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Annexus Quam 926 posts |
Oct 06, 2004, 15:54
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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 !
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bigjaybee 106 posts |
Oct 06, 2004, 16:16
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Man, another dude with an advanced copy! Pah - not fair! Hey chap, in the Balfour book he says that one "legend" in the guide is made up and was put in there by himself to see "how it gets on in the world". Did you (or any of the rest of you good HHers) ever figure what one this was?
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Annexus Quam 926 posts |
Oct 07, 2004, 18:00
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I never said I had an 'advanced copy'! Just talking about the enormous importance of the new book in terms of previously unknown areas of Megalithic Europe (like Iberia) being exposed for the first time in history, as well as visited by anyone (possibly for the second or third time!). It truly is an achievement to have covered so much in such little time by the author himself *experiencing* the sites. Well, Balfour's was a good try and is pretty much the only previous attempt at a coffee table book of such a scale, and I like the book; but he never visited most of the places, the photos in some cases are poor (see the Xarez cromlech in Portugal, it is only a photo of yellow grass and compare it with the one I posted on the Guilfin site) or confused (Poulnabroke), and obviously many areas are left untouched. Not sure about the site you mention. Needless to say, no book will ever possibly do anything but scratch the surface of all the monuments in Europe (50,000) but the European is definitely the first attempt from a British perspective (and this is what any other author has failed in doing) to show that the sites are there, that they *exist* and that they rock, even in the remotest of locations/countries. In this way, it will produce the necessary 400-site Iberian, Scando-Germanic and French Antiquarians in due course (comparable to the Modern Antiquarian) by inspiring the unaware persons in those countries with their own unknown heritage.
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