Sacred Landscapes

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As a non-believer par excellence I would have to disagree totally with the half-hearted and amateur non-believers above who claim there no such thing as sacred, but then I guess my definition differs.
In any case, our notions of sacredness aren't central to what I was wondering about, which concerned the motivations and attitudes of the original builders. Were they building a sacred (i.e. religious) landscape? It seems often to be taken as obvious fact in much that I've read. Or are we putting our own construction on a much more complex bundle of different motivations that happen to now be observable in one particular location? I guess there are too many anomalies (and I really enjoyed your stuff Brigantes) for it to be other than the complicated answer.
I would add two further complications to the bundle:
First, as I've rambled elsewhere, I feel and therefore reckon they felt, that sacredness or significance attaches to lots of points in the landscape, not just to monuments. When we look at the landscape today there's nothing to prove that to us, yet if it's true we must be missing much or even most of the point.
Secondly, invaders. Once you get those the slate is wiped clean and that which was previously sacred is open to desecration or loss of significance. A speculation: is Silbury 3 a high-tech cruel edifice deliberately built upon the deity of a conquered people, Silbury 1, burying it forever and humiliating them? Perhaps they were enslaved and forced to do it themselves. Scary, but an utterly human thing to do! That's just a bit of raving, with only a bit to support it, but there's no strong evidence it's wrong. If it was right then what price Avebury's sacred landscape?

I think we don't know!!!

All I know is that land set aside for some reason other than crops or building, brought me to a sensibility that nurtures and respects the land. So it did it for me. If a stone circle or mound was built to glorify murder, and years down the line I am 'wrong', then I who can argue that THAT space is not sacred to me? Or the reasons for it being so?

You know I want to know what that mound is!?

Puzzled of Florida :-)

"As a non-believer par excellence I would have to disagree totally with the half-hearted and amateur non-believers above who claim there no such thing as sacred"

Oh, that's very broad brushed and so silly to say that passionate and well articulated views giben the limitations of this discussion are half-hearted and amateur. You don't even know what I believe in, because I haven't actually said it yet! I am arguing for baza's general belief in no belief, but I don't actually equate the word 'sacred' solely with religion, so I CAN accept the phrase 'sacred landscapes' if it means 'highly valued' - and this is obviously conjecture anyway because we don't really know how important these sites and landscapes were to people - I do strongly believe that we will never really get to the bottom of it because our society is so so different that it is basically impossible to really know what people were thinking then, and if we really think we can, then it's simply our modern ego (that we surely must be able to undertand things) overtaking reality.