The Significance of Monuments

The Significance of Monuments The Neolithic period, when agriculture began and many monuments were constructed, is an era fraught with paradoxes and ambiguities. Students of prehistory have long found the highly theoretical interpretations of the period perplexing and contradictory. Starting in the Mesolithic and carrying his analysis through to the Late Bronze Age, Richard Bradley sheds light on this complex period and the changing consciousness of the people who lived at the time. The book studies the importance of monuments, tracing their history for nearly three millennia from their first creation over six thousand years ago. Part I discusses how monuments developed and their role in forming a new sense of time and space among the inhabitants of prehistoric Europe. Such features of the landscape as mounds and enclosures are also examined in detail. Through a series of case studies, Part II considers how monuments were modified and reinterpreted to suit the changing needs of society. The Significance of Monuments is an indispensable text for all students of European prehistory. It is also an enlightening read for professional archaeologists and all those interested in this fascinating period. Richard Bradley is Professor of Archaeology at Reading University. Current interests include landscape archaeology and rock art. Recent books include Altering the Earth and Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe. The Significance of Monuments On the shaping of human experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe Richard Bradley London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. First published in paperback in 1998 © 1998 Richard Bradley All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Bradley, Richard The significance of monuments : on the shaping of human experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe / Richard Bradley. Includes bibliographical references and index 1. Neolithic period—Europe. 2. Bronze age—Europe. 3. Megalithic monuments—Europe. 4. Architecture, Prehistoric—Europe. 5. Europe—Antiquities. I. Title. GN776.2.A1B73 1998 936—dc21 97–27536 ISBN 0-415-15203-8 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-15204-6 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-02471-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-07324-X (Glassbook Format) The cover illustration is taken from a one-person touring exhibition called ‘Petrified Garden’ organized by An Lanntair Gallery, Stornoway, Scotland. The picture is a photo-montage made by photographing sections of a stone circle and the horizon from a height of 6.5 metres, with the camera on a pole. Using a flash at night mimics what the stone circle might look like with a central fire, which was one of the curious features of these Aberdeenshire stone circles. Stone circles in the British Isles show enough of a theme and variation in their design to suggest that if we knew the missing elements in each case then the variety of monument types would reduce to a smaller group of pictures on the ground. Just one of many possibilities is that these circles are an expression of the way Neolithic peoples related to their surrounding landscape. The following text accompanied the exhibition and is my response to a way of seeing unrestrained by the painter’s rules of perspective, or the frame of the photograph or television. In a single photograph, the horizon is a line from one side of the frame to the other. Do we really see our surroundings in this way? No, because we look around, we don’t look at. In this way the horizon is a circle, and we are always at the centre of the circle. Even though we define a circle visually wherever we stand, we need not be conscious of ourselves doing the looking, so we define a circle with a hole in the middle. That is the human condition. As we look we also unconsciously magnify the horizon. With the discovery of perspective, a painter could convey distance by making objects on the horizon appear very small. But we see the horizon as bigger than that. A photograph never does justice to the ‘grand view’ to which we aspire because the hills in the distance are smaller than we remembered. The human mind is easily capable of imagining its surroundings from a vantage point above eye-level. Reality in this sense is more map-like. It makes more sense to imagine things from above because the brain needs less memory to make one useful picture – like a template – from which to infer necessary information as we move about. It may be the case that our perception and our cosmology are intimately bound together, and that discovering the meaning of lost cultures will require the simple question to be answered: How did they look at their surroundings? Mark Johnston 1997 For Colin Richards Contents List of figures ix Preface xi PART I From the house of the dead I 1 Structures of sand: settlements, monuments and the nature of the Neolithic 3 2 Thinking the Neolithic: the Mesolithic world view and its transformation 20 3 The death of the house: the origins of long mounds and Neolithic enclosures 36 4 Another time: architecture, ancestry and the development of chambered tombs 51 5 Small worlds: causewayed enclosures and their transformations 68 PART II Describing a circle 83 6 The persistence of memory: ritual, time and the history of ceremonial monuments 85 7 The public interest: ritual and ceremonial, from passage graves to henges 101 viii Contents 8 Theatre in the round: henge monuments, stone circles and their integration with the landscape 116 9 Closed circles: the changing character of monuments, from enclosures to cemeteries 132 10 An agricultural revolution: the domestication of ritual life during later prehistory 147 References 165 Index 177 Figures Figure 1 The Neolithic ‘longhouses’ at Barkaer, Jutland 6 Figure 2 The local setting of Barkaer 7 Figure 3 The internal structure of one of the monuments at Barkaer 8 Figure 4 The agricultural frontier in north and north-west Europe 12 Figure 5 The regions considered in Part I 15 Figure 6 Sites and regions considered in Part II 16 Figure 7 Mesolithic and Neolithic burials at Dragsholm, Zealand 23 Figure 8 Mesolithic burials with deposits of antler 26 Figure 9 Mesolithic burials at Vlasac, Serbia 29 Figure 10 Cist burial at Téviec, Brittany 30 Figure 11 Symbolic structures at Lepenski Vir 33 Figure 12 The distribution of longhouses, long mounds and megalithic tombs 38 Figure 13 The plan of a longhouse at Olszanica, Poland, compared with that of Kilham long barrow, England 39 Figure 14 The changing locations of the longhouses at Langweiler site 9, western Germany 45 Figure 15 The layout of the longhouses at Brzesc Kujavski, compared with that of the long barrows at Sarnowo, Poland 47 Figure 16 Alternative groundplans of Severn Cotswold tombs 55 Figure 17 Plan of Tumulus-St-Michel, Carnac, Brittany 56 Figure 18 The excavated sequence at Le Petit Mont, Arzon, Brittany 57 Figure 19 Alternative groundplans for megalithic tombs 60 Figure 20 The changing relationship between tomb plans and human remains 62 Figure 21 The sequence at the megalithic tomb of Lønt, Jutland 65 Figure 22 Plan of the causewayed enclosure at the Beusterburg, western Germany 70 Figure 23 Plan of the enclosed settlement at Darion, Belgium 75 Figure 24 Plan of the causewayed enclosure at Les Réaudins, northern France 77 Figure 25 Plans of the enclosures at Flagstones and Briar Hill 79 x List of figures Figure 26 The relationship between causewayed enclosures and the wider landscape 81 Figure 27 Stonehenge as a causewayed enclosure 93 Figure 28 The timber phase at Stonehenge 94 Figure 29 The developed stone structure at Stonehenge 96 Figure 30 The final structural phase at Stonehenge 98 Figure 31 The relationship between Stonehenge and barrow cemeteries in the surrounding landscape 100 Figure 32 Outline plan of the passage grave and timber circle at Newgrange 103 Figure 33 Circular imagery in the Boyne valley 105 Figure 34 Outline plan of the cemetery at Knowth 108 Figure 35 Structural features outside the passage grave at Newgrange 111 Figure 36 Stone circles and other features enclosing passage graves 112 Figure 37 Plan of the Stones of Stenness 117 Figure 38 Regions of Britain dominated by henges or stone circles 119 Figure 39 The local setting of the Orkney henges 123 Figure 40 The relationship between henges, stone circles and the surrounding landscape 25 Figure 41 Skyline barrows viewed from the monument at Stonehenge 130 Figure 42 The typology of ‘variant circles’ 134 Figure 43 The excavated sequence at Temple Wood stone circle 135 Figure 44 Stone circles with associated cairns in the Peak District and Cumbria 140 Figure 45 The excavated sequence at Cairnpapple Hill 141 Figure 46 The excavated sequence at Balbirnie 144 Figure 47 Early Bronze Age ceramics as ‘house urns’ illustrated by the evidence from the Down Farm pond barrow 151 Figure 48 The plan of a round house at South Lodge Camp compared with that of a nearby barrow 152 Figure 49 The plan of a round barrow on Itford Hill compared with that of a nearby house 153 Figure 50 The organisation of deposits in selected cemeteries and settlements in Sussex 154 Figure 51 The relationship between the Middle Bronze Age cemetery and settlement at Down Farm 156 Figure 52 The structural organisation of selected cemeteries and domestic sites in Cranborne Chase 157 Preface It is curious how one project can overflow into another.

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