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Reconstituting the Lost Complexity of the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age Cosmovision by Multi-Disciplinary Method

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Reconstituting the Lost Complexity of the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age Cosmovision by Multi-Disciplinary Method Interpretation through emergence: reconstituting the lost complexity of the late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age cosmovision by multi-disciplinary method. PhD (by publication and production) Lionel Duke Sims University of East London February 2013 i Abstract This PhD by publication and production represents some of the published outputs of a research project in interpreting some monuments of late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (EBA) in NW Europe. In the course of this project it became clear that it is necessary to integrate a number of methodologies that presently are mainly conducted in isolation – behavioural ecology, social and cultural anthropology, archaeology and archaeoastronomy. This integrated methodology required not just a new way of conducting field work, but also a new interpretive method that requires analytically reconstructing the prehistoric monument building cultures. This interpretive method is based upon a return to ‘system theory’ through and taking with it many of the assumptions of post-constructionist thinking. I call this method - ‘re-emergence’, and its rationale and application are justified and explained in the Critical Review and in the published papers. Over the course of the past decade during which I have developed and applied these methods, I have simultaneously developed and tested a theory of ‘lunar-solar conflation’. This theory locates the monument building cultures of late Neolithic/EBA NW Europe as both a continuation and reversal of their Palaeolithic/Mesolithic forager forebears. At Stonehenge this is exhibited by cattle pastoralists confiscating Palaeolithic ritual entrainment upon monthly dark moons by substituting dark moon rituals which coincide with the solstices twice every nineteen years of the draconic cycle. The published papers of this PhD constitute the evidence and tests for this new theory. Early in this research programme, and quite coincidently, a film production company approached me to make a film on Stonehenge commissioned by National Geographic based upon my research. As I became the main participant, consultant and script writer for this film it is included as the ‘production’ part of my PhD. ii Table of Contents Critical Review 6 Appendix 1 34 Appendix 2 40 Appendix 3 44 By publication and production: Art and Representation 55 Stonehenge Rediscovered DVD 59 Note on two papers 60 The solarisation of the moon 61 What is a lunar standstill? 110 Integrating archaeology with landscape archaeology 121 Entering and returning from the underworld 131 The logic of empirical proof 163 Coves, cosmology and cultural astronomy 178 Theoretical sampling 204 Which way forward for archaeoastronomy 224 Out of Africa: the solarisation of the moon 239 Where is cultural astronomy going? 254 iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the staff of the Faculty of Social Sciences and subsequently the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London who were instrumental in supporting my application for sabbaticals over the course of a dozen years and for sponsoring me through two Masters degrees. In particular these are Tim Butler, Barbara Harrison, Mike Rustin, Gavin Poynter and Maria Tamboukou. Without these sabbaticals and Masters training I would not have been able to do this research. I would also like to thank those individual scholars who read drafts and published papers of mine and kindly made comments and advice that has proved invaluable. In this regard I would especially like to mention John North, Mike Rustin, Paul Valentine and Chris Knight. This acknowledgement includes those anonymous reviewers of the journals that have published my papers. In spite all of the impediments that all must face when conducting individual research work, it is gratifying and reassuring to experience such high standards of peer review. I must also acknowledge my students over 43 years of lecturing. To be able to look them in the eye and gauge their received judgement has always been a refreshing and steadying discipline. This became especially important in developing my ideas for this research. I would also like to thank Mike Rustin and Barbara Harrison for agreeing to be my tutors for this PhD and for giving me wise counsel at crucial moments of its writing. Lastly I must thank Diane Ball, our administrator of the anthropology and related programmes for which I was responsible at UEL for many years. Without her total loyalty and dedication to her work and our collaboration I and many others would not have been able to deliver what we hope was an enjoyable and rewarding experience for our students. For me personally it has been a joy and privilege to work with her. iv Dedication I would like to dedicate this PhD to the memory of my father Bernard Leonard Victor Sims and to my mother Winnifred Bertha Allen. v Critical Review 6 Critical Review Introduction This research project came out of a long term concern with the origins of inequality which was re-awakened by my work circumstances at the University of East London in the early 1990s. I was one of a staff team in the new B.Sc.(Hons) Anthropology programme exploring a model of cultural origins developed by three of our staff - Chris Knight, Camilla Power and Ian Watts (Knight 1991, Knight et al. 1995). Using neo-Darwinian methods of calculating the cost-benefit ratios of the reproductive outcomes of a range of survival strategies, this model suggested that our African hunter ancestors had lived in egalitarian relationships in matrilineal-matrilocal clans. My research interest was in the limits to this model. In particular, could the collapse of the optimum conditions for this model help us locate the source, shape and content for the first social inequality? The model felt particularly promising to assist such a research project since it predicted a large suite of unusual, precise and testable attributes for the first human society. Since unusual and precise predictions are easier to refute than trivial and vague predictions, then they should feed into equally testable and precise predictions for the origins of social inequality. I therefore began my research into inequality by engaging with this model of a primordial equality. ‘Sex-strike’ theory suggested that Palaeolithic sub-Saharan African female coalitions, in concert with their matrilineal classificatory brothers, adopted seclusion strategies to motivate men in other matrilineal clans to provision them with hunted meat. Seclusion would be signalled and achieved with menstrual synchrony during the dark moon phase of the month. A collective hunt of mega-fauna was scheduled to be successfully completed by the light of the full moon, and the seclusion rules would then be relaxed once the blood of the surrendered game had been removed by cooking back at base camp. During the waxing period of the month leading up to full moon, women and men would shed those aspects of themselves denoted by biological gender as wives and husbands, and commune amongst their blood kin. To those outside their matrilineal clan they became a collectivised anti-marital unity. Without assuming language the model predicts that women would reverse the signals of an animal mate recognition system. All animals must ensure that they have chosen the correct species, sex and time when seeking a mate. Only humans can in masquerade performance represent themselves as animal, gender 7 ambiguous and bloody. Females signalling wrong species, wrong sex and wrong time would in ludic, carnivalesque mode be able to discriminate against those jealous covetous males not willing to join in the joke and therefore meet the terms of the women’s coalition. This constitutes a performative theory of gender in which females and males as siblings construct themselves as gender ambiguous to temporarily separate themselves from their partners in other matrilineal clans. It predicts that gender is socially constructed as ‘the gender of power’, whereas ‘normal’ sex-gender in which we are our biological selves, is weak gender. For a culture organised around a sacred waxing half alternating with a profane waning half, the gender of power predicts that the sacred domain is populated by therianthropic, gender-ambiguous bloody beings. If this model is valid, then these attributes of sex-strike theory should translate into hypotheses informing the emergence of inequality. When my research began in earnest I was unsure how this might be. Rather than any precise research agenda, all I had to go on was a very strong hunch that with the collapse of Palaeolithic hunting equality then this would lead us to expect a sense of loss, and that post big game hunting cultures would display some complex swan-song of transition. I also suspected in the vaguest of ways that included in this transition would be issues that touched on economics, gender and ‘astronomy’. Practically it began in 1992/3 during a sabbatical year granted by the School of Social Sciences at UEL. In that year I followed a Masters course split between the Institute of Archaeology and the anthropology department at UCL, where I studied the current research into the emergence of social complexity. Sensitised by my studies at UCL, my thoughts came to focus on the monument building cultures of Neolithic north-west Europe. I was particularly struck by the lack of integration between anthropology and archaeology into the origins of social complexity. One sub-discipline in particular stood at the centre of this intersection yet itself was in disarray – archaeoastronomy. I focussed on a multi-disciplinary research project into the monument building cultures of the Neolithic in the British Isles, with particular reference to the ‘astronomy’ of the monument complexes of Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire. In the course of this project I had to develop a new method that considered buildings and landscape as particular choices in a virtual world of limitless choices, a multi- disciplinary method of ‘re-emergence’, and a new theoretical model of lunar-solar conflation to overcome key weaknesses in all three disciplines.
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