The Modern Antiquarian. Stone Circles, Ancient Sites, Neolithic Monuments, Ancient Monuments, Prehistoric Sites, Megalithic MysteriesThe Modern Antiquarian

Head To Head   The Modern Antiquarian   General Discussion Forum Start a topic | Search
The Modern Antiquarian
Re: Houses for the dead...what about the living?
45 messages
Select a forum:
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.


Reply | with quote
tjj
Posted by tjj
7th September 2010ce
00:02

Messages in this topic: