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Monuments and Megaliths: From Stonehenge to ‘Stonage’

Angus Vine

in In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England

This chapter considers the antiquarian response to ancient monuments through a detailed account of early modern discussions of Stonehenge. The Wiltshire stone circle enthralled the antiquaries, but ... More

This chapter considers the antiquarian response to ancient monuments through a detailed account of early modern discussions of Stonehenge. The Wiltshire stone circle enthralled the antiquaries, but it also taxed their imaginations. Enigmatic and inadequately explained in historical sources, it was perhaps the archetypal antiquarian curiosity. The chapter proposes that a new, practical methodology emerged to enable viewers to make sense of such monuments: measurement, or, as it was known at the time, mensuration. This became an important way of describing ancient remains, conveying both their size and their wonder, but it was also increasingly a strategy to interpret or make sense of them. The chapter also explores how Stonehenge became an important locus for the poetic imagination, as poets increasingly commented on the speculation over the monument and also found in its enigma moral and epistemological lessons.Less

Excursus: A Heart Unknown

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

Stone’s function as human memorial is discussed.

Afterword: Iceland

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

Iceland offers a lesson of stone’s impermanence: it moves like any liquid, restless and ephemeral.

In Search of Lost Designs

Alexander Wragge-Morley

in Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

The design argument is usually interpreted simply as an apologetic strategy, used by members of the early Royal Society such as John Ray to deflect accusations of irreligion. This chapter, however, ... More

The design argument is usually interpreted simply as an apologetic strategy, used by members of the early Royal Society such as John Ray to deflect accusations of irreligion. This chapter, however, uses a comparison between antiquarianism, architectural criticism, and natural history to show that the design argument was no mere polemical tool, but rather an aesthetic assumption that played a crucial role in the investigation and interpretation of nature. Comparing Robert Hooke's efforts to interpret the ruins of Snowflakes with contemporary attempts to do the same with the ruins of Stonehenge, this chapter shows that naturalists and antiquarians employed a strikingly similar set of approaches to the interpretation of objects they thought had been designed. Taking in a range of further examples and comparisons, including previously overlooked exchanges of correspondence between the naturalists Martin Lister and Nehemiah Grew, the chapter reveals that the empiricism of the early Royal Society was not as empirical as has been assumed. Instead, it was an empiricism shaped by aesthetic assumptions about the appearance of objects thought to have been designed. Naturalists such as Hooke aimed to generate for their readers an aesthetic experience of ease and pleasure.Less

The Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age: The Time of The Sacred Circle

Ronald Hutton

in Pagan Britain

The monumental forms of Early to the Late Neolithic include round ceremonial enclosures and circular settings for the burial of human remains. In Ireland, the developed passage grave or passage tomb ... More

The monumental forms of Early to the Late Neolithic include round ceremonial enclosures and circular settings for the burial of human remains. In Ireland, the developed passage grave or passage tomb consists of a large round mound, entered by a long passage of megaliths leading to a stone-built chamber. Neolithic inhabitants also built the largest chambered long barrow causeway enclosure and cursus and the largest henges: the Avebury henge, Marden and Mount Pleasant Henges, and the Durrington Walls. About two miles and southwest of Durrington is the most famous prehistoric monument in the world: Stonehenge.Less

Witness and Celebrate

Jonathan R. Eller

in Bradbury Beyond Apollo

Chapter five surveys the poems and musical experiments that both distracted Bradbury from story writing and renewed his creativity in the early 1970s. Television and film composer Lalo Schifrin put ... More

Chapter five surveys the poems and musical experiments that both distracted Bradbury from story writing and renewed his creativity in the early 1970s. Television and film composer Lalo Schifrin put Bradbury’s Madrigals for the Space Age to music just as Bradbury’s accelerating output of poems led to the first of three volumes of verse with his trade publisher Alfred A. Knopf. His defiant articles on the termination of the Apollo lunar missions culminated in his December 1972 Playboy article, “From Stonehenge to Tranquility Base,” a title image meant to convey the all-too-brief period of human history devoted to reaching the heavens. Chapter five concludes with unsuccessful attempts by the United States government to negotiate a cultural exchange for Bradbury with the Soviet Union.Less

Merlin: Magic, Miracles, and Marvels

Karen Sullivan

in The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions

In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, medieval thinkers disagreed about what they called “marvels,” that is, phenomena in the natural world that cannot be understood according to the laws of ... More

In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, medieval thinkers disagreed about what they called “marvels,” that is, phenomena in the natural world that cannot be understood according to the laws of Nature, and about Merlin, the preeminent performer of marvels. Rationalists denied the existence of marvels because they denied that anything natural was beyond human comprehension. They argued that, because Merlin was not a saint, enacting miracles with divine aid, he must have been a limb of the devil, enacting magic with demonic assistance. Contemplatives affirmed the existence of marvels because they affirmed the irreducible mysteriousness of God’s existence. They maintained that Merlin possessed a natural power, neither divine nor demonic, to predict the future. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of Merlin and History of the Kings of Britain and Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Merlin demonstrates that time is not a linear sequence of points but a web of correspondences, where marvelous portents (like dragons) anticipate the future and marvelous memorials (like Stonehenge) recall the past. One should respond to a marvel, these texts suggest, not by trying to understand it, but by delighting in it, as one responds to romance.Less

Introduction: Stories of Stone

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

The introduction maps how a geologically-inflected materialism opens new literary vistas. It discusses Job, Aldo Leopold, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Sisyphus and others of geological note.

Geophilia: The Love of Stone

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

The first chapter examines geophilia, a shared desire between humans and stones for endurance, creativity, and art.

Excursus: The Weight of the Past

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

The author explores Bordeaux, Paris, and Montparnasse and contemplates stone’s legacy in the city.

Time: The Insistence of Stone

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

“Time” looks at deep time as understood now and in the Middle Ages, detailing how fossils arrive into history rich with stories of cataclysm and a call to inventiveness.

Force: The Adventure of Stone

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

“Force” investigates how stone works as both a magnet, drawing attention and desire, and a propulsive force, disrupting and moving just when we assume bedrock to be still.

Excursus: Geologic

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

The author explores Scotland and ponders how stone represents a people’s history.

Soul: The Life of Stone

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

“Life” considers how some people have been locked into a Stone Age by others in order to dispossess them, then details how stone’s liveliness provides a countermovement and queer vitality.

Stonehenge in Nevada

Rosemary A. Joyce

in The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World's Most Hazardous Material

This chapter explores the understanding of Stonehenge, the support for major features of the proposed design for markers for nuclear waste repositories. The proposed design would have two concentric ... More

This chapter explores the understanding of Stonehenge, the support for major features of the proposed design for markers for nuclear waste repositories. The proposed design would have two concentric lines of stone monoliths justified explicitly by a claim that Stonehenge’s contemporary remains survived as indications of its original plan and intention. Drawing on archaeological research, the chapter shows that this image of Stonehenge as composed at one moment is untrue to its complex history of transformations. The chapter follows one part of the design proposal—the suggestion that the monoliths be made of granite, not the original material of Stonehenge—to demonstrate that the experts were drawing on a history of understanding of monuments and commemoration that developed in the United States in the early 19th century. It ends with an interlude introducing the alternate design proposal, based on a theory of archetypes that would arouse universal emotional responses.Less

Fighting it Through: England 1860–1880

Peter Rowley-Conwy

in From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain, and Ireland

On 29 July 1858, a stone tool was found among the bones of extinct mammals in Brixham Cave. More soon appeared; they were undeniably contemporary with the bones, and the antiquity of humankind was ... More

On 29 July 1858, a stone tool was found among the bones of extinct mammals in Brixham Cave. More soon appeared; they were undeniably contemporary with the bones, and the antiquity of humankind was established. A carefully planned series of publications in 1859 ensured that most of the archaeological world accepted this conclusion very rapidly, and historians of archaeology have rightly identified this episode as one of the most crucial developments the discipline has ever seen. Darwin’s Origin of Species was also published in 1859, and evolution and human antiquity between them created a huge revolution in our understanding of ourselves. Histories of the archaeology of the rest of the nineteenth century correctly devote much attention to developments in the Palaeolithic, and to Near Eastern archaeology (Grayson 1983; Trigger 1989; van Riper 1993). These were the growth areas of the discipline. Palaeolithic archaeology was elucidating the new ‘deep time’ of the human species, by working out the sequence of industries in the ‘Drift’ (glacial moraine) and the caves, and the implications of human evolution. Near Eastern archaeology was deciphering long-forgotten scripts and excavating the ruins of cities hitherto known only from the Bible or the Iliad. Less consideration has been given to other areas of archaeology, in particular the study of the later pre-Roman periods in England, and this has left the impression that little remains to be said in this area (but see Daniel 1950: 79–84). In England, however, the debate about the adoption of the Three Age System was to continue for another twenty years, and that is the topic this chapter will address. The discovery of human antiquity outflanked the short chronology until then espoused by English archaeologists. Thomas Wright wrote rather plaintively that until recently, archaeologists had considered that the pre-Roman occupation of Britain amounted to ‘a few generations, at most’, and that they had been content with the biblical chronology of ‘somewhat more than six thousand years’ (Wright 1866a: 176). This very short chronology made unnecessary any subdivision into periods. Now these archaeologists found themselves jostled by an altogether alien group of new men, who dealt in huge (though unspecified) depths of time. For these people the Three Age System provided a vital series of intermediate periods bridging the gap between the people of the drift and the caverns, and the people of the classical world. Less

Stonehenge and Avebury: A Ritual and Ceremonial Landscape?

D. W. Harding

in Rewriting History: Changing Perceptions of the Past

As Britain’s foremost prehistoric monument, Stonehenge illustrates changing fashions in interpretation of, and public and professional attitudes towards, the national archaeological heritage over at ... More

As Britain’s foremost prehistoric monument, Stonehenge illustrates changing fashions in interpretation of, and public and professional attitudes towards, the national archaeological heritage over at least three centuries. From Stukeley and the early antiquaries there was constant interest in Stonehenge and its environs, including Avebury and Silbury Hill. But it was not until the twentieth century, after the site had become a listed ancient monument and had been taken into state guardianship, that the greatest damage was inflicted through fieldwork that remained unpublished until the end of the century. Stonehenge evidently was significant in terms of the seasonal solar cycle, but in the mid-twentieth century especially it became the focus of astro-archaeologists with complex theories of astronomical and calendrical significance. Interest has always focused on the origin of the bluestones, whether the product of glacial drift or transported from south Wales by the builders. Research on Stonehenge and its neighbourhood in recent years has greatly enhanced understanding of the site’s chronological and structural sequence, and its possible roles as a place of ritual, burial, and ceremonial activity. Now with Avebury part of the World Heritage site, Stonehenge is once again subject to controversy as to how best to protect its environment from greatly increased volumes of traffic.Less

Contemporary Pagans and the Study of the Ancestors

William Rathouse

in Archaeologists and the Dead: Mortuary Archaeology in Contemporary Society

In 2007, English Heritage and the National Trust initiated a public consultation process regarding the display of human remains at the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury. This was a response to ... More

In 2007, English Heritage and the National Trust initiated a public consultation process regarding the display of human remains at the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury. This was a response to contemporary Pagan calls for reburial of a child’s skeleton displayed there (BBC News 2007; Jenkins 2011 and this volume; Tatham this volume; Thackray and Payne 2009; Historic England 2015). This chapter derives from ethnographic research (semistructured interviews and participant observation fieldwork) undertaken between April 2008 and March 2012 for a doctoral research project as well as nearly twenty years of personal engagement with the British Pagan community. This project was designed to provide qualitative analysis of relations between heritage and archaeological professionals and contemporary Pagans and did not attempt to establish any quantitative data on the proportions of people in these groups who hold particular views. It focused on the arguments and ideas behind contestation of sites and human remains. This chapter examines how the archaeology of ancient human remains aids contemporary Pagans to reinvent beliefs and emulate practices of the pre-Christian past. It also explores how excavation and display of human remains provides an arena for counter-cultural elements of contemporary Paganism to contest the authority of the heritage establishment. The sheer diversity of values, practices, and expression make it challenging to define contemporary Paganism. Pagans usually conceptualize the divine as immanent in nature either as pantheism (the divine permeates reality) or panentheism (the divine permeates reality but also exists beyond it). The divine may be seen as unified (monotheism), gendered polarities of the God and the Goddess (duotheism), or multi-faceted (polytheism). Additionally, some Pagans may be animists, which Harvey (2005: xi) defines as the belief that the world is inhabited by many persons, only some of whom are human, or even be atheists. Harvey (2005: 28, 2013: 206–10) suggests that religions may be better defined by their practices and behaviours rather than their beliefs. This is slightly harder to do with Paganism since most Wiccans and Druids tend to practice their rites by standing in circles of fellow Pagans and invoking elemental spirits at the four cardinal directions, while many Shamans, Heathens, and other reconstructionists do not. Less