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Ritual Landscapes
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BuckyE
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Re: Ritual Landscapes
Oct 09, 2005, 06:07
Hello new friends. I'm coming more or less from the Stone Pages, where Loie and I have been lurking and posting for a few years. Nigle and Jimit and Pete are friends from there. Loie and I had a marvelous personal tour of Avebury with them a few years ago. One of the best days we've ever had.

Actually, the hallucinating shamans were probably on the way out by the time Avebury and other large stone sites were being built. A much more formalized, priestly religion was probably organizing by then. I just threw that out to be contentious in a friendly way. That said, though, we've seen few if any sites we thought were oriented to any particular landscape features. FourWinds's link looks to me like a very good case in point. A few tall trees would block the view of that little slice of hilltop. Perhaps the old timers kept the trees trimmed?

To reply to the evocatively cognomened Rhiannon, maybe I'll try another way of putting my objection. The question, as I understand it, and perhaps I'm MISunderstanding it, is whether the megalith pushers and henge diggers were especially interested in some how relating their constructions to natural features of the landscape. In other words, were they finding some significance in hills, valleys, horizons, rivers, etc?

Loie and I have seen a fair number of these places in Scotland, England, France and Italy. Rings, menhirs, barrows, cairns, rows. They've been in valleys, on hills, near water, nowhere near water, close to each other, magnificently isolated, dead obvious, nearly impossible to find; you name it. They've had obvious means of orientation (stone rows, recumbent stone rings, barrow openings) and no discernible means at all (single menhirs, rings of similar stones.)

Now, if we wanted to say, as an example, that "having a view" was of primary importance or had a particular significance to people with incomes of over $200,000 a year in America between the years 1990 and 2000, how would we go about demonstrating that? (Other than just asking them, of course.) Of course we'd look at the houses they bought, and see whether said houses "had a view." But that implies we KNOW what comprises "a view." In modern times, of course we have some general idea of what that phrase means. Advertising, the things friends point out to us about their houses, etc. all add up to a general, if vague, concept of "a view," as opposed to just being able to see SOMEthing through a window, such as the side of a shed.

But we have NO SUCH preconceived concept for the Neolithic. Or, if we do, we're not being very good scientists. What we're trying to do is a bit circular: first, we want to know what might have been considered "a Neolithic view," that is, an important type of landscape feature? Something that the old timers considered significant (meaningful) enough to somehow highlight with the placement, orientation, sightlines from or some mixture of these aspects of their constructions? (In the process, we hope to understand their ways of thought.)

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