|
The Modern Antiquarian Forum » Sacred Landscapes |
Log In to post a reply
|
|
|
|
| Topic View: Flat | Threaded | |
|
BrigantesNation 1733 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 08:03
|
||
|
"Ritual landscapes were built" Where are they being built? You describe a pilgrimage, which is fair enough but nothing I suggest that we could look to and say "this was deliberately constructed as a ritual landscape", we could say "this has been interpreted as a ritual landscape" but even then, other than the notion of "god's country" I doubt many people saw their pilgrimage as being accross a sacred landscape, more a set of points of potential sacred significance distributed accross a landscape. What I'm getting at here is that we don't actually know why the ancient monuments were built, some are linked with causeways that we may choose to interpret as having ritual significance, and that a particular density of such monuments and causeways accross a landscape could be interpreted as being a sacred landscape. Where are the more recent examples of us building sacred landscapes? Or is it really just a bit of a fantasy? I guess if we look for a modern comparison we could think of London's ritual landscape - Buck's palace, the royal mile and Westminster Cathedral. I'm just thinknig out loud here, this debate has thrown quite a few new angles at me.
|
|||
AtomicMutton 104 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 08:03
|
||
|
A Lych gate as a pair of stones ? But why did we pair stones so avidly back then ? Left and right ? We've found it so we'll show it ? The proddies were probably better at recording the ancient placenames (formally) though. The closest thing to a church back four thousand years was a hill - the more glacial the better. I don't know what I'm going to find when I get back to Camp1 this afternoon. As I was leaving on Monday the keepers went swirling in with their new Landrovers, riding shotgun to the little digger. This JCB will be acting as a toreodor (sorry) before the big buggers arrive. I've got some little lumps of Gur for the fuel systems. In the right circumstances that will construe as using reasonable force. Two ballaun stones, a little re-erected standing stone and the capstone off something too. It's futile, of course. English Nature seemed to give *backdated* permission for a road a mile long in their SSSI. Backdated nine months - the moor's only been sold six. I've certainly never seen that happen before (Don't Call Me Mark Thatcher). TomBo, our budding shaman, maybe fifteen miles away as the crow flies, might have written to the local MP, even. I can see him telling me the stonecrusher is really a big baler or a new type of combine! The EN field officer told me that as the burial mound had already had some stone taken then that made it more ok to take the rest of it. A local placename - the Three Pikes - needs revision. One Pike | He's gone (to 520m.)
|
|||
Kammer 3083 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 08:37
|
||
|
My kids are pretty indifferent to the beauty of the land around them. :-)# K x
|
|||
|
nigelswift 8112 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 09:16
|
||
|
Isn’t that word “processional” a key element in all this? Very few “significant” landscapes could have been built as such, right from scratch, but many contain a number of significant points which were linked together either in reality and/or (more importantly) conceptually. Perhaps the remaining landscape gains significance merely because it cradles all this. I rather like Birmingham, but thinking about it, I suspect I like bits of Birmingham and I like the rest merely because it contains the bits and allows me to access them. I’ve been on the Beatles tour in Liverpool (their houses and schools and where they met and Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields etc). To an avid fan, isn’t the whole of Liverpool a sacred landscape? You mention that thirty disparate churches might one day be mis-identified as a single sacred landscape. But the problem is, if they were all the same denomination then to that particular set of people, who might have visited them all, they would indeed have had a collective significance. So by sheer luck the archaeologists of the future would have got it right (except for the fact that they’d probably lump a couple of synagogues into the bundle). I would have thought the Stonehenge area, being so complex and dating over such a long period, is particularly inappropriate to be given the title of sacred landscape as there are so many possibilities. Perhaps the term sacred landscape should be amended to sacred landscapes? Perhaps Michael Dames would have done well to adopt this humbler approach?
|
|||
|
BrigantesNation 1733 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 09:30
|
||
Yes, so not only do we have a "4th dimension" - the development of the area over time, we also have a perception overlay - one person or people's concept of a ritual landscape may be different to another in the same time period.
|
|||
|
nigelswift 8112 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 09:39
|
||
|
... and then there are your thoughts about tree cover, which I haven't forgotten you promised... :)
|
|||
|
BrigantesNation 1733 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 09:56
|
||
In think that will have to be another thread, this one got a little out of control.
|
|||
|
Annexus Quam 926 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 09:58
|
||
|
There's been a lot of talk on this thread about Nature and the ancients. First, I don't think we will never know the rituals and minds of the ancients. We are getting closer and closer. 50,000 megalithic sites around Europe are giving us more and more clues in the enormous amounts of paraphernalia, building methods and relationship of the tombs to their settlements and the environment. And, as Fourwinds says, places like Ireland, Spain, Portugal, etc still preserve, believe it or not, quite a lot of Neolithic elements in traditions like festivals, dances or pilgrimages. As far as I know, for instance, no proper compendium of possible pagan festivals has ever been written. As more countries like Albania or Romania open up to research, we will get more clues to our own particular beliefs (even though it is NOT the same, why are dolmens the same or why are long dolmens all over Northern Europe the same? - common elements are everywhere). There’s just been a general lack of talk between European archaeologists as well as a lack of global vision of sites in context (until now). Now, if the Land (or parts of nature like boulders, hills, rivers, etc) wasn't sacred to the ancients, then what was? Are we implying they didn't consider anything sacred? Because *that* was all they had. All of this supposing we ignored years of anthropological research among pre-literate societies, like, say, those who are still tired of calling their land 'sacred' (the Amerindians), those who communicate with the spirits of the dead for counsel via trance (Siberian shamans) or those who are still building megaliths in a Cult of the Dead as we speak (in Madagascar). Were our ancient ancestors, for some unknown reason, different from all other pre-literate societies? We are surrounded by so much stuff and information nowadays that we feel so secure in our distinction between sacred and 'not sacred'. For a thousand years or more, since part of the land was consecrated and became God's Acre, we have been able to draw a distinction between the sacred space and the not-sacred space. Any of us who had to spend 24 hours a day outside surrounded by Nothing-but-nature and have to survive, would automatically start believing in fairies and trolls. Atheism would turn into passionate fervour. And we would also become illiterate as there is no need for words – everything is already said in the complex mithology of the landscape. We just forgot how to interpret it.
|
|||
|
BrigantesNation 1733 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 10:05
|
||
|
Thinking of Bucks palace I was reminded of a primary reason why ritual landscapes exist - to reinforce the powewr structure - to "sanctify" those in power. by associating your leaders with your religion, this gives them the ultimate seal of approval. Doing it regularly makes sure the people do not forget that their leaders are "gods". Is this is the case, and we do have ritual landscapes, then surely we are looking at three types of structure - power, religion and communication.
|
|||
|
nigelswift 8112 posts |
Jul 31, 2003, 10:29
|
||
|
... and the greatest of these is Power. Democract has always been, and still is, an aberration in the way humans behave. Absolutism rules! (ho ho). The French, who are supposed to have invented modern democracy started by simply substituting one absolute dictatorship with another. It took us until the American Constitution to even think of the idea of Separation of Powers, and ever since then the Presidency has worked to subvert the concept as much as it could. It's the way we are. Your three things, power, religion and communication are an indivisiblre trinity to my mind, and if a monument displays one it is bound to have involved the other two as well. At least, if it's not the case, those people were very different to all we know of how people are these days.
|
| Pages: 21 – [ Previous | 1 … 7 8 9 10 11 12 | Next ] | Add a reply to this topic |
|
|
|
| The Modern Antiquarian Forum Index | |
