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ARC 35.1.Indd Reaching into the Underworld: Maeshowe Side-Chamber Apertures as Doorways into an Inverted Land of the Dead A. J R1 U H I: O C 1 [email protected] : This paper combines the chaîne opératoire and microhistory methodologies to investi- gate decision-making and intentionality in construction design choices within the internal walls of the Neolithic Orcadian passage grave Maeshowe. Focusing specifi cally on side-chambers and their opposing sidewalls, this study documents that masonry quality is superior on the left-hand side— against the grain of highlighting the right, that novel left-dominant architectural features are notable for their association with rare incising, and that fl uvial sedimentary stones are purposefully inverted. These features of re-orientation, watery inversion and of left for right, engender an interpretation that side-chambers exist within the space of an inverted netherworld, and that their apertures gesture a physical opening into the the Land of the Dead. Thus conjoined, these methodologies generate a comprehensive new hypothesis. : Communal stone-built tombs span the temporal depth and physical breadth of the European Neolithic (Joussaume 1988). One iteration, the passage grave, has a main chamber accessible via a passageway through an encasing circular mound (Robin 2009: 9). The most famous of these, termed cruciform, occur in confi ned groupings along the Atlantic Seaboard, incorporating three side-chambers off of the main chamber (Nordman 1935). This architectural style reached a pinnacle, and an apparent end, in the Orkney Islands north of mainland Scotland with the construction of the unique Maeshowe cairn. Presumed to have been erected toward the end of the Neolithic based on stylistic comparisons (Kilbride-Jones 1973: 79; Renfrew 1979: 31), Maeshowe suff ers a paucity of datable material, such that 14C dates span 3730-2840 cal BC (68% probability, Griffi ths 2016: 287). In terms of its stylistic elements, Maeshowe is composed not of upright menhirs like most tombs, but huge slabs laid as dry-stone walling (fi g. 1a; Petrie 1861). The masonry of the main chamber is unrivalled, and frequently discussed (reviewed in Thomas 2016: 54-62). With an internal cruciform layout the same dimensions as Newgrange, Ireland (pers. obs.), but with a far smaller mound, Maeshowe has an extended low passageway leading to a square main chamber, off of which each of the other walls has a side-chamber (fi g. 1b; Davidson and Henshall 1989: 144). These singular side-chambers have restricted apertures like other Orcadian passage graves, but are—atypically—raised above ground level. Their cuboid volume is constructed with three dry-stone and three whole fl agstone walls. Of these latter, the single ceilingstone caps a vertical backslab supported on an understone, itself resting on the fl oorstone. The ceiling and backslab are equivalent in size, but the understone to fl oorstone proportions vary, creating volume diff erences. The dry- stone walls are the two sidewalls fl anking the backslab, the third forming the front endwall with the aperture into the main chamber abutting one side. Figure 1: (a) Northeast wall of the main chamber at the midwinter sunset (oval: right-side-up waveform; circle: single corner cut-out) with raised Northeast midline side-chamber, and (b) the internal footprint with side-chambers identifi ed by cardinal direction (reproduced with permission of Historic Environment Scotland: SC 342874 and ORD 92/10, respectively). Construction analysis of the interior walling in Neolithic tombs has, so far, focused on material sourcing and building erection (eg. Scarre 2009), with little work investigating design choices beyond colour selection (but see Cummings 2002). Diametricity within designs is signifi cant in the Neolithic (Parker Pearson and Richards 1994: 13). One well-investigated topic is the sidedness (right vs. left) of artwork locations within passage graves. Generally weighted to the right, this trend is well documented in Irish passage graves (Herity 1974: 123; Robin 2009) and Orcadian domestic settings (Hodder 1982: 224). The forced right-hand direc- tionality of these latter (Hodder 1982: 224; Richards 1993: 166), where ‘beds’ on the right are also larger (Childe 1931: 50), provides architectural evidence of right vs. left selectivity. These examples, however, consider only aspects of entering structures, ignoring that the far left is the last reached when “hidden, back, private spaces” (Tilley 2008: 109) may be the most sacred (van Ruysbroeck 1900: 58; see also Scarre 2011: 233) as well as that, upon leaving, right-side aspects are now on the left (Tilley 2008: 120). The investigation here, aiming to analyse such design and construction choices, combines the chaîne opératoire and microhistory methodologies under the for- mer’s premise that a decision is made for each action (Schlanger 1996: 248) and the latter’s assertion that up-close immersion is inherently informative (Cohen 2017: 66). This is enacted by comparing and contrasting the opposing dry-stone sidewalls of Maeshowe’s side-chambers for diff ering prevalences of architectural features. The results show design inversions from the main chamber, supporting a comprehensive new interpretation that these side-chambers exist within an inverted netherworld, as a concept. The notion of a post-bodily-death existence, an enduring state of being following on from the realm of the living, has been argued to be cognitively inherent, deriving from third-party social interactions—the understanding that a person out-of- sight is still independently doing and being (Bering 2006: 456; Hodge 2011a). Via this theory-of-mind neural origin (Grafman et al. 2020: 130-131), people are predisposed toward the belief of an afterlife—and it is in fact more taxing to not do so (Bering 2002: 291; Hodge 2011b: 374). The dead, as a group, are understood as embodied within a specifi c location, even if fi ctional (Hodge 2011b: 385); they are envisioned to be “somewhere doing something” (Hodge 2011a: 10). Concepts of what this realm, the Netherworld as a location, is like are however socially determined, and distinctly separate from the cognitive notion that there is an afterlife (Bek and Lock 2011: 15; Hodge 2011b: 368). In particular for the European Neolithic, this cosmological realm seems to have been envisioned as existing beneath this one— the Underworld (Davies and Robb 2004: 142; Malone and Stoddart 2009: 376). To investigate mortuary design intentions, this study looks beyond the physical and geological aspects of stone constructions (Darvill 2009: 3) and engages with the actual presented assemblage (Fowler 2013: 253). It adopts Creswell’s (1976: 6) and Lemonnier’s (2012: 17-18) belief that “material culture becomes, in a tra- jectory of induced transformations from natural raw material to cultural matter” (Schlanger 1994: 144, emphasis added). That is, that man-made objects do not just encompass physicality and engineering solutions but also socially-driven design choices (Hodder 1993: 269; Robin 2014: 4). The chaîne opératoire methodology, reverse engineering the order of events within an activity, is used by Schlanger (1996) to reassemble fl int debitage to its core. This showcases that each strike, inherently recording a decision enacted, autonomously embodies material knowledge (Budden and Soafer 2009; Strand 2012), socially learned gestures (Apel 2001; Leroi-Gourhan 1993) and inten- tionality (Coupaye 2009: 439; Edmonds 1990). Applications of this methodology to buildings have considered aspects of civil engineering (Gianotti et al. 2011; McFadyen 2006) and event organisation (Benjelloun et al. 2018; Binninger 2008) but tend to leave aside the socially-based design choices also refl ected within the built environment. Stone-built structures have material limitations (Laporte 2015: 18), but it is naïve to dismiss their stones as mundane (Cooney 2009) and their designs as uninformative (Mens 2009). The microhistory methodology, as a purposeful restriction in “the scale of observation” (Levi 1992: 99), intensely investigates singular events, since narrowly- focused studies can contribute signifi cantly to generalities (Borić 2010: 53; Hupperetz 2010: 283). This allows the formation of a comprehen- sive account of embodied decisions through the in-depth, close-up study of the interrelatedness of things (Baires 2017: 251; Cohen 2017: 54) via non-de- structive engagement with exposed walling (Dessales 2017: 77). Therefore, an approach to the interior walling of Neolithic passage graves as artefacts them- selves (Cousseau 2015; Laporte 2015; Laporte et al. 2017) highlights the act of making (Lewis-Williams 2004: 37; MacFadyen 2006: 131; Richards 2004: 72). Purposeful attention is therefore given to deciphering and interpreting design selections (Dobres 1999: 125; Schlanger 1994) as essential to a balanced build- ing interpretation (Mens and Large 2009: 48; Sherwood and Kidder 2011: 73). It particularly considers what social constructs are being manifested (DeMarrais et al. 1996: 16; Scarre 2004: 151) through combined analytical and subjective observations (Domanska 2018: 23; Skeates 2016: 40). Furthermore, gestures of the afterlife are intentionally considered (Robin 2014: 4), frequently ignored among analyses of mortuary constructions (Cavanagh and Laxton 1990: 145). In sum, the chaîne opératoire and microhistory, are conjoined expressly so that material culture can invoke infl uences and “act back” (Buchli and Lucas 2001: 5), thereby allowing the stones to speak
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