be planted as the old ones died— that was the artist’s plan—or a setting of monoliths would be all that remained with the stones themselves marking the positions of oaks that had disappeared. Beuys was concerned with regeneration in a way that was entirely appropriate in a war-damaged city where the oak trees would gradually replace a setting of rocks. His work was informed by his interest in ecology and played on a contrast between wood and stone which is equally relevant to archaeology. They are very different materials from one another, but both were used in prehistoric structures and employed in distinctive ways. Wood is an organic substance and eventually decays. Stone, on the other hand, is inorganic and for that reason it lasts a long time. The distinction is important in considering ancient architecture (Parker Pearson and Ramilsonina 1998). Of course, there were places in which only one of these materials was available, but there were others where the distinctive ways in which stone and wood were used are especially informative. Two examples illustrate the point. Neolithic houses in Northern Europe were timber constructions, but most of the tombs that accompanied them were made of local stone. In this case, the choice of building material suggests that these dwellings were thought to have a finite lifespan, whilst the tombs of their occupants would have a longer history. Similarly, the Neolithic longhouse at La Haute Mée in north-west France was built of wood but was accompanied by a granite menhir (Cassen et al. 1998).