Greetings
The last few weeks have seen me preoccupied with trivia like finding about the etymology of the hip town of Staines or, more revealingly, bumping into the Viereckschanze, those square enclosures of which I have only seen one outside Germany - the beautiful and mysterious Arthur's Table in that beautiful stretch of Cornwall where the horizon joins the heavens (and featured in the Modern Antiquarian). Not only are the 200 known Middle European proto-henges the potential proto-Neolithic prototypes for the Bronze Age ones in the UK, but the Viereckschanze are another common Ur-feature here. Only in Bavaria, there's even an atlas of VES with 100 of these monuments.
Although Northern Germany is, along with Scandinavia, part of the same megalithic tradition, the central and southern parts of the country are, although lacking megalithic sites, even more mysterious due to its hilly nature and the tall standing stones galore. Having this year exhausted (though not visited all of) my own private catalogue of 1,000 hunenbett, dolmens and other megalithic paraphernalia in the German North, I am slowly directing my attention to the fantastic stone circles of Poland and the German Baltic.
Writing from the corners of free-internet shops, I must testify to the greatness of the Megalithic European. Anticipated for years, it is a lush book as well as the most comprehensive European overview published so far. Other books (Balfour, Alistair or Mohen) were rather incomplete due to the unknown character of the thousands of sites in countries like Spain or Portugal, which used to appear as 'megalithic voids'. In fact, this is the first time that many of the sites featured in those countries are coming to light. I don't even think that the locals themselves know of those sites due to archaeologists keeping them secret until now. But the time has come for the cromlechs/circles and dolmens of those countries to unveil their secrets to the rest of the world for the first time.
The numbers are misleading though, for example the famous and neatly rebuilt 55 Dutch-only hunebedden conceal the reality of the hundreds of German or Danish hunenbett across the border or the fact that there are at least at least 6,000 sites in each of the other major countries involved. But the purpose of the book is to pull people to get there, by picking some of the most flashy stones and, more importantly, their accessibility. In all, it is the first attempt and some very NEW information is there.
And before I am Back To The Egg, in my constant nomadic quest, I was shocked to find that my kindred spirit, a Norwegian homeless dude that used to frequent the Dunkin Donuts where I used to sometimes check the net, has burned the place down due to his anti-smoker stance, thus indirectly forcing me to continue wandering the Berlin streets and forests in search of a Connection.
Keep The Zeitgeist !
|
