Well, you folks are the best. I am *so* bummed we won't be at the Avebury Meet. You're very kind to put up with my obsessed iconoclasm.
Nigel writes that "the actual backbreaking process was the work of heroes." Well, it strikes me as just the opposite. Or, perhaps not *just* the opposite, because we've seen plenty of prehistoric sites that obviously weren't the work of heroes: they're just arrangements of rocks that any reasonably well organized group of young folks could create. People in olden days *expected* to work. I'm sure, without any proof--that they did it at least cooperatively and creatively enough that it *wasn't* backbreaking.
My brother has a saying: "If it's hard to do, you're not doing it right." It's absolutely astounding to me how correct he is. I can't tell you how many times he's shown me a trick that made a frustrating sweaty heap of misery a reasonable little task. And I'm not talking about invoking a machine, I'm talking about using the pry bar differently: placing it differently and pushing it instead of pulling it. Or using a clamp. Or creating a backstop. I myself have shown friends ways to pry or lift that made what they had thought impossible, simple. And I'm no expert, just a hero-brother worshipper!
In modern times, when farmers are at the bottom of an oppressive economic ladder, of course they are denied the proper resources--of time, tools, knowledge, help--to do their jobs properly. Hence breaking their backs, trying to do something for a shoestring profit that should be done only for survival in a community of like minded helpers.
That we today can't fathom how the stone arrangers did it is meaningless. We've lost their techniques. And given thousands of years of arranging, there aren't really many examples of unfathomable. Stonehenge, of course. Avebury, yes. A few of the recumbents. The giant menhir at Carnac: that puppy makes Stonehenge look a mere bagatelle. Well, maybe not Stonehenge, but I was awestruck by *that* hunk of stone. But then, how long did they work on the menhir? Did they move it a foot a year? Did they raise it an inch a year? The Stonehengineers try to row or push a stone for yards an hour. How about yards a day? Yards a week? I have no idea how much work would be necessary to get any given stones from their putative origins to their final arrangements *in the time that was devoted to it:* possibly decades. Most of the rest of the stones we've seen could be moved by any highschool football team, provided they worked smart.
When we looked over the crazy rows of Carnac, we were all struck by the idea that they might well have been the work of centuries. The "rows" stagger like a drunk. Did dozens of families get together to add a stone a year at some festival? How much work would that have been at any one party? From our modern vantage point of wanting to construct infrastructure for immediate use, we assume the prehistoric people felt the same way. But look even at the historic precedent of building medieval cathedrals over periods ranging from years to centuries.
So to me, the "heroic" aspect of *the great majority* of prehistoric constructions is Romantic fantasy. Certainly work--effort, thought, resources--was devoted to them. Out of all the theoretically available work time for a prehistoric population resident over *millenia,* what percentage was it? My guess is vanishingly small, on the average, per person. I could be wrong: there could have been many constructions lost to us, skewing my mental survey. But from what Loie and I have seen; knowing what I do about the potential inherent in working smart; and the long time over which the work could have been spread; seeing it as "backbeaking heroism," implying some great sacrifice, isn't justified. So, neither is the deduction they were impelled by burning passions.
Were all of the people constructing Gothic cathedrals so impelled? Or were most of them hod carriers working for a wage? Some of them crafstmen impelled by pride in a job well done, and a wage much better than they would have made as peasants? How do we know the stone circles and barrows and henges weren't constructed in the same way? By teams of experts hired for a few years to build East Aquorthies, then moving on to spend a few years on Sunhoney? Would this perhaps help account for the similarities of monuments in regions, and differences between regions?
It's an uncritical assumption the monuments were physically built by their users, like an Amish barn raising. Maybe there really *were* prehistoric Obelixes. They woud have been in tip top shape, fed on the choicest bits available to their clients; wise in the ways of moving stones to the point of seeming uncanny: handing down their secrets of smart work honed and perfected over generations. The community hiring them would have had all the usual motives for doing so: pride (the tribal headman), true religious devotion (the shaman and her/his female congregation) , grudging aquiesence to a social norm (the ladies' husbands), unthinking inheritance of unquestioned tradition (the little kids), excitement over a chance to see something new going on (the teenagers).
The community would have then used their monument in whatever ways they did, for generations, (resources well spent, when amortized over centuries) and then when the weather turned bad and the peat began to rise, well, heigh ho to the old home place.
"Shame about the stones, eh?"
"Ah, stop mooning over the flaking old things and get your back into that sledge."
That's *my* Unromantic fantasy. Thanks for the chance to air it in public!
