Posted 10 October 2004 - 20:35
Dear Nigel and friends,
I'm writing the afternoon after the Oktoberfest Party and Burning Man at our friends' the Peelings. Talk about a Neolithic event! Well, actually maybe more an Iron Age one, as the Burning Man is suspended from an iron beam whose top end is about twenty feet in the air when he's dancing (film and pictures to be posted somewhere, soon). But all in all quite a bachanal. For a bunch of forty and fifty year old parents and their kids and grandkids, that is. I'm also recovering from a rotten head cold, so please forgive any small incoherencies.
Nigel, we couldn't be more pleased or proud at the chance to have our inconsequential names associated with magical Avebury. It's great that your find has been identified. That was so much fun, sitting with you guys and the Hauers in the New Inn, pondering that little bit of history. Loie and I have done a bit of that kind of traveling before, poking around old stones and hobnobbing a tiny bit with a few locals, but we've never had a chance to spend so much good time with so many expertly knowledgeable and agreeable new friends. We're ready to come back; our time there was not nearly enough. And besides, Mr. Sumbler's promised to show us some crop circles.
As to the "viewshed," which I think is an admirable word, we were kind of, umm, underwhelmed. Perhaps the weather kept us from appreciating it as much as we could have with wider forays, walks and inspections. Perhaps the modern viewshed interferes, and lack of the full ancient panoply prevents comprehension. And just what WAS on top of Silbury? I guess it couldn't have been a Burning Man, huh? Not enough charcoal up there? Or has the top not been dug into enough?
All in all, though--and our French investigations may be influencing our British recollections--it didn't seem to us that the Avebury placements and prospects were particularly impressive. Big, yes, to the point of each individual element's being overwhelming. The Avebury "gates" must have been awesome when intact, and of course Stonehenge is without peer. (Well, the Grand Menhir Brisé was no piker, either.) But as far as being a well-thought out collection of viewscaping, along the lines of what Lancelot 'Capability' Brown used to do, I'd have to give the Neolithic guys an at-most passing grade. To make a well-considered judgement, we'd have to come back and spend a lot more fair-weather time walking the Ridgeway, walking the Avenues, considering the views from the long barrows, watching the moon and sun rises and settings, and so forth and so on. Loie and the Hauers and I were just overwhelmed by all we were seeing and learning. It needs more time.
And then, of course, before any of what you all so kindly tried to help us see could even begin to sink in, we were off on the Ferry of Grand Vitesse for Brittany. A week in the Morbihan, then a week on the Pink Granite Coast, seeing just about every alignment, menhir, dolmen, alleé couverte, quadrilateral, engraved stone and what-have-you we could cram in. Those old French guys were even more stone-mad than your British forebears. The Carnac and Erdeven alignments are astounding. Thousands of stones stuck up in groups of ten or twelve rows that go on for miles. The Avebury Avenues would have been insignificant little bits of the alignments in France, which contain many Avebury-avenue sized stones in their "large" ends, and dwindle away to little things Obelix would have scorned to lug about. But then, with huge Stonehenge-henged-sized rings at each end of the alignments; and dolmens and alleé-couverts scattered all about. And the tumulus of St. Michel looms up right by the Carnac alignments, half as big as Silbury Hill, granted; but still big enough that the chapel perched on it looks tiny.
Yet, again, the alignments and menhirs and dolmens seemed, to our modern eyes, to have been just kind of plunked down. True, the rows tended to have their large-stone ends at the top of little hills, but the "hills" were barely worthy of the name: just small rises of a few dozen feet over the length of a quarter mile. Nothing to be seen from them, except more of the same kind of countryside, and often, at many sites, a few trees would have--and do--destroy any view at all.
Maybe the "views" were of night sky, or of astronomical events on the horizon? Perhaps, but then, stone rings within miles of each other? What would a tribe or clan of a few hundred or even thousand people need with all these things, none of which seems to be any better placed than the other to catch "views"? Each on its little rise, or just as likely, in its little low spot? It all makes no sense whatsoever. There are so damn many of them: immense beyond belief menhirs and tiny little ones; immense, highly decorated passage "graves" like Gavrinis, covered with huge mounds on prominent hill-sides overlooking the mouth of the river as it meets the sea; and tiny little dolmens of a half-dozen stones lost in some little valley, overlooking nothing.
So far, at the end of Driving The Stone Age Part Two, all we can think is this. The Neolithic was not, by any means, monolithic. There were already in place richly varied Mesolithic cultures. And they were influenced by more than a few kinds of thought that created what we think of as "The Neolithic." It seems there was, in a very general way, a turning away from the Nature-oriented art of the Paleolithic to a much more human-power-centric set of concerns. Perhaps the trend from "dolmen" to henge reflects the dying out of the earth-mother-cave concern and the rise of the sky-gods concern. But, the sky-piercing Grand Menhir Brisé may have been knocked down by a bunch of people who then built passage-mounds. It's certain, from the matching of engraved art on certain broken bits of roof-slab, that a huge menhir from somewhere near the Grand Menhir was knocked down and reused to roof passages. The chronology just isn't good enough, or at least, not well understood enough by us, to truly make any sense out of it.
Loie and I wanted to try to understand how our culture "began." We need either more time at this, or a different approach to it. Seeing the stones and barrows and walls and cursuses and hills has been thrilling, and you guys helped make it even more so. But really, we're just flabbergasted. Other than impressing someone, or some god, we have no idea what those old time guys could have been thinking. It's screwy! Marvelous, fascinating, mysterious, yes, but, screwy.
Bucky Edgett
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