Piecing Together a Past

Piecing Together the Past was one of the last books by Gordon Childe. It was published in 1955 and drew on a series of lectures he had given over the previous decade. Every chapter asked a question. The most difficult was: ‘What happened in prehistory?’ There might be disagreements over particular answers, but they would be based on a single method of analysis, for it seemed as if there was only one past to study. The authors of the present volume take a different view, for, no matter which monuments they consider, they find evidence of many separate pasts. Some of those histories were invoked at different times, and others were advocated simultaneously but by different groups of people. There was far more diversity than Childe allowed. It may have happened because his account was concerned exclusively with prehistory and with its significance for twentieth-century thought. What took place in between was overlooked, for in 1955 few scholars envisaged a past within the past. Those who did so were more concerned with the development of archaeology as a discipline. Childe’s procedure was like that of field projects which disregard later structures to focus on a single period. Childe was concerned with artefacts as well as monuments, but the present account considers the evidence of buildings and related structures. It is a vital distinction. Small objects might have been discovered by chance or could have circulated for a long time as heirlooms. Monuments, however, were impossible to overlook. They might be ignored as unacceptable beliefs were rejected, they might even be destroyed, but in every case their presence demanded some response. It is conventional to associate monuments with memory, as that invokes the Latin verb monere, to remind. This equation is problematical. It is implausible that a single version of the past would remain unaltered for long and more likely that it was revised as circumstances changed. At the same time, forgetting is an important cultural process (Forty and Küchler 1999) and ideas could lose their force surprisingly quickly.

Megaliths and Holy Places in the Genesis of the Kingdom of Asturias (North of Spain, ad 718–910)

Flowing from the Picos de Europa mountain range into the Bay of Biscay (in a SW–NE direction), the River Sella is the main dividing axis of the highly mountainous territory of Asturias, northern Spain, with peaks up to 2,500 metres. The first known human traces in the Sella river basin date back to the Middle Palaeolithic and include remains of thirteen Neanderthal individuals found in the cave of El Sidrón. Archaeological remains dating to the Upper Palaeolithic and the Epipalaeolithic are frequent throughout the region. The adoption of the Neolithic way of life in Asturias was modest. The polished axes found in large numbers and mostly manufactured with rocks imported from other regions, are one of the main sources of evidence to study the Asturian Neolithic. The most noticeable archaeological evidence for this period is, however, the megalithic phenomenon, the earliest monuments dating to the beginning of the fourth millennium BC. Unlike the usual concentrations of barrows and dolmens in other areas of northern Iberia, these constructions are often found on high ground, strategically overlooking the main stretches of well-travelled pathways. The most prominent Asturian megalith, Santa Cruz (Cangas de Onís), however, differs from the pattern outlined above, as it was placed on a fluvial terrace, on a location often flooded by the Sella and Güeña rivers, which meet here (Blas Cortina 1997a; 1997b). The low altitude and the fair conditions of the optimal Holocene would have provided the basis for a densely forested environment throughout the fifth and fourth millennia bc. Historically, the most populated town of this region has been Cangas de Onís, located in the confluence of the Sella and Güeña rivers, where the best agricultural land is also found. These apt conditions also extend to the adjoining valley of Güeña, home to the sites of Covadonga and Abamia, which bear witness to the interweaving of prehistoric memory and Medieval affairs that will be discussed in this chapter.

Enduring Past: Megalithic Tombs of Brittany and the Roman Occupation in Western France

The extended lives of prehistoric monuments, whether or not they were interacted with once their initial phase of use had ended and how they were treated, can reveal valuable details about a culture. To interact with a place means that the action or influence is reciprocal. The individual, or group of individuals, is somehow affected by the physical contact they’ve had with the site, and the place in turn has been altered. Interactions are more than just reuse of a space. In fact, missing pieces of monuments’ biographies, evidence of subsequent use and treatment, are details that may tell us how a people dealt with their own past as well as that of others. The focus of this study is a region in which the biographies of a group of monuments appear to be intimately tied to clashing cultures during the Roman occupation: Morbihan, Brittany. Brittany is the westernmost province of France, roughly 30 kilometres north-west of the mouth of the Loire river, and extending over 200 kilometres westward into the Celtic Sea. The south-easternmost department of this province is Morbihan, which makes up over 6,800 square kilometres and centres on the Gulf of Morbihan, a few kilometres south of Vannes (Darioritum), the Roman-period civitas-capital of the Veneti. Darioritum was not only a port for commercial ships, but was also on the major road network connecting the Coriosolitae (Corseul), Osismes (Carhaix-Plouguer) and Namnetes (Nantes) civitates (Galliou and Jones 1991, 77, 81, 84). Evidence found in a thorough survey of Iron Age and Roman materials at megalithic tombs in Atlantic Europe revealed that Brittany is by far the region with the highest concentration of direct Roman period interactions, despite both the distribution of megalithic tombs across the peninsula and subsequent habitation patterns during the Iron Age and Roman periods (Scarre 2011, 29–33; Vejby 2012) . It also revealed that this activity is a major shift from the comparatively low number of megalithic tombs at which Iron Age materials have been found.

Before the Standing Stones: From Land Forms to Religious Attitudes and Monumentality

Any study of great prehistoric monuments from standing stones to pyramids involves exploring people’s spiritual beliefs. There had to be some strong sense of awe to motivate people to do the kind of extraordinary work to erect such monuments, and in the ancient world, religion served as the greatest motivator. There are many ways to study religion, and each academic discipline uses its own methods, which in turn shape its conclusions. Anthropologists compare different religions to see how different cultures express their beliefs; sociologists look at the functions religions serve to maintain a social cohesiveness. Psychologists of religion might look at the way religious feelings are manifest in individuals, and theologians try to explore deep truths about the nature of God. All these approaches reveal some truths about this complex phenomenon we call religion and the results often seem like those of the proverbial blind men describing parts of an elephant while missing the glory of the whole. I, too, will focus on one small part of the religious experience—the feeling that lies at the heart of those who have felt the spiritual, and while there have been many disciplines that have studied this religious experience, from psychology to philosophy to sociology, my approach is historical. I will try to explore the nature of people’s religious expression over time, as they change and as they stay the same. What is this religious feeling? As we might expect, there are many different interpretations and analyses of the nature of the religious experience. It may mean the capacity of feeling at one with something larger than oneself, which is the definition of ‘mysticism’. It maymean a belief in—a faith in—a supernatural being. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will simply accept the experience as a capacity humans have to feel awe and reverence (Bellah 2011). This enduring sense of awe—what has been famously called the idea of the holy (Otto 1950)—lies somewhere at the heart of all subsequent religious impulses.

Beowulf and Archaeology: Megaliths Imagined and Encountered in Early Medieval Europe

Since the mid nineteenth century AD, the poem Beowulf has long been a quarry for inspiration, analogy and insight for those exploring the archaeology of Early Medieval Britain and Scandinavia (Cramp 1957; Hills 1997; Webster 1998; Owen-Crocker 2000). The dialogue of archaeology and poem has been employed to explore a range of Early Medieval social practices and structures: the production and circulation of weapons and armour through inheritance and gift-giving, the role of vessels and feasting practices, hall-building and ceremony, the hoarding of treasure, and various dimensions of funerary practice including barrow-burial, boat-burial, and cremation. In discussing many of these practices, scholars have recently pointed to the sense of the past in the poem as a practice-orientated form of social memory. Synergies have been identified between heroic poetry and the ceremonial use of material culture, monuments, architectures, and landscapes identified in poetry and archaeological evidence as distinct but related technologies of remembrance within the hierarchical Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerge during the mid to late seventh century AD (Williams 1998; 2006; 2011a; 2011b; Owen-Crocker 2000; Semple 2013). In this fashion, the assertions of legitimacy and identities by Early Medieval elites, including their claims to land, power and people, were performed through the ritualized reuse, appropriation and naming of ancient monuments and their deployment within rituals and oral performances, including poetry (Semple 2013; see also Price 2010). The locations and immediate environs of major later Anglo-Saxon churches and elite residences, and the maritime and land routes connecting them, provided the dramaturgical and ritualized settings and media by which social memories were transmitted and reproduced. Landmarks such as ancient monuments were actively integrated through reuse for a variety of functions from burial to assembly (Williams 2006; Reynolds and Langlands 2011; Semple 2013). In particular, Sarah Semple’s (2013) important interdisciplinary survey and analysis of Anglo-Saxon perceptions and reuse of prehistoric monuments from the fifth to the eleventh centuries AD, identifies the variegated and shifting perceptions of prehistoric monuments revealed by later Anglo-Saxon texts, manuscript illustrations, place-names and archaeological evidence (see also Semple 1998; 2004).

Back and Forward: Neolithic Standing Stones and Iron Age Stelae in French Brittany

The history of each place is always unique, and this also applies to each monument. Even the title of this book fits in with a pattern of thought developed by R. Bradley (2010). This approach treats the way in which certain prehistoric monuments continue to focus our attention, and how new significances come to be attributed well after their initial construction. In some cases these monuments are the result of a considerable collective investment. They often represent places of memory, sometimes providing vectors of identity that continue up to the present day. A certain number of these monuments continuously changed their function and configuration through the course of time. They were successively the setting of events that their builders could not have imagined. However, owing to the scale as well as the lasting nature of their achievements, the builders assigned additional unique features to these monuments that others later adapted or simply exploited. Many megalithic monuments of western Europe underwent such a process. Consequently, this chapter also contains the seeds of a more general discussion about the definitions of megalithism (Laporte forthcoming). It is a question of timescales and rhythms, involving lived time just as well as measured time, seen at different geographical scales. This is because the biography of each monument cannot be explained as simply being the sum of events that are unique in each case and specific to each site. Our contribution to this volume takes as an example the standing stones of Brittany. The region considered here includes the depart- ments of Finistère, Morbihan, Côtes d’Armor, Ille-et-Vilaine and Loire-Atlantique; that is to say an area of approximately 34,300 square kilometres. In the popular imagination, the Iron Age stelae of this region are often associated with the standing stones of the Neolithic, as portrayed in one of the world’s best-selling comic books featuring Astérix the Gaul and Obélix the menhir deliveryman. How- ever, for more than a century, archaeologists have always striven to make a clear distinction between material realities that, ultimately, are rather different.

Biography of a Hill: Novi Pazar in South-Western Serbia

Archaeology is one of the academic disciplines whose aim is to make sense of the past. Among other things, we organize and classify the material culture of the past into distinctive units according to a number of scholarly established criteria. In the course of the history of the discipline, these criteria have changed, and some of the previously prevailing modes of classification have been severely criticized, above all the concept of archaeological culture (e.g. Jones 1997; Canuto and Yaeger 2000; Isbell 2000; Thomas 2000; Lucy 2005). These reconsiderations have brought forward that the past may not have been as orderly organized and readily packed into the units we have designed to manipulate and explain its material traces. Consequently, we have started investigating other possible paths of thinking about the lived experiences of the people whose actions we seek to understand (e.g. Díaz-Andreu et al. 2005; Insoll 2007). However, some of the archaeological practices of organizing our subject of study have remained largely unchanged from the very beginnings of our discipline to the present day, such as defining one of the very basic units of observation—an archaeological site. The archaeological process may be said to begin ‘at the trowel’s edge’ (Hodder 1999, 92ff.), by distinguishing the features in the soil indicative of past human activities and demarcating their spatial limits. This basic anchoring in the spatial dimension, regardless of subsequent procedures, that may vary significantly depending upon the theoretical and methodological inclinations of the researcher(s) in question (Jones 2002; Lucas 2001; 2012), renders the past tangible and manageable, transforming a patch of land into an object of study, further scrutinized according to a set of rules laid down by archaeologists. Once investigated in their physical form in the field, the sites are converted into a set of information, analysed, commented upon and valorized both by archaeologists and the general public. In the process, some are judged to be more important than the others and lists of particularly valuable sites are compiled, such as the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Life and Death of Copper Age Monoliths at Ossimo Anvòia (Val Camonica, Italian Central Alps), 3000 BC–AD 1950

During the third millennium BC a widespread Copper Age ideology manifested itself within and around the Alps in ceremonial sites prominently marked by standing monoliths or orthostats (‘statuemenhirs’). The twin valleys of Valtellina and Val Camonica in Alpine Lombardy provide some of the richest inventories of this ideology. The apparent avoidance of anthropomorphism in the Central Alpine monoliths makes them distinct from those of other areas in the Alps and beyond. Combined with an ignorance or neglect of archaeological context (Fedele 2012), this was a reason why the age of the monoliths long remained problematic. From this shared trait and other inter-valley similarities one can envisage a particular ‘Camunian’ province, this adjective being derived from the Augustan name for the Val Camonica polity, the Camunni. In this province the first statue-menhirs were discovered between 1940 and 1953 and in the adjacent Adige Basin to the east similar monuments had already been known since the late 1800s, although only published from 1925 (Menghin 1925; Pedrotti 1996). However, not until the finding and excavation in 1988 of the site discussed in this article, Anvòia, did anyone think that statue-menhirs and associated sites could have a ‘life’ beyond their original time frame: this latter being the Iron Age, as it was initially thought, or the Copper Age as we know now. The occurrence of whole or partial prehistoric monoliths in re-employed conditions—as roadside blocks; in vineyard walls—was considered banal and thus unimportant in archaeological or historical terms. Anvòia initially, and by the late 1990s two other monolith sites in the Val Camonica, Cemmo and Ossimo Pat, suggested instead that an appraisal of the vicissitudes of statue-menhirs after the Copper Age would be of great interest. The case-study presented here provides a demonstration of such possibilities. To avoid the plethora of designations, the general term ‘monolith’ will be used to indicate any kind of individually placed stone of relatively large size, often upright.

Les Pierres de Mémoire: The Life History of Two Statue-Menhirs from Guernsey, Channel Islands

Many prehistoric monuments survive in the landscape and are revered by later generations but there is a special category of artefacts and monuments that reflect images of ourselves, sometimes with just faces and sometimes as life-size human figures. On Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, just off the north-west coast of France, two statuemenhirs or standing stones survive that appear to represent female figures, although the form of the stones themselves may have masculine traits also. Guernsey is the most westerly of the Channel Islands and so it is particularly surprising that these exceptional human representations should be found there (Kinnes 1995). The menhirs have witnessed a long history and have been refigured in modern times possibly in an attempt to Christianize them. One has even been given the local nickname of the ‘Grand Mere’, implying a benign maternal presence. Guernsey is one of a group of small islands that lie strategically placed in the western Channel off the northern coast of France, collectively known as the Channel Islands. The islands of Alderney, Sark, Herm, Lihou and Jethou are part of its Bailiwick, but the largest island of Jersey is independent. Guernsey is positioned some 50 kilometres off the western coast of the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy in France and 120 kilometres from mainland Britain. The Bay of Saint Malo, in which Guernsey and the other Channel Islands are situated, has a very large tidal range due to its position and currents. As a result of this, the inter-tidal zone is extensive. Guernsey is 7.5 kilometres at its widest point and 14 kilometres long, with an area of about 63 square kilometres. This area increases at low tide by some 11 square kilometres. As the great French novelist Victor Hugo famously said, . . . The Channel Islands are fragments of France that fell into the sea and were gathered up by England [ ... ] Of the four islands, Sark, the smallest, is the most beautiful; Jersey, the largest, is the prettiest; Guernsey, wild and charming shares their characteristics. (Hugo 1839, v) . . .

Icons of Antiquity: Remaking Megalithic Monuments in Ireland

Megalithic tombs dating to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (4000–2000 cal. BC) are a very distinctive aspect of the Irish landscape (Jones 2007; Scarre 2007). They are an important monumental aspect of this period and since the 1990s our understanding of this period has been complemented by an extensive record of settlement and related activity that has been revealed through development-led archaeology (e.g. Smyth 2011). A focus of antiquarian and archaeological interest since at least the nineteenth century, the basis of modern approaches to megalithic tombs includes the systematic Megalithic Survey of Ireland that was initiated by Ruaidhrí de Valera in the 1950s, under the auspices of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (Ó Nualláin 1989; Cody 2002 are the latest volumes published) and the excavation of key sites, for example the passage tombs of Newgrange (O’Kelly 1982; O’Kelly et al. 1983) and Knowth (Eogan 1984; 1986; Eogan and Roche 1997; Eogan and Cleary forthcoming) in the Boyne Valley and Carrowmore in Co. Sligo (Burenhult 1980; 1984; 2001). Current work includes the excavation of individual sites, work on the sources used in tomb construction, reviews of particular megalithic tomb types, landscape and regional studies, archaeoastronomy and overviews for a wide readership. The known number of megalithic tombs on the island now approaches 1,600 and the majority of these can be categorized as falling into one of four tomb types whose names encapsulate key architectural features of each tradition, hence the terms portal tombs, court tombs, passage tombs and wedge tombs (Evans 1966, 7–15; Valera and Ó Nualláin 1972, xiii). Unsurprisingly, much of the focus of archaeological research has been on the role of these monuments for the people and societies who constructed them. Issues such as the date of construction of different tomb types (Cooney et al. 2011) and the relationship between them have been central to key debates about the Neolithic, informing such major topics as the date and character of the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition, the changing character of society over the course of the Neolithic, mortuary rites and traditions, and the links between Ireland, Britain, and north-west Europe at this time (Cooney 2000; Bradley 2007; Waddell 2010).