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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

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

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.

Space–Object–Landscape: Sacred and “Sacro-idyllic” from Dunhuang via Stonehenge to Roman Wall-painting

Jaś Elsner

in Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art

This chapter interrogates a number of normative assumptions about “landscape” as an art-historical category current in the discipline. It proceeds by means of some very diverse thought-objects ... More

This chapter interrogates a number of normative assumptions about “landscape” as an art-historical category current in the discipline. It proceeds by means of some very diverse thought-objects significantly separated by time and space—Chinese pagoda paintings found in the Dunhuang caves that are simultaneously concrete poems, British stone circles such as Stonehenge and standing crosses including that at Bewcastle, Roman wall paintings from Pompeii—because the issues are not specifically historical or historicist but rather more broadly conceptual and span the archaeological history of art from the Neolithic to modernity, not least interrogating certain practices in contemporary earth art. The intent is to interrogate what is meant by ‘landscape’ when treated as an art-historical category.Less

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

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.

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