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Houses for the dead...what about the living?
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Sanctuary
Sanctuary
4670 posts

Re: Houses for the dead...what about the living?
Sep 07, 2010, 08:22
tjj wrote:
Firstly, thanks Sanctuary for starting a thought provoking thread that prompted me to turn my lap-top back on ... quite late, so apologies in advance for any incoherence.

Rodney Castleden in his excellent book Britain 3000BC makes many references to Orkney as the one the few places where the neolithic way of life in Britain can be observed in a tangible way. In his chapter 'The Castles of Eternity' he says the following.

Two big Orkney tombs, Quoyness and Quanterness, were built to the same plan and in the same materials as an Orcadian stone house. One of the houses at Barnhouse is identical in layout to the tombs: a rectangular room with an entrance passage leading into the middle of one of the long sides and six symmetrically arranged rectangular bed recesses. Here, the architectural metaphor is taken a significant step further – in Orkney people were not just making houses for the dead, but beds for them too. The Orcadians passed from home to tomb, from bed to cist, from sleep to death. Even in the simple cist burials, no more than stone boxes made out of four slabs planted in the ground, were references to the stone box-beds that were standard furniture in Orkney houses at Barnhouse and Skara Brae.

He goes on to say …
There has been a recent tendency to draw attention to the differences between the architecture of long barrows and that of long houses …

A search for a suspected Neolithic village on the island of Westray led to the discovery of a major chambered tomb. This consist of a mound 21m across covering a large (7 x 4.5m) burial chamber, the largest ever found in Britain dating from 3000BC. The chamber is near rectangular, with bowed sides and rounded corners, very like the well known Neolithic houses at Knap of Howar, not far away on Papa Westray. The huge burial chamber was meant to look just like a house. Human fingers and toes found close by suggest a sky-burial site next to the tomb. A family lived in a house; the same family lived on in the family tomb.


I've left a bit out of that last section which also talks about Paul Ashbee's idealized reconstruction of Fussell's Lodge long barrow as a solid long barrow with a pitched roof - the author then goes on to use the Westray barrow to support the idea.


Thanks tjj, very interesting indeed. I don't have Rodney Castleten's book but it's on my wanted list right now!

I've always had a personal belief that Neolithic man had a far more powerful belief in the Afterlife than is generally supposed and places such as Avebury and Stonehenge etc were built as major 'vehicles' that got them there in their mindset. Quite how it all worked is open to serious debate and for another time but I'm sure smaller stone circles were in a way the 'local' way of attaining the same result. Rather like the Cathedral compared to the village church scenario.
So if this was the case then it would make perfect sense that you had to live somewhere in the Afterlife so why not build a house for them that was possibly the same as the one they lived in whilst living as a mortal soul. As the majority of Long Barrows seem to have been the last resting place of comparatively few people compared to their size, I've supposed that they were either for family groups or those of a higher order that held great sway but were on the whole unrelated…or a mixture of course. The fact that the WKLB for instance was 'open for business' for something like a 1,000 years before being filled in MAY confirm that they were only intended for the special ones and not Joe Bloggs who would have filled it pretty quickly. I further believe in the possibility that until this time the belief was that although you had gone into your Afterlife your soul/spirit still remained on earth (hence the house for the dead) where you were revered and believed to have carried great power and were 'consulted' often in day to day matters such as health, crops, marriage etc and laid down gifts and offerings.
It may have been only when those beliefs you had in the 'departed' were not coming to fruition (health problems, food shortages, severe weather, child deformities etc) that the belief changed when 'outsiders' moved in and the Afterlife was then conveniently changed from an earthy spirit that you could consult, to a heavenly one where it could not be challenged anymore. And is where we are today I suppose!!

While on the subject of houses for the dead/living, there will be for sure many more undiscovered ones with the same basic floor plan that were just houses for the living that have been taken apart and the stones used elsewhere or simply filled in and grassed over because they were built into the ground with the tops level or just above it. Why should people who were well used to working with stone just live in tent type arrangements or wattle and daub shacks when the option was there to build a decent permanent home with a ‘conventional’ roof of its time over it. Like many of us I have visited arrangements where the top of the stones are at ground level and just called chambered tombs and the assumption was that they were burial tombs with the capstones removed. But were they, or were they houses for the living plain and simple with simple roofs now lost in time?

Anyway I'm rambling now but that is my take on it even though it may be way off the mark.

I’m on to my next project now…building a time-machine to go back and prove it all!! All offers of help welcome!! Haaaaaaa haaaaaaaa
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