Home - by Francis Pryor
Stone - by Jeffrey Cohen
The Dominion of the Dead - by Robert Pogue Harrison
Prior to sourcing these book, and leading up to meeting with an archeologist/curator, I was considering some questions:
Barton - almost arid when first planted. Saplings rather than trees, flat terrain, and an association with loss.
Gradually over time - more trees, a feeling of safety and enclosure. Visits change as time passes. Grief enters new phase.
How is this different to the past? When ceremonial burials began in ancient Britain - was this also experienced? People buried their dead with precious or personal items to accompany them to the next world. What was their relationship like with the grave after this point? If they were nomadic (or semi nomadic) ie pre neolithic did they revisit their family graves? if so, what relationship did they have with the dead at this point?
All these questions float around as I consider the Baton burial ground.
Often strangers buried near each other, but sometimes in family groups. Husbands with wives etc.. One grave at Barton is simply marked 'Mum and Dad'. "That's sad" Iona says as she sees it and stands still for a moment.
There's of course a practical reason for this. We have to have designated areas to bury the dead. But also - (and aside from overtly Christian beliefs) what are we saying about ourselves and our need for community and attachment by wanting to bury loved ones close together?
Some key passages and thoughts from the books read over the last 6 months or so, including two recommended to me by a tutor in my unit 2 feedback.
Home, Francis Pryor
'In Home, Pryor reveals a completely different picture of the past, showing that hearth and home lay at the heart of our ancestors' lives, and led to some of the most profound advances in human society'.
I was interested to look at this book in relation to the ideas I've been looking at on burials, and the evolution of our relationship with place and settlement. I'm due to meet with an archaeologist next week at a local exhibition called 'Beneath our Feet' and I'm hoping to gain some more knowledge on this topic.
A tutor commented that this book would be useful to look at, mentioning how the land literally beneath our feet has shifted and divided over time. How the physical realignment of the ground mirrors the social evolution of humans. There's so much about this archaeological and anthropological fact that is visually stirring.
Some key quotes that jumped out at me when reading:
"Communities needed to assemble together in prehistoric times, just as they do today...if you open a book on Britain's prehistoric monuments, the earliest examples are always neolithic, because very little survives, as visible humps and bumps in the landscape, from earlier times. But when farming arrived around 4000 BC, all of that was to change. Suddenly people started to erect permanent monuments in the landscape, many of which have survived to this day. We know this took a vast amount of work and planning. So why did they do it? And the answer, I firmly believe, reside within the family."
On Stonehenge:
' If anything, Stonehenge was more about astrology than astronomy. it was never a predictive or scientific instrument in the modern sense, but rather a place where people came for supernatural assurance about the things that mattered in their lives: that the sun would continue to rise, that winter would eventually end and the grass and crops would grow again, come the springtime'.
Pryor makes note that the great sites of Stonehenge and Avery are only 16 miles apart, and speculates that communities would travel from all directions to visit them and that they were possibly visited for different reasons.
He comments that despite these sites most likely being 'neutral' sites where different or perhaps funding communities would come together to discuss and resolve differences or other arrangements, there is still an undeniable mysticism about the sites.
It's interesting to contemplate this when visiting these sites, and likening it to the places I myself visit. I guess these places that one returns to holds a level of significance that varies according to the individual.
'By 2500 BC, when Stonehenge begins its major phase of rapid , Britain was a very different place to what it had been when farming began, some two and a half millennia previously. By now, most of the woodland was well on its way to being opened up to cairns, narrows, standing stones and other long-vanished markers, such as ancient trees which signalled the edges of communal and family holdings. In certain parts of the country, such as the edges of the fens, the first fields were bing laid out, using those earlier markers as guides. Villages were starting to emerge. Landscapes of this sort can only function if they are linked by a network of roads and droveways (for livestock), connected, in turn, to rivers and streams. The whole process was , a feed0back loop - call it what you will - between people and their surroundings: social development stimulated landscape change, which in turn affected the way people in different communities were able to interact.'
On agriculture and land dividing:
'At this stage of prehistory (5,700 years ago), the British landscape was still being developed. trees were being felled, roads and trackways were being laid out and possession of good farmlands were being divided up among communities.'
'..prehistory is not just about food production, or metalworking, however important they may have been at the time. It's actually about people, their surroundings and how they inhabited the landscape.'
In ref to the 'domestic revolution of 1500 BC '...the new social politics brought about by the Domestic revolution was essentially to do with localism. With an established national network of roads and tracks, and with the landscape cleared of natural forest, woodland, hearth, moor and scrub, people in different regions would have been in regular contact with each other. So it made sense to structure life around that simple fact. As it was now unnecessary to travel so far, people organised their communities around what lay closer to home: their families, their houses and their farms.'
On ceremony:
(And on stating the book is not heavily about ritual and) 'But I do think it's important to point out that small-scale, sometimes intimate, family-based ceremonies continued to take place in the later Neolithic and Bronze Age, long after the much earlier causewayed enclosures had gone out of use.
On burial:
An interesting point about early burial being called 'excarnation' - where instead of being buried under the ground, bodies were taken away to a remote location (up a mountain or within some trees) and left exposed to the elements. Today, we bury the dead swiftly and if, as in terrible circumstance of sudden death from an accident or murder, a body isn't location, it can leave a family in a terrible state of limbo. This of course is part of Christian doctrine surrounding 'original sin'.
Pryor speculates on the conditions of delaying a burial, or not entombing the dead deep underground. Could it have been a way for communities and families to process the departure of a loved one, to give people time to grieve?
When talking about the 'messages' contained within objects used in burial "the message concealed within objects buried within prehistoric graves was not always the same. Like the monuments they built and frequently modified, the beliefs that people held were in a state of gradual evolution. Attitudes to religion, death and the afterlife were changing with an ever increasing speed, as the population grew and the landscape developed'.
On journeys (and specifically, the moving of the dead and the creation of ancient sites using sacred stones transported from one place to another):
'It has been suggested, quire reasonably, that the source of these rocks (the rocks transported from Wales to Stonehenge) was somehow sacred, but I believe there is more to the idea than this alone: the physical journey made by the rocks was somehow linked in people's minds to the symbolic journeys made by the spirits their loved ones.'
Stone - by Jeffrey Cohen
Although aspects of this book feel quite wordy and lofty (!) I find the connection between geology and humankind so interesting. I want to keep referring back to this book but wanted to note down some words relating to Avebury stone circle which really resonate with me, especially having visited recently.
A real sense in this book, of the force and endurance of stone. Cohen talks of the presence held and exuding some megalithic sites and the power of connecting with this. The stones at Avebury are spread over a large area and appear to rise from the ground unapologetically, especially when viewed from a distance away. I've been dong some drawings in response to my visits there and especially looking at the mottled surface of the stone itself - how being truly face to face with them means we can chart and trace their surface up close. It's quite a remarkable experience doing this.
Cohen recounts his own visit to Avebury with his son and I really liked his way of describing it:
"Perhaps Avebury's megaliths are not so much a letter but an epistolary romance, a gap-riddled among many authors (some human, some not) unfolding over immense duration. Whatever its initial architects called the stone, in whatever language they shared but could not bequeath, barber Rock has not yet ceased to speak" .
- (Barber Rock refers to one of the stones that, in the 14th century fell and crushed a barber- surgeon to death. His body was recovered in 1938 by the archaeologist Alexander)
He continues:
"My son and I touched a megalith's pocked surface and felt our own desires. But we also perceived that these desires are not ours alone. Our fingers traced an ancient record of love, and strife, of the stone's being hewn, transported, dressed, raised, toppled and raised again. We wandered a tactile archive of its long companionship with wind, rain, ice, sheep, lichens, artists, admirers, worshippers, wayfarers. Barber Rock is thick with multiple plots and uncertain denouements". - (denouements meaning the final part of a play or story in which the strands of a plot are pulled together and matters are explained or resolved). Great word!)
" Avebury's stones are a dynamic aggregate of difficult composed, rewritten, revised, forgotten, discovered. To touch the towering or toppled megaliths is to enter a human-lithic-world participation that gathers millennia, layered and deep, opening to expansive sedimented temporalities, a community of people, things, and forces through story and stone"..
Cohen's writing really reminds me of Macfarlance's here. It's interesting that both writers bridge across different areas of specialism. Not just archaeology or geology - but transposing into the literary and poetic. It feels completely fitting when writing about and pondering the significance of ancient sites.
I get a real sense of time passing through the land, but that these stones (despite being moved or transported) hold the record of this in a form that is so undisputedly strong and permanent. When you stand right under one of those stones you can't help but contemplate their sheer weight - but at the same time, a feeling of wisdom or protectiveness falls over you.
These images and symbols are all percolating and circulating as I continue to work on my paintings. I can see these intersecting areas of research being sustained long into the future -and for that I feel grateful and hopeful.