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Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

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Ritual Landscapes
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BuckyE
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Re: Ritual Landscapes
Oct 08, 2005, 15:38
In a certain sense, ALL constructions that aren't strictly practical define ritual landscapes. The mere fact of marking the ground implies "this bit is significant," and then further implies all the bits outside it must be either less significant (the stuff you can't see for the trees, walls, stones, etc.), or have some significance defined by the marked bit (the Avenues, the views, the celestial events, etc.)

As a kind of an aside, I'm coming to think this "marking and dividing" is really the salient point for we moderns. But that would be another thread.

So, to determine whether the ancient constructions were trying to say something about a PARTICULAR bit of landscape (a hill, or river, etc.) I'd think you'd have to do some fairly boring statistical analysis along these lines...

1. Identify every landscape feature in the geographical area occupied by a given culture that stands out as visually significant. In other words, that fairly obviously "stands out" from the crowd of somewhat similar features. Certainly not every hilly horizon resembles a recumbent person. Which of them do? Which of them have some other resemblance? OK, make as many lists as needed.

2. Identify all the constructions of that culture.

3. Compare all known constructions to all identified landscape features. Is there some seemingly statistically significant correlation?

4. What are the chances (broadly speaking) that a randomly placed construction might have a seemig correlation? That is, are there particular places (only certain hills, through valley notches) from which the landscape feature is seen, or can you see it from everywhere around? Does the placement of constructions seem statistically to take advantage of placements?

When Mr. Cope and friends have done this work and demonstrated some correlations, I'll take notice. Until then, the cursuses, henges, rings, standing stones and barrows were placed where the hallucinating shamans dreamed they should be for reasons we'll probably never know and don't make any difference to our understanding of the things IN GENERAL.

OK?
In reply to:
Ritual Landscapes (morfe)		 Replies:
Re: Ritual Landscapes (Rhiannon)
Re: Ritual Landscapes (FourWinds)
Re: Ritual Landscapes (The Eternal)
Re: Ritual Landscapes (BuckyE)
Re: Ritual Landscapes (BuckyE)
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