Re: Ritual Landscapes | Forum — The Modern Antiquarian

Ritual Landscapes

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BuckyE Oct 8, 2005 15:38:07

Replying to morfe

In a certain sense, ALL constructions that aren't strictly practical define ritual landscapes. The mere fact of marking the ground implies "this bit is significant," and then further implies all the bits outside it must be either less significant (the stuff you can't see for the trees, walls, stones, etc.), or have some significance defined by the marked bit (the Avenues, the views, the celestial events, etc.)

As a kind of an aside, I'm coming to think this "marking and dividing" is really the salient point for we moderns. But that would be another thread.

So, to determine whether the ancient constructions were trying to say something about a PARTICULAR bit of landscape (a hill, or river, etc.) I'd think you'd have to do some fairly boring statistical analysis along these lines...

1. Identify every landscape feature in the geographical area occupied by a given culture that stands out as visually significant. In other words, that fairly obviously "stands out" from the crowd of somewhat similar features. Certainly not every hilly horizon resembles a recumbent person. Which of them do? Which of them have some other resemblance? OK, make as many lists as needed.

2. Identify all the constructions of that culture.

3. Compare all known constructions to all identified landscape features. Is there some seemingly statistically significant correlation?

4. What are the chances (broadly speaking) that a randomly placed construction might have a seemig correlation? That is, are there particular places (only certain hills, through valley notches) from which the landscape feature is seen, or can you see it from everywhere around? Does the placement of constructions seem statistically to take advantage of placements?

When Mr. Cope and friends have done this work and demonstrated some correlations, I'll take notice. Until then, the cursuses, henges, rings, standing stones and barrows were placed where the hallucinating shamans dreamed they should be for reasons we'll probably never know and don't make any difference to our understanding of the things IN GENERAL.

OK?

Rhiannon Oct 8, 2005 16:48:52

Replying to BuckyE

Perhaps I've not understood what you're saying, but surely if we can say 'people sometimes tried to site their monuments in relation to the landscape around them' then that is an important generalisation? Because it shows that people weren't just concentrating on one spot, they were seeing their surroundings in a more holistic way than that - the spot within the wider environment.

FourWinds Oct 8, 2005 19:34:25

Replying to BuckyE

Hi BuckyE, welcome to TMA and thanks for digging out some of these great threads and adding some fair comments to them. So often these old threads just disappear and we probably forget a lot of what i said.

"When Mr. Cope and friends have done this work and demonstrated some correlations, I'll take notice. Until then, the cursuses, henges, rings, standing stones and barrows were placed where the hallucinating shamans dreamed they should be for reasons we'll probably never know and don't make any difference to our understanding of the things IN GENERAL."

I suppose I fall into this group of people so I feel somewhat obliged to answer for all us <i>Significant Hill Heads</i>.

This work is being done, but it's a slow process. What work has been done to investigate how "the hallucinating shamans dreamed" where sites should be? How do you statistically prove that theory? Basically you can't do it, so this makes the theory a good one to cling to as a bit of a dream. I'm not saying it couldn't have been that way, just that the other likelyhoods are worth investigating and the folks that cling to other ideas need to be open minded about any findings that come to light.

I, for one, will take a lot of convincing that situations like this one: http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/40794 are coincidental.

The Eternal Oct 9, 2005 01:57:02

Replying to BuckyE

Taking the hilly option.
It's obvious that if you build, for instance, a stone circle in a mountainous environment then you are going to find numerous coincidental alignments with various hill tops.
It's a matter of filtering out the obvious from the subtle.
The Castlerigg site on TMA shows, in my opinion, more than coincidence, due to the shapes of the tops of the stones in relation to the shapes of the surrounding peaks. If more than a huge coincidence, this surely shows evidence of ritual, otherwise why do it?
Cheers,
TE.

BuckyE Oct 9, 2005 06:07:02

Replying to BuckyE

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.)

(continued next post)

BuckyE Oct 9, 2005 06:07:48

Replying to BuckyE

Secondly, we want to know whether they actually did it: placed, aligned, etc. The idea being that a demonstrated placement, orientation, etc. proves the significance, and thus tells us somewhat of their beliefs. You do see the circularity here? That the view of the hilltop is cited as evidence that the view was important? What, in this one instance, eliminates the much higher probablity that the tiny little easily obscured "view" was pure coincidence? Not a damn thing.

To return to my modern example, and compare it to Fourwinds', what if we looked at all the houses sold last decade and saw that a large majority had "views"? Would that be proof views were a MAJOR CONCERN of highend housebuyers? Not at all. It's entirely possible that the only land suitable for expensive houses is that which has a view. Perhaps soil drainage is only good on hillsides that coincidentally have views, and that's what causes those houses to sell best. We would have to compare all places with views, and demonstrate that no other living-suitable characteristics (drainage, distance from transportation, acceptable amount of land, cell phone reception, who the heck knows what) determined the hot sellers. If ANY, or even a particular COMBINATION, of some other identifiable characteristic of houses was as prevalent even among those with views, we have no PROOF that views were important. "Nice view, but will my mobile work?"

And remember, I've chosen ONE type of landscape feature, and one that we understand to be of some concern to at least some people, as an example.

So, what WOULD be good evidence that the hengers and megalithers were on about the landscape? The Eternal cites a possible methodology: compare the shapes of the site to the shapes of the landscape. I bet he's hard pressed to find another example than Castlerigg. And if there are one or three examples out of thousands, then it's going to be difficult for TE's methodology to make the point that landscape had much meaning for the megalithic culture overall. For the Castleriggers, maybe, but what significance? Perhaps it was a purely aesthetic decision to match stones to horizon.

As in my modern example, we have to eliminate the variables and boil it down to "landscape features" that PRIMARILY determine the placements, orientations or etc. of (at least some category or categories of) sites. The only way to do this is to 1, show that some aspect of the lanscape is apparent or emphasized at a majority of sites (analagous to modern houses having a view) and 2, show that NO OTHER concerns could reasonably account for the "landscape" features of the sites being what they are.

In order to satisfy these two conditions, I proposed a plan of analysis. It ain't gonna happen, folks. Or, well, from our experience and reading, I'd be very deeply surprised if it did. But I DO love surprises!