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Stonehenge and its Environs

The Secrets of Stonehenge

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tiompan T
tiompan Jun 2, 2009 15:43:19
Replying to tjj

tjj wrote:
tiompan wrote:
moss wrote:
Well perhaps one word will give a clue to exploration..'phenomenological', this perhaps is where some of the new archaeologists are coming from, experiencing the landscape through a 'thought' process of what it might have been like at that particular time of history.. It is a subjective approach, the old objective 'interpretation' of earlier archaeology has been dissed for a new modern approach;).. Julian Thomas is a phenomenologist I believe, cant say about the others, and I think MPP has been criticised to some extent for a reliance on other cultures to interpret Stonehenge... in the game of theories you can never arrive at an ultimate truth, unless of course you're Dr.Who...
I think if the next generation become any more phenomenological then MPP will seen as comparatively acceptable . Hopefully there will be a reaction and maybe a return to the less subjective .A more objective approach like Anthony Johnson might be a start although he is a wee bit too established to be considered "new generation "
http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/phenom.htm

For anyone like me who didn't know what phenomenology means .... or is this just another method of making the subject of archaeology inaccessible to all but the sanctified few.

The use of the term is a bit older than is suggested by the site , Lambert 18 th C certainly used it . Similar to the misuse of deconstruction , it is really a synonym for subjectivity ., sling in a bit of Merleau -Ponty and you can happily twitter about how you feel about any site anywhere and because you are a qualified archaeo it just might provide new info . Posters do it all the time here and it's no more or less valid but doesn't really tell us anything new about the site other than learning how others "see/feel " it . The technical term for any P word stuff I have ever read in relation to archaeology is bollocks .

G Gwass
Gwass Jun 2, 2009 16:35:36
Replying to tiompan

Thanks for that, it's all very interesting. I'd not really heard of phenomonology in the way it is described in the link someone posted and felt it was a bit inaccessible.

However I have recently got a book called the phenomonology of landscape which I've not read yet but I understood it in an archaeological sense to refer to the sybolic way in which ancient people or otherwise encountered their landscape both in a real and spiritual sense, which I thought was exactly what the programme last night was exploring i.e. a real and imaginery line (the cursus) defining a zone of the living from a zone of the dead etc etc.

Why rivers, hills, pottery, stone axes, ditches etc were sacred rather than just functional entities in peoples minds. Not be that familiar with phenomonology I'm not sure.

Would welcome anyones thoughts.