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This chapter addresses the following questions: What do archaeological finds tell us about aniconic standing stones in their variety of geometric forms? Are there particular contexts and cults in which we are more likely to find stelai that were worshipped by ancient Greeks? Can we detect certain patterns or recurring features in our records? Is there an affinity between such wrought monuments and the completely unwrought? It also considers possible resemblances between the semi-figural and the standing stone, in particular when the two types are found in analogous cultic contexts and/or have similar functions.

The literary portrayals of El worship must be complemented by a look at the aesthetically physical. Was El imagined in the form of an enthroned, benevolent patriarch or a majestic bull or even a solid block of stone? Chapter Five situates the iconography of El within a comparative study of ancient Israel’s neighbors, especially the robust El religion of Late Bronze Age Syria (Ugarit). Methodologically, the chapter examines the misuse of comparative iconography prior to articulating criteria for determining whether a material object represents the divine. The numerous cults of standing stones or masseboth (known elsewhere as betyls or “houses of El”) attested archaeologically throughout Iron Age Israel’s history are discussed including at the key sites of Shechem, the so-called “Bull Site,” Hazor, Arad, Tel Dan and Khirbet Ataruz. Possible theriomorphic representations of El (especially as a lion and bull) in text and material culture are also discussed.

This chapter explore the monumental ritual monuments of the Neolithic period including the major stone circle complex at Calanais in Lewis. It also considers the extensive evidence for Neolithic funerary architecture in the form of chambered tombs such as that from Clettraval, North Uist.

This chapter examines the origins of the megalithic monuments of Brittany. It describes the Grand Menhir Brise at Locmariaquer and the Kerloas menhir in Finistere and analyses whether they constitute the earliest megalithic monuments of Brittany or the first stage in a long tradition of marking and modifying the natural landscape. It also investigates whether the shaped and carved menhirs of coastal Morbihan were preceded by an earlier series of ‘unshaped’ menhirs and what do the shapes of the standing stones represent.

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).