Chapter TenConclusions
Chapter TenIn this concluding chapter I first draw some general comparative observations in relation to Chapters 2 to 9. In the second section, I respond to my critics, and finally, in the third section, I suggest ways forward, or avenues for research, in the general development of a phenomenological perspective on landscape in the twenty-first century.
I am well aware that the approach taken in this book, to rewrite prehistory in relation to the rocks, might be regarded as a very simple type of determinism, in which the claim being made is that geologies and topographies determine consciousness, meaning, and action. Such a response to the text, as discussed in Chapter 1, would amount to a reductive travesty. The differing geologies and topographies of these landscapes each provided very different sets of raw materials and possibilities for monument construction, but what is more important is that they invited a creative response. We cannot predict what this might be in advance. It requires unraveling through considering the manner in which the rocks and their topographies relate to the monuments and their morphologies and their locations.
When I started to work in the Stonehenge landscape (Chapter 3), I had just completed my study of the northern edge of Cranborne Chase (Chapter 4). The distance was short, no more than 12 km northeast from the eastern end of the Ebble-Nadder ridge to Stonehenge itself. One might easily walk this distance in a day. I brought with me all my expectations and experiences of another chalk landscape, even the same kind of recording form, essentially a check list of things to observe: Could one see the bottom of a nearby coombe from a barrow, and so on. But this approach proved to be completely unsatisfactory. Everything was different. There were no cross-ridge or spur dykes. Instead, there were long and sometimes meandering land boundaries crossing from river to ridge and down again. The coombes were mostly shallow and indistinct. Gone were the dramatic scarp edges. The same kinds of prehistoric monuments were found here—long barrows and round barrows—but in considerably greater numbers, and their relationship to one another and the topography was very different. And then there was the unique monument of Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, the largest henge in Britain. This was built around a coombe running down to the Avon, and Stonehenge itself was situated near to a very unusual coombe (discussed in Chapter 3). There were similarities and differences that could be investigated. No predictive model based on one landscape works for another. Individual interpretations of the places and the monuments considered in the different study areas have been made in the individual chapters. The intention here is to make some general comparative observations linking geologies, topographies, and identities.
A consistent theme arising from the individual case studies is the significance of particular hills or ridges in relation to monument location. In the Stonehenge area, the pebble-capped and topographically differentiated Beacon Hill Ridge was of particular importance, together with Sidbury Hill. The former, in particular, is visible from all but one of twenty-five long barrows and the vast majority of the hundreds of round barrows located in its vicinity. But here no Neolithic long barrows or Bronze Age barrows are located on the highest summits. On the northern edge of Cranborne Chase, long barrows reference the highest points but are situated some distance from them. By contrast, the ridgetops and their spurs are marked by round barrows throughout their length, a pattern more or less replicated along the South Dorset Ridgeway. On the East Devon Pebblebeds, one distinctive coastal hill, High Peak, with a probable causewayed enclosure, is visible from all the round barrows, wherever they are situated in the landscape. Again, no barrows occur on the summit or its surroundings. On Exmoor, there is an absence of topographically distinctive hills that all or many monuments might relate to. Linear groups of round barrows run along the tops of some of the high ridges, particularly along the southern parts of the Moor, but are absent on other equally suitable ridges or summit areas. Here, as in East Devon, there is an absence of long barrows. On Bodmin Moor, two prominent hills with jagged rock outcrops and hilltop enclosures of probable Neolithic and Bronze Age date dominate, with many barrows clustering in their vicinity or in sight of them. Here two of the three Neolithic long cairns reference localised rock outcrops in their vicinity. None of the chambered tombs of West Penwith directly reference the rocks in this manner, and no particular hill summit here seems to have had paramount significance. So in some cases, as in East Devon and around Stonehenge, and on Bodmin Moor, it is particular hills or short ridges that are of significance. In other cases, such as the northern edge of Cranborne Chase and the South Dorset Ridgeway, each stretching for 15 km or more, the entire ridge was of great significance. On Exmoor and West Penwith, relationships among monuments, hills, and ridges are much more localised in character. In some cases, as in the East Devon study (Chapter 6), gaps through hills and ridges may be as significant, if not more significant, than the hills and ridges themselves. In Chapter 4 the discussion of the Ox-Drove ridge emphasises the importance of a situation in which a coombe virtually cuts the ridge but stops just short.
Another significant point is the importance of water and water courses and coombes or dry valleys in terms of the manner in which they break up and divide the land but also bring it together, acting as both boundary and bridge. Walking along these places in the landscape affords one a completely different experience of the landscape. In an area such as the Stonehenge landscape, one can walk along Stonehenge/Lake Bottom and hardly encounter a single barrow in a landscape filled with them. On the northern edge of Cranborne Chase, the perspective is the same. Springs, confluences, valley and coombe heads are all significant places in relation to the locations of monuments in the chalk and pebble and sandstone and slate landscapes considered in the book, as is the process of crossing wet or boggy areas, discussed in Chapter 8.
Places where water collects, falling from the heavens and filling the solution basins of the high tors, were of great significance in the granite landscapes of Bodmin Moor and West Penwith. The coastline, a liminal zone between the sea and the land (see discussions in Helskog 1999 and Scarre 2002), was of great significance in relation to the location of monuments in South Dorset, East Devon, and West Penwith but appears to have been of little significance on Exmoor—at least in relation to the locations of the lithic monuments. Part of the significance of the coast, as discussed in Chapter 6 in relation to the inland Pebblebed heathlands and their cairns and in Chapter 9 in relation to promontory hillforts, was that it provided a place, sometimes the only place, where a prehistoric ‘geologist’ (cosmologist) could inspect the rocks, see what was under his or her feet. The coast is a place where the sun may be seen to either rise or set into the sea, die and be reborn from a watery underworld, and this is discussed in relation to an experiential understanding of the world in Chapters 6 and 9. Inland, the manner in which it rises and sets behind hills or monuments on auspicious days of the year, such as midsummer, the equinoxes, and midwinter, is emphasised in Chapters 3, 4, and 6.
Coastal landforms have been the main point of departure for the study of monument location here, but in the future a subtle and more nuanced discussion might be developed in relation to the flows and directions of rivers into the sea, the tides, eddies, sand banks, and currents and their convergence, which have recently been shown to be of great significance in various ethnographic studies (for example, McNiven 2008; Morphy and Morphy 2006). A consideration of seascape, including its formation processes and chronology, needs to be developed to complement an understanding of landscapes.
The coast is, of course, significant in that it is here and usually only here that pebbles are found. Thus is interesting to note that the two largest concentrations of Bronze Age round barrows in England occur on and in the vicinity of chalk hills capped with pebbles. Is this mere coincidence? It may well have been this particular geological combination of dramatically contrasting stones that was of special significance, as opposed to a landscape consisting solely of one kind of rock: chalk, granite, pebbles, sandstone, or slate.
It can be suggested that in some cases the highest and most significant hills in the landscape, as in the Stonehenge area and in East Devon, were too spiritually powerful to have any monuments located on their summits during the Bronze Age. This is the case earlier, during the Neolithic around Stonehenge, but not in East Devon. In all the landscapes considered in this book where Neolithic and Bronze Age funerary and ceremonial monuments both occur, the round barrows are consistently located higher up on the ridgetops or on the very highest points, and the Neolithic monuments are at a reserved or safe distance. So on Bodmin Moor, tor cairns are built up and around some of the highest hills with rock outcrops, unlike the long cairns, and a similar practice takes place in West Penwith and along the South Dorset Ridgeway and along the northern edge of Cranborne Chase. This may be understood as a fundamental difference between monuments that reference aspects of the rocks and their topographies and those that actively appropriate them and their powers in various ways through being constructed on, in, around them—being situated on the highest hill or part of the ridge in south Dorset and on Cranborne Chase, built in and around rock outcrops on Bodmin Moor and West Penwith or among dolines along the South Dorset Ridgeway.
The whiteness of chalk has, of course, long been noted as providing a resource for constructing monuments that would have been highly visible and dramatic in the landscape. Through building monuments out of turves stripped from the surroundings and then capping these monuments with chalk, as in the Stonehenge area, provided the means to invert the world—turn it upside down. In East Devon, cairns constructed out of bright multicoloured pebbles, when freshly constructed, would also have been strikingly visible and in a continuous state of transformation, according to the light and the season of the year and whether the weather was wet or dry. This was another means of appropriating powers residing within the land itself into the cultural form of a monument. On Bodmin Moor and West Penwith, this approach involved using and incorporating rocks taken from the tors and their surroundings in various ways. By contrast, on Exmoor the stones used to construct the stone settings in all probability came not from the high points in the landscape but from the valley sides and bottoms.
An enormous contrast exists between sandstone and slate landscapes and those of granite. One is an inversion of the other. The way to orientate oneself in the granite country of Bodmin Moor and West Penwith is by reference to the high points of the tors. On Exmoor, it is the valleys that are memorable and that tell you where you are, and it is here, rather than on the tops of the hills, where the rocks are exposed. To some writers, such as Richard Blackmore (author of Lorna Doone, the novel that made Exmoor famous), Exmoor is the female landscape, looking as if everywhere it ‘had a woman’s hand on it’ (Blackmore 1997: 286), with granite being the contrasting male landscape. The literature is replete with such a gendering of landscape, and both literary writers and New Age spiritualists have consistently linked chalk landscapes with the female body. But if instead we envisage the Exmoor landscape as a kind of body, the ridges and hills represent the outside of this body, with its mantle of earth and vegetation, and the valleys represent interiority—ways into the body that is the land. So, the contrast is between being outside or on top of this body (moor) and being inside the moor, with interiority implying intimacy. This perspective might also be applied to chalk landscapes. From the tops of the hills and the ridges, the outside world, areas beyond the moor, are visible, while the valleys signify being part of and inside the corporeal body of the moor. This contrast between exteriority and interiority, being inside or outside the body that is the land also relates to chalk country and the dramatic contrasts between ridgetop and coombe discussed in Chapter 4. As is the case on Exmoor, it is the coombes, as opposed to the ridgetops, that are distinctive and differentiated. Here, and on the South Dorset Ridgeway and in the Stonehenge area, the locations of the round barrows are related both to the ridgetops and to the coombes. They are metaphorically both inside and outside the body of the land. By contrast, in West Penwith, Bodmin Moor, and Exmoor they are predominantly outside this body, related to rock outcrops, high ridges, and hills.
Although round barrows cluster in relation to stone circles in some areas of Bodmin Moor, this arrangement is highly variable, and it cannot be compared with the great barrow arrangements in the vicinity of Stonehenge and their intervisibility with this monument, discussed in Chapter 3. The uniqueness of Stonehenge relates not just to the sheer size of the stones and their exotic and distant origins but also to the manner in which it provides a focus for the construction of the later round barrows, which occurs nowhere else. Thus, it is interesting to note that, of all the very different and contrasting landscapes considered in this book, the landscape around Stonehenge is the least dramatic and differentiated. The coombes are generally shallow, the ridges gently rounded. The escarpment edge of the Beacon Hill Ridge cannot match the sheer drama of that encountered along the northern edge of Cranborne Chase or that of the South Dorset Ridgeway. Rocky outcrops are absent, as is much surface stone in the form of sarsen. The construction of the monument can be regarded as a form of compensation for the deficiency of material and symbolic resources in the landscape in which it is located. Like other monuments elsewhere, aspects of its architecture have a mimetic relationship to the local topography. But once it had been constructed, the monument itself became the paramount focal point in relation to which barrows were located. Nothing similar occurs anywhere else, from Stonehenge to Land’s End. A dialectic is at work between Stonehenge and the great Bronze Age barrow cemeteries that surround it: Monument relates principally to monument. Elsewhere, the principal dialectic remains unchanged from the Neolithic to the Iron Age and is between monuments, their geologies and topographies, and their relationships to other monuments, past or present. At Stonehenge, ‘culture’ largely seems to have replaced ‘nature’ in the Bronze Age in structuring both the landscape and the identities of the people living in it.
All the different landscapes considered in this book posed their own geological and topographic problems for the people who inhabited them and sought to understand how they had come into being. Some of these problems were shared, others unique to the particular locality. A common problem to those who dwelled on the chalk was the absence of surface water but the presence of coombes that were recognisably dry or dead rivers: Why did the waters no longer flow? Another common problem was the presence of flint bones wherever they dug into or tilled these landscapes. Pursuing a little further the anthropomorphic metaphor of landscape as body, one might conceptualize chalk landscapes with their dead rivers and their flint bones as landscapes that were in some senses either dead or dying themselves, or that were associated with death. A very common anthropomorphic understanding of landscapes found worldwide in many different cultures is that the rivers and streams represent the flow of blood in the arteries and veins through the body. If this flow stops, the body becomes a corpse.
A problem for the people of the Stonehenge landscape, not shared with people inhabiting the other chalk landscapes discussed in the book, was the presence of sarsen stones, so different from the chalk, in the coombes. Another problem common for these people and for those of South Dorset was the presence of pebbles on the ridgetops next to the sky—pebbles normally found only on the beach anywhere else. In South Dorset, a related problem was the presence of dolines, or solution hollows, among these pebbles. Here, the coastal presence of the great sweep of the Chesil Beach and its lagoon linking Portland to the mainland required an explanation. In East Devon, a similar problem was considerably magnified: How was it possible that the entire inland landscape was made up of brightly coloured pebbles? How could the great band running through the red cliffs by the sea be understood? On Bodmin Moor and West Penwith, the major problems requiring an explanation would have related instead to the form and character of the rocky tors: How could their fantastic forms have been created, as well as the caves and the runnels and the ‘tombs’ within them, and the hidden solution basins on tops of the rocks? In contrast to all the other landscapes, to live on Exmoor may have been relatively unproblematic. Here, the pebbles were found only where they were supposed to be found—on the beach—and the streams still flowed down the valleys, and the topography, with few exposed rocks except along the valley sides and no very distinctive hills, was fairly similar everywhere.
Of course, we will never know the content of the mythic stories that would have been told to explain these geologies and topographies so that people who dwelled in relation to them could make sense of their lives. Part of the solution in all cases must have been to explain all these things in relation to the past. Clearly, the pebbles or dry rivers or the rocks themselves were not contemporary creations. They were products of events and processes that had taken place in the past, of the ancestors, of the gods or ancestral forces, a legacy of the past for the living, something that was both dangerous and that had inherent power as an ancestral creation. Part of the solution to the problems of how the landscape came to be this way and how to tap into and relate to the ancestral creations and powers within the land was to objectify the spirit of place in the construction of monuments through the eleven different kinds of dialectical relationships listed in Chapter 1 (see pp. 38–39). Sometimes one of these relationships might have been sufficient. In other cases, a number of them might have been employed in tandem and, as discussed in a number of the individual chapters, that which had been marked or mimicked or referenced, incorporated or substituted or changed through time.
The mythic origin stories could then have been told in relation to the forms of the monuments themselves and in the process of moving around and inside them and locating them in particular places in the landscape when different topographic features came into or out of sight or where one’s perspectival relationship to the surroundings changed. Various examples of this are discussed throughout this book. Here it is interesting to note that the kinds of perspectival effects that were created in relation to the Bodmin Moor stone rows and circles seem to be completely absent in relation to the Exmoor stone rows, circles, and stone settings—which marked out different areas of the landscape as significant—but moving along them or around them did not give rise to a sequencing of visual effects. In part, this arrangement simply relates to the lack of topographic diversity of the hills and ridges of Exmoor. Here, as was the case on some of the hills of Bodmin Moor, the building of a summit cairn or cairns in the Bronze Age was an act of construction that differentiated the land. The populations of Exmoor, unlike those living on Bodmin Moor, had no tors. Perhaps the act of building cairns on the summit of Dunkery Beacon and elsewhere was their attempt to make reference to or to mimic another landscape altogether.
All the different landscapes were visually connected from the high points. You could see one from the other, and the populations living in these landscapes would have been well aware of the presence of people living in different worlds. The presence of similar monuments in these different landscapes— long cairns or barrows, stone circles and stone rows, round barrows, and so on strongly indicates commonalities as well as differences in the identities of the populations who constructed them. In the Bronze Age, there is both the shared idea of the appropriateness of round barrows and round cairns. The geometric form of the circle provided a template for understanding the world (Bradley 1998), and on Bodmin Moor and in West Penwith and elsewhere we find circles within circles within circles, in the form of rings of cairns on the hills, stone circles, circular houses, and circular post rings within these houses (see Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007).
As discussed throughout the book, there are both generalised and locally specific factors at work in the locations of individual monuments. Sometimes the landscape locations are similar for the same class of monument. In other cases, they are very different and obviously related to the contingencies of the local topography and the presence of earlier or contemporary monuments. This situation means that, if we are looking for perfect and consistent patterning, we are almost always likely to be disappointed. The location of monuments is always likely to have been both creative and improvised rather than the application of some kind of rule. For example, in some cases, as at both the eastern and western ends of the South Dorset Ridgeway, there is a very close relationship between the locations and landscape settings of long and round barrows. In other cases, as along the northern edge of Cranborne Chase and in the Stonehenge area (Tilley unpublished research), this is not the case.
In Chapter 2, I argued that the largely post-Mesolithic removal of forest cover had a profound effect on the sensory experience of landscape. In a more open world, monument construction and social strategies of visual control and manipulation made sense in a manner in which they did not in a forest world. It was this sensory revolution that gave birth to a new and increasing emphasis on monumentality throughout the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. In a landscape without monuments, the earliest to be constructed could have been related only to the contours and the flow of the land itself, and to ‘natural’ places that may already have been significant in the Mesolithic. But, of course once monuments were in place, and became of the place, part of the past rather than part of the present, the situation became far more complex in terms of where and why particular locations were chosen rather than others and whether the presence of earlier monuments was acknowledged or not in terms of, for example, orientational relationships, skyline sighting, false cresting, and so on, something that is explored throughout the book.
Forest clearance must have been carried out in some areas on a massive scale. Palaeoenvironmental evidence for the Stonehenge landscape indicates its increasingly open character during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, as discussed in Chapter 3. The same appears to be true for Bodmin Moor and Exmoor (see Chapters 7 and 8 and discussion in Herring 2008). As Herring points out, this could have been maintained only through fairly intensive grazing of large herds and flocks of cattle and sheep. Furthermore, he notes ‘for those who created this newly open world, the ability to see downland rolling into downland, with distant tors poking over the backs of closer ones, would have been a source of wonder and pleasure. It is not surprising that they worked with this quality when designing their landscapes’ (Herring 2008: 86).
The golden thread running throughout this book is that the relationship between peoples and their landscapes throughout prehistory was deeply anthropomorphic and animistic. People “thought” the landscape through their own emplaced and palatial bodies. The landscape to them was a kind of body, and this body was imbued with spirit powers. It was not dead or inert but alive and animated, and so constructing monuments and dwelling in these landscapes involved tapping into and harnessing spirit powers that might both empower the living and be a source of fear. This way of thinking was not extraordinary but part of daily life. To know the world was to know this and the myths and creation stories explaining how this world had come into being and had obtained its present form. The construction of monuments for the living and the dead was one way of objectifying creation myths in material form and thus telling these myths not through words but in the medium of an enduring material form. There would have been people who knew the stories and people to whom they were told; there would have been people who knew the correct way to encounter the landscape and people who would be led. Experiences of landscapes and places within the landscapes were structured through monument construction and movement along, around, and between these monuments. Unequal relations of power could thus be reproduced in this manner through structuring encounters and patterns of social inclusion and exclusion, and they might also, of course, be subverted.
That pattern is, in part, a geological and a topographic pattern. To live in a chalk landscape, or a landscape of pebbles, or a granite landscape necessarily provided and still provides in the present a material grounding for very different forms of perceptual and sensory experience of place. A person accustomed to the chalk had a different embodied identity to someone living in a landscape of granite tors, simply because the powers of place were so different. Personhood, biographies, and identities were not in any simplistic sense determined by the very different geologies and topographies. These rather provided different material resources and opportunities that might be exploited and suggested different kinds of creative responses. The construction of cross-ridge and spur dykes toward the end of the Bronze Age in some areas of chalk country with deep and dramatic coombes and steep escarpment edges made perfect social and symbolic sense in relating people to the landscape. Such monuments would have made no sense at all on the granite uplands.
Many years ago I read the following paragraph from Barth’s monograph on the Baktaman of highland Papua New Guinea:
On rare occasions, peace and political alliance would reach a stability where mutual trust would allow the reciprocal passage of groups of men through neighbouring territories to reach a further circle of second order neighbours; but these were so rare as to produce little knowledge of these more distant territories, and the known world of the Baktaman remained very small. Thus in an easterly direction one may sit on the men’s house platform and see landscape, including smoke from garden fires, in unknown territory for which the Baktaman have no name for land or people, while to the north, west and south the known world extends for approximately two days’ journey. Detailed knowledge of the countryside is limited to their own and closely adjoining sectors of neighbouring territories; it is significantly wider for men than women and for adults than children. (Barth 1975: 18–19)
This paragraph has always stuck in the back of my mind, and, of course, it is because I wondered whether the Neolithic or the Bronze Age world might be something at least a bit like that of the Baktaman. Might the known world be so small that one would be able to see in the distance the fires of others without knowing the names of these people? How closely connected were different communities in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age? How localised were their worlds? The various studies in this book suggest that there was a very strong relationship among monuments, places, and landscapes, that individual and social identities were constructed in place, by the people of that place, who belonged to that place and landscape. The relationship was intimate and enduring.
However, the different landscapes and communities seem to have been connected by commonalities of practice, alliances, and the exchange of raw materials. The inhabitants did not live in isolated and hermetically sealed worlds. The magical power of desired resources—and their sources and properties—linked different people largely through maritime and riverine routes of communication over long distances. The movement of things that we can identify in the archaeological record does not, of course, necessarily imply that people traveled to the source—to, for example, the Isle of Portland to obtain chert, or to Beer Head to obtain flint, or to Cornwall to acquire ground stone axes or the material with which to make them. The supply of copper and tin no doubt linked the Bronze Age populations of Bodmin Moor and West Penwith with those living on the East Devon Pebblebeds and those living on the chalk downlands. By contrast, the populations of Exmoor may have been both relatively small and isolated. Long after domesticates had been adopted elsewhere and gardens were being cultivated and tilled, hunter-fisher-gatherer groups may have never substantially changed their lifestyles on Exmoor, and the peculiarity of their minilithic monuments and stone settings may be a reflection of that, although these groups would have been well aware that stone circles and stone rows formed a standard repertoire of monuments found elsewhere, some of which on Dartmoor might be only a few days’ walking distance.
How many Neolithic or Bronze Age people from West Penwith or Bodmin Moor might have visited Stonehenge is not the kind of question that we can realistically answer. We know that certain, and probably exceptional, individuals came from a great distance away, for example, the so-called Amesbury Archer from the Alps (Fitzpatrick 2002). The transport and erection of the blue stones from South Wales was a major feat of organisation linking different places and landscapes, but again this seems exceptional. To what extent pastoralism and more localised movement were widespread during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age has been the subject of a lengthy and continuing debate (Parker-Pearson 2008), as has been the role and the importance of domesticates as opposed to hunting, fishing, and gathering in local Neolithic and Bronze Age societies (see Bradley 2007; Thomas 2008a).
What has always struck me about such debates is their essentially abstract and generalised nature, and ultimately, in a non-pejorative sense, their imaginary character as exercises in peopling the past. But they all too often tell us so little about how people inhabited an actual landscape, partly because of evidential problems, partly because they are paper-based discussions in which that past has already become dematerialised as words and diagrams and maps in texts. There is an alternative and, I maintain, altogether more grounded way to imagine the past in the present. In carrying out the fieldwork for this book, I was struck by the manner in which the landscape itself changes so radically within a very short walking distance. In relation to the Pebblebed landscape of East Devon, discussed in Chapter 6, I walk from where I dwell toward the east, crossing the river Otter, climb up the East Hill Ridge, and pass over its flat top. I leave the smooth multi-coloured pebbles behind, walk over red sandstone, which I can see exposed in the river cliffs, encounter brittle grey and yellow chert and small cairns made of the same material. I descend to the valley below. My journey takes several hours. The topography is now totally different. Ahead is a ridge very different from the ridge that I have just passed over. The aspect of the East Hill ridge seen from the east is a ragged affair, broken up by numerous valleys and spurs. Seen from the west, the line is smooth, continuous, and unbroken. I have entered a very different sensuous and experiential world. I feel lost and uneasy in this landscape that I have not walked or studied. My relationship to the earth and the sky has changed; all the landmarks and watercourses that were familiar to me have gone, my knowledge has vanished. In order to dwell here, rather than over there, I need to find myself again, establish a new embodied relationship with place, establish a new kind of identity with the land. I have maintained throughout the book that something of value can also be inferred from this kind of view of the people of the past, an imagining taking place through the medium of the body rather than through a text.
The principal focus for discussion in this book has been various types of monuments in the landscape, and the reason for this focus is the almost complete absence of settlement evidence in all the areas considered apart from Bodmin Moor (the settlement evidence is extensively discussed elsewhere— Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007) and in some parts of Exmoor, where no excavations have been undertaken. The origins of the materials used to construct these monuments have also been considered. But such a perspective could be taken much further. In particular, more attention needs to be directed toward the origins of the raw materials and artefacts deposited in them and the manner in which the act of deposition itself drew together and articulated various places in the immediate and more distant landscapes, a theme that is recently being explored and developed in detail in a variety of ways (for instance, Goldhahn 2008; Hind 2004; Jones 2008; Lewis 2007; McFayden 2008; Nowakowski 2007; Tilley 2004: 87ff.; Woodward 2002: 100ff.) and that might result in the production of a parallel book relating the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ landscape referents and relationships of monuments and the manner in which they relate to the paths of movement of individuals and groups and their relational identities.
In recent years, there has developed quite a wide-ranging number of reviews and critical responses to a phenomenological perspective on landscape. These range from individual book reviews (for example, Bradley 2000a; Cummings 2004; Fleming 1995; Gibson 2005; Hummler 2008; Ingold 2005; Jones 2007a; Pocus 2001) to critical review articles discussing a phenomenological perspective in general (for instance, Brück 2005; Fleming 1999, 2005, 2006; Thomas 2006) to shorter or longer passages, comments, or asides in various books, articles, and edited volumes (for instance, to cite just a few examples, Barrett 2004; Bender 1998: 78ff., 2000; Brück 2001b; Chadwick 2004; Criado Boado and Villoch Vazquez 2000; Cummings, Jones, and Watson 2002; Cummings and Whittle 2004; contributions in David and Thomas 2008; DeBoer 2004; Exxon et al. 2000; Fowler 2004; Hamilakis 2001; Herring 2008; Hodder 1999: 136ff.; Karlsson 1998:173ff.; McFayden 2006; Meskell 1996; Pearson and Shanks 2001: 156ff.; contributions in Scarre 2002; Skeates 2008). These responses, not surprisingly, have been extremely diverse, ranging from enthusiastic to derogatory in tone. Some take the form of criticisms of specific interpretations of landscapes, monuments, and places. Others are quite broad discussions of general theoretical issues, such as the relationship of subjectivity and objectivity in research, the status and the role of the individual in the past and in the present, and discussions of empathy, embodied experience, gender, and politics. Landscape studies in archaeology seem to have rapidly developed from a somewhat sleepy and uncontentious area of field research (see Bruno and Thomas 2008; Fleming 2006: 267) into a major intellectual battleground through which the past and its relationship to the present has become debated. I have responded to some of the more general philosophical and conceptual issues raised in these reviews and commentaries in Chapter 1 and elsewhere (Tilley 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2005a, 2005b, 2008).
Below I make some additional remarks, and in the third section, I extend and develop both the gist of my critical reactions and my general perspective.
One general criticism has been that much of the fieldwork I have undertaken has been a kind of romantic wandering of the landscape in the spirit of Coleridge and Wordsworth: ‘When Tilley describes his walk along the Cursus, for example, there are only three actors involved in the scene ‘the author, the Cursus, and the physical landscape’ (Brück 2005: 63), Chadwick finds that my ‘solitary strolls and musings were very much in an appropriating, antiquarian tradition’ (Chadwick 2004: 22). According to Hummler ‘the modern landscape fanciers come across as Romantics, pursuing vistas because the tors and the hills are still there but the people have gone. And all is couched in a portentous style crossed with touchy-feely verbiage’ (Hummler 2008: 1157). Her alternative insight for the study of landscape is that it wouldn’t have mattered at all, because the people probably had ‘raging toothaches’ and ‘boils on their necks’ and wore wet clothes. I leave it to the reader to assess for themselves the analytical rigour of such a statement and its usefulness for our understanding of the past. I believe that the poetic understandings of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the work of novelists and topographic writers in a literary mode (see Chapter 1 and sectional introductions to Parts II–IV of this book), offer a significant interpretative resource for landscape studies and that poetic metaphor can provide striking insights simply not available in deadened literal prose. To write in metaphors is to view the world afresh, create new imaginative insights, construct a new past in the present. So, in response, my position is simply to reverse the terms of the debate. The absence of a ‘poetic’ approach simply produces a past that is irrelevant to all of us, something that does not make it worthwhile reading about.
Some of my fieldwork has indeed been undertaken in a solitary fashion. The reason for this has been deliberate and methodological. It was a way of attempting to bracket the contingencies of the present to achieve a sense of immersion in the landscape, a way of walking and experiencing the past in the present in the spirit of participant observation in anthropological field research. It was one way of facilitating the production of a phenomenological account. More recently, working in the landscape with Wayne Bennett, the approach has become dialogical in character, in the sense that it involves a mutually constituitive bodily immersion through which dialogues arise between us. I am quite prepared to admit that I did describe a ‘depopulated’ Dorset Cursus (Brück 2005: 63). I did not write about the personalities of individual men, women, and children or concern myself with precisely which of their variable and relational identities might be in play when walking along it: tried to both imagine and put into words what they might have been thinking or doing. Nor was I able to say how many were taking part: twenty, thirty, two hundred or whether this number radically altered according to whether it was November 21st or August 2nd. To attempt to do so could amount only to empty speculation, for which I would quite rightly be criticised. The people are gone and cannot be resurrected in this simplistic manner. Brück’s demands that I might do so are not all that helpful. People and their different and parallel social identities as ‘daughter, mother, sister, farmer, weaver’ are invoked in relation to the ambiguity of depositional evidence but still remain conspicuously absent in Brück’s own accounts of monuments, such as Mount Pleasant henge (Brück 2001b: 63).
A somewhat related general criticism is that my perspective on landscape is irrevocably biased, both by my gender and my sexuality (Meskell 1996: 6–9). It is, after all, the perspective of a white, middle-class, heterosexual male—and we can now add middle-aged. I plead guilty to these obvious personal deficiencies, but here simply note that Vicki Cummings (2002) has made similar observations to my own in relation to the megalithic monuments of southwest Wales and has come to similar conclusions with regard to the significance and power of their landscape settings.
A more pertinent criticism of my approach is that it depends on anachronistic universalist assumptions with regard to concepts of the self and identity. The kind of body I posit ignores the cultural multiplicities of the manner in which the body itself is an artefact and culturally constructed (Brück 2005: 58ff.; Fowler 2004: 11ff.; Hodder 1999: 136; Pluciennik 2002: 174). I accept entirely that the body is culturally constructed, that this perspective is culturally variable, and that it is important. I also think that relational models of the manner in which personhood is constructed in a social and symbolic field have much to offer in contrast to modernist conceptions of the individual self as a discrete centre of consciousness and awareness (Shanks and Tilley 1987n: 70ff.; Tilley 1990b: 313ff.). However, advocacy of such a perspective poses enormous practical difficulties in interpreting prehistoric landscapes and monuments when, in most cases, suitable high-quality evidence with which to work is entirely lacking.
The body invoked in my studies is universalist in the sense that it has a distinctively human perceptive apparatus: binocular vision and so on, an upright two-legged posture when walking. This is all that I share with prehistoric persons, male or female, and it is surely something to work positively with. If the prehistoric people were not disabled or sensorily impaired, they would have been able to see from a particular point in the landscape something— for example, a hill, or a river cliff, or a monument on the skyline—behind which the sun set on the shortest day of the year, something that I can still see now. Or they would also have been able to recognise the tactile and colour contrasts between granite and chalk, or smell the sea salt. This claim is really rather limited, and neither Brück nor any other commentator has been able to provide any convincing philosophical or evidential grounds to dispute it. Even though one can readily acknowledge that there are indeed distinctive gaits and ways of walking, a bipedal posture is common to all (see Ingold and Vergunst 2008; Tilley 2009).
Contra Brück (2005), I make no claims whatsoever to have any empathy with prehistoric populations, which is exactly why I don’t want to go around pretending to understand something from the point of view of a female Neolithic weaver with twins or, to give an example from Hodder, a ‘priest’ (he doesn’t specify the relevant gender, age, or emotional state of such a person). And I admit that, while crossing the Cursus, I am quite incapable of recogn-ising the presence of a ‘now invisible community boundary’ (Hodder 1998: 136), which would affect the manner in which it might be understood from the point of view of the female Neolithic weaver burdened down with twins, and according to Hummler, suffering from toothache and multiple boils on her neck, and wearing sodden clothes, walking along it in the pouring rain. Only a few square metres of the over 10-km-long Dorset cursus monument have ever been excavated (Bradley, Barrett, and Green 1991: 43ff.), and I therefore find the absence of any consideration of ‘hidden community boundaries’ in Hodder’s recent account of the extensively excavated settlement of Catal Hüyük somewhat surprising (Hodder 2006).
Brück’s entire article is riddled with contradictory statements and perspectives, perhaps because hers is a general review that incorporates views other than her own. For example, she points out, as have many others, that the fact that something is visible from some point does not necessarily mean that it is significant: Any association may be accidental (Brück 2005: 51–52; see also Criado Boado and Villoch Vazquez 2000; Fleming 1999). The corollary, of course, is that if you can’t see something, this does not necessarily imply that it is insignificant. Both points may readily be accepted. Identifying consistent patterning is often the only way we have of suggesting ‘adequacy’, and such identification is very much a feature of the work presented throughout this book. On the one hand, Brück demands to know precisely how observations can be verified and evaluated adequately, in a deeply empiricist sense. On the other hand, she puts forward no suggestions with regard to precisely how ‘adequacy’ might be assessed, and the reason is, of course, is that there are no such absolutes to which we might cling. She notes, in relation to Watson’s research, that all stone monuments have some kinds of acoustic properties, so we need to be wary of making too much of this: a point that amounts to a kind of unconstructive nihilism.
The point to be made is that Brück seems to want some kind of absolute standard of ‘adequacy’, while at the same time she rightly warns us that all representations are partial and not ‘objective’ methods at all. She is both enthusiastic about the use of new methods for spatial analysis, such as GIS (Geographical Information Systems), while warning us of their dangers; she sees both the positive aspect of developing an archaeology of the emotions proposed by some (for instance, Meskell 1998; Tarlow 2000) while being wary of them. Despite such ‘neither/nor’ criticism, which in the end doesn’t advance us very far, on the whole she appears to be broadly sympathetic to the development of a phenomenological perspective and has readily adopted aspects of it, such as an interpretative emphasis on metaphor, in her own interpretative work (Brück 2001a).
This approach may be contrasted with the views of Fleming. Clearly, in the views of some commentators cited above, my interpretations have been limited and lacking, because I have failed to take fully on board the cultural and historical relativism of the human body itself and have downplayed, or not adequately dealt with, the sheer diversity of human subjective experience in terms of the construction of social and gendered identities in the landscape.
Fleming’s rhetorical representation of a phenomenological perspective is virtually the mirror image of this point of view, and he seems to have started a minor cottage industry in Wales producing sustained negative appraisals of the overall perspective (Fleming 1995, 1999, 2005, 2006). I have been reluctant to directly respond to these or other criticisms for three principal reasons: first, an unwillingness to let such criticisms set a particular and unacceptable conceptual agenda for the debate in terms of which any particular response inevitably has to be framed; second, because I thought it might be useful to let readers make what they like of it; and, third, because I am aware that once a text becomes part of the public domain, people are bound to respond to it (represent or, from my point of view, perhaps misrepresent) it in various ways. I have lost control, and others will read into and out of my texts things that I intended and much else that I did not. But, of course, this strategy runs the risk of acquiescence—that in some way I accept the criticisms as valid and am unable to respond.
Fleming argues that the megalithic monuments of southwest Wales discussed in A Phenomenology of Landscape (Tilley 1994) are not a good data set to analyse, apparently because they are ‘diverse in character’, a somewhat strange statement, since most European megalithic monuments, when considered in detail, are equally diverse (see, for example, Tilley 1999a and Chapter 9, this volume). According to Fleming, the heterogeneity of these monuments does not therefore imply that their builders had any ‘common mindset’ (that is, any kind of relationship at all to their surrounding landscape) (1999: 120). Instead, he suggests that this diversity in the form of the monuments might relate to variations in architecture in relation to rituals involving the manipulation of ancestral bones, a point with which I would entirely agree, since I put forward a similar argument in relation to Swedish megalithic tombs (Tilley 1996, 1999b). But, however diverse the localised rituals and architectural forms of the monuments might be, this does not imply that there might not be more generalised principles at work regarding their locations in the landscape— which is what I was trying to discover. Fleming pours scorn on the idea that Carn Ingli was a significant landmark in relation to the location of some of these monuments, despite the indisputable fact that it is the most prominent hill in the area with by far the most impressive and dramatic rock outcrops. And he elsewhere actually makes a similar point, noting from historical sources that ‘Carn Ingli was the “hill of angels”, definitely a liminal place for the Irish saint Brynach’ (Fleming 1995). He remarks that many sites may have been destroyed (ibid.: 120 ), so that the sample remaining is biased, supposedly undermining any positive conclusions regarding site location. He also states another truism: that in many cases there is some uncertainty in the original form of the monuments, especially with regard to their surrounding cairns. Such comments are true of the archaeological record virtually everywhere. The logical conclusion to Fleming’s position would seem to be to impose an embargo on any archaeological research or interpretation at all!
He then argues that there is no relationship between the megalithic monuments of southwest Wales and the rocky outcrops, because some monuments are built alongside and against them, others up to a few hundred metres away, and in the case of some individual monuments, such as Carn Wen, the monument is built against a rocky outcrop while Carn Ingli is also dramatically visible on the skyline. That a localised rocky outcrop and a more distant prominent hill might both be mutually significant is apparently an unacceptable statement. It appears that there is no place in Fleming’s worldview for multiple landscape features to be significant in relation to monument location. Similarly, one must apparently choose between either rivers being significant or rocky outcrops and hills in relation to the location of other monuments (ibid.: 121). And, again, when one considers where the long axis of a cairns points or directs one’s view out across the landscape, the fact that in some cases this might occur in relation to the higher, the lower, or both ends of the cairn is again apparently unacceptable (ibid.: 123). Yet, at the end of his highly critical paper, Fleming directly contradicts the position set out earlier, valuably listing a whole series of different factors that might relate to the locations of megalithic monuments.
In relation to the long cairns of the Black Mountains of southeast Wales, in which case I argued that the orientation of the long axis of the cairn might relate to more distant landscape features such as river valleys and ridge or spur ends, Fleming suggests some other ridge ends toward which the long axis of the cairns might point, implying that this in some way contradicts my observations of the ridges to which they actually point or seem to be orientated toward (ibid.: 121)! He furthermore suggests that some of the axes of the long cairns point slightly off the ends of the ridges rather than directly to them with geometric precision. This may well be the case. My observations were suggesting that the general orientation to the ridge end was significant when seen from along the cairn axis. Like the Neolithic people, I was not concerned to draw pencil lines on maps to somehow verify the observation or use precision surveying equipment to establish the point, and to do so may indeed be entirely misleading. What is significant here is the embodied perceptive eye rather than the anachronistic disembodied perspective of the machine (cf. Cummings, Jones, and Watson 2002), which certainly appears to be counter-intuitive when we are dealing with a Neolithic rather than a twenty-first century world. Some of the associations between long barrow orientations and distant spurs that I made may well be somewhat inaccurate by the standards of modern surveying equipment, but I would wish to claim that they may alert us to relationships and associations to which such precision technology might be blind, and its use entirely misleading; the machine and the map have been allowed to dominate rather than embody human experience.
This perspective essentially is my reaction to GIS, although I do not want to dismiss it altogether. Such a technique can be useful in situations where the contemporary present obscures visual fields possible in the past, which is the manner in which it is employed in Chapter 3. The problem with much use of GIS is that there is already a tendency to use it as a substitute for phenomenological fieldwork altogether, or as something that comes first rather than last (for instance, Anderson and Stoddart 2007; Exxon et al. 2000). GIS provides a dumb, indeed surreal, view of landscape in which everything is equally visible and therefore equally important—which is clearly never the case—and, of course, it can cope only with the visual rather than with other forms of sensory experience. Like any other mathematical technique, it is terribly impoverished and inevitably makes inhuman assumptions in the form of the modeling that is involved. In short, it is incapable of providing an embodied encounter with a landscape, or a monument, a feeling for the place in which the place itself exerts its agency, exerts its own powers in relation to human perceptual experience. And part of that is the human capacity to take memories from one place to another, to situate and to sequence them in relation to different encounters and paths of movement (Tilley 2008).
Six years later, Fleming once again felt the need to repeat many of these criticisms, but this time in the wider context of an attack partly directed to the subsequent research of Cummings and Whittle (2004), which also considers, in part, the megalithic monuments of southwest Wales and the Black Mountains; Fleming extended, developed, and constructively evaluated and criticised some of my own approaches and reflections (Fleming 2005). Here Fleming similarly disputes the veracity of many of the observations made by Cummings and Whittle, preferring his own. He ends up dismissing the entire approach taken as ‘ethnographically based rhetoric.’ Again, multiple possibilities regarding the significance of monument location and architectural features appear to be the main problem. Sometimes Cummings and Whittle recorded too much, too many possibilities of what may be significant in the location of specific monuments, and so are found wanting. In relation to other monuments, however, they apparently recorded too little—for example, a rock stack or an island that Fleming had observed somewhere but is not mentioned in their analysis. After reading a few pages of this diatribe, one gradually realises that nothing would actually satisfy Fleming, because his critique is overwhelmingly negative and destructive in intent. For example, he specifically criticises the observations made by me, and Cummings and Whittle subsequently, that if some monuments had been sited a few meters away from their actual locations, important hills or rocky outcrops would no longer be visible from them. He writes that the same might be true of the positions of road signs or grazing cows in the landscape. This may indeed be the case, but this vacuous rhetoric can hardly be taken as a serious criticism of the general approach.
The phenomenological approach has, according to Fleming, taken the study of ceremonial monuments virtually back to ‘pre-Enlightenment times’. His criticisms seem to demand, instead of a nuanced and multifaceted perspective on landscape, a simple black-and-white perspective in which there can be only one reason why a specific location might have significance rather than many, only one way of observing the landscape from a monument, and only one feature in the surrounding landscape that might be significant, if any are at all, which he consistently doubts. It therefore comes as little surprise that the one positive suggestion given by him as to why some megalithic monuments are located near to rocks is simply that the rocks offered ready sources of building stone!
In relation to my interpretation of the Maiden Castle bank barrow as ‘a beach in the sky’ (see Chapter 5 this volume), Fleming (2006: 274) is naturally incredulous at the very use of the metaphor. He might, of course, have critically called into question the theory of metaphor and material forms as solid metaphors acting in a distinct way from linguistic metaphors, put forward in my book (Tilley 1999a). He could have put forward a theoretical argument explaining precisely why the notion of metaphor has no place in archaeological writing or interpretation. Instead, he prefers to discuss just how much shingle there might have been on the Chesil Beach during the Neolithic, wondering, but not concluding, whether it appeared exactly the same then as today. My argument was based not on whether the beach looked exactly the same then as now, but rather on a general resemblance between the overall morphology of the beach and the bank barrow and more generally the course of the Ridgeway itself and the pebbles on its summits—an argument that he is unable to challenge. Fleming finds the interpretation dubious but has no alternative argument.
The overall perspective on landscape taken by Fleming in relation to a phenomenological position stressing the significance of features of the ‘natural’ landscape in relation to monument construction is in fact highly ambivalent. On the one hand, he seems to disparage the entire idea that landscape features had any significance at all. On the other hand, he consistently makes interesting individual observations—for example, pointing out the potential significance of the presence of a spring near to the St Elvis megalith in southwest Wales, not mentioned either by me or by Cummings and Whittle, and making other similar observations, for instance, that specific stones might have been venerated in situ and so on. But most of Fleming’s critique remains resolutely negative and yet offers no alternative. Ultimately, his is a voice of silence telling us nothing about the megalithic monuments of Wales, or the Maiden Castle bank barrow, other than the fact that from his perspective they will always remain inexplicable. This is the logical outcome of the point of view of someone who believes that archaeology has been well served over the years by a ‘combination of empiricism, logical positivism, and critical skepticism’.
In his latest critique, Fleming substantially broadens the attack. He labels the approach being taken to landscape archaeology by me and others as ‘post-processual landscape archaeology’ (Fleming 2006). He disparages Bender (1998) for the argument that there is much that is deeply political involved in the study and interpretation of landscapes, and he claims that the scholars that he chooses to label political have ‘given themselves permission to say more or less whatever they like’ (ibid.: 268). If this were really the case, there would indeed be little or no necessity for doing fieldwork, which provides the entire basis for an interpretative phenomenological approach. The reality is that Fleming clearly does not appreciate what I and a host of other scholars who are criticised in his article (for example, Bender 1998; Edmonds 1999; Edmonds and Seaborne 2001; Thomas 1993, 1996; Cummings and Whittle 2004; contributions in Chadwick 2004) have written as being valid prehistory. Throughout his critical writings, Fleming never engages seriously with philosophical, theoretical, or conceptual issues. This is why it is possible for him to regard empiricism and positivism as being more or less the same. For him, they just provide ‘useful heuristic principles’. In fact, of course, they are distinct philosophical positions, bringing with them an entire conceptual and methodological apparatus of which he appears to be entirely unaware. Clearly, Fleming either does not take any philosophy or theory seriously or at the very least cannot be bothered to engage with it and its implications (cf. Brück 2005; Karlsson 1998). For him, academic research appears to be just a matter of common sense or, more specifically, his own unreflective understanding of what constitutes common sense. From this anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual position, he has no time and patience with fancy theories, interpretative texts, and dubious metaphors.
For Karlsson, however, I fall short because the
interpretations are fixed within the framework of an anthropocentric and calculative, post-Socratic metaphysic, while the material culture is approached solely as beings and while Being is forgotten and is therefore viewed as synonymous with the presence of the actual beings. At the same time, the material culture is also approached as . . . passive phenomena that are centered on the thinking of the interpreting subject . . . there is no awareness of the ontological difference and the crucial unity of Being (as-history) and human thinking. As a consequence, the crucial and fundamental question, Why are there beings, rather than nothing? is never brought forward in relationship to the actual megalithic tombs, which means that there are no reflections on the negative dimension (Being) of the beings in question.(Karlsson 1998: 250)
Karlsson’s argument is rooted in the later philosophical writings of Heidegger, with which I have a number of misgivings. However, there is a quantum leap between these philosophical concerns and the kinds of criticisms that would reduce archaeology to a simple technicist process of recording and observation and that might regard phenomenological archaeology as useful only in so far as it can be reduced to the status of just another kind of recording methodology. Used in this way, which is how the perspective has frequently been adopted, there is no need for further philosophical engagement.
Karlsson, unlike some other commentators, is deeply attentive to the texts that he reads, and he obviously raises profound and difficult metaphysical questions. These questions may be contrasted with the lack of any significant philosophical reflection in many of the critiques cited above. Karlsson’s book discussing the Fjälkinge 9 passage grave in southern Sweden and Pentre Ifan in southwest Wales was written prior to my subsequent discussions of metaphor and a phenomenological perspective (Tilley 1999a, 2004, 2008), wherein the relationship between Being and thinking is addressed in a different manner from that found in the earlier works that he cites, and some of the points made are partially addressed in the summary discussion below. But to do justice to his concerns requires another book about landscape altogether.
I also, of course, happily acknowledge that the approach seems to have been rather influential and that many others have been broadly sympathetic or indeed enthusiastic. Fleming’s view that none of my studies has contributed anything of positive value to an understanding of prehistory may be contrasted, for example, with that of Cummings and Whittle (2004) and many others cited above. who, while not being uncritical, build on some of my work (see The Times Higher Educational Supplement 23–29 April 2009: 34–35). Bradley underlines the veracity of my fieldwork in relation to South Dorset and ‘a level of documentation that should satisfy the most orthodox field archaeologist’ (2000a: 204) and metaphorically considers Metaphor and Material Culture (Tilley 1999a) to be a ‘landmark in material culture studies’ or ‘a milestone in the integration of archaeology and anthropology’ (ibid.). Bradley has very usefully extended the overall perspective in a consideration of a whole series of ‘natural’ places not discussed in this book, places with votive deposits or hoards, quarries and axe production sites, and has emphasised the significance of the origins of raw materials in the landscape and the manner in which they were gathered together in monuments. In this manner, he cogently suggests that places can be artefacts and that monuments can be landscapes (Bradley 2000a and see also Fontijn 2008). Herring, with twenty-five years of fieldwork experience and an unparalleled knowledge of the area, has underlined, in a fascinating new analysis that includes a study of another stone row that he recently discovered (Herring 2008), the importance of my observations of stone rows on Bodmin Moor and has emphasised other aspects of their relationship to the landscape that I did not consider or record.
Fleming’s critiques are essentially a rhetoric of self-making in which my approach becomes constituted as Other. In literary terms, this rhetoric amounts to a parable of good versus evil. His chief debating tactic is simply to assert the validity of his own ordinary everyday ‘commonsense’ pragmatic empiricism and use it as a measuring rod against which other approaches are inevitably found to be invalid. Anything that goes beyond a discussion of ‘facts’ becomes for him hyper-interpretation. The best kind of interpretation would appear to be as little of it as possible, and therein resides the irresponsibility of the position he advocates, because, in my view, if archaeology is not, in the future, principally about interpretation, it is nothing and has no value, a view that I seem to share with most of my colleagues.
I regard the perspective that I am trying to develop as representing a middle way between a form of hyper-relativism espoused by some researchers and the kind of nihilistic empiricism found in Fleming’s critiques, which encourages the view that all archaeologists can do is document facts, whatever these might be deemed to be, and provide some kind of inventory of the past while refraining to provide an interpretation of it. The kind of research I have been advocating asserts limited commonalities between bodies past and bodies present, a shared perceptive apparatus of the world through the senses, a common way of understanding the world through a process of dwelling within it, and ways of movement through it, and it posits a shared form of metaphorical human reasoning. These are existential propositions that stress common aspects of human Being. While human cultures have an almost infinite diversity, they also share important attributes of our common humanity. Through my body I can therefore approximate some types of human perceptive experience, which would be impossible to do if I were a rodent or a dog. This point is also political, since an emphasis on shared human perceptions and types of experiences runs counter to any form of racism, nationalism, gender bias, or other forms of exclusionary politics. This approach forms a starting point for making empirical observations, for an interpretative understanding of the world out there. What I share with other human beings either in my own culture and society or with others is, of course, limited, and such limitation certainly constrains what it is possible to say in relation to the obvious evidential limitations of archaeological information. The materiality of archaeological remains, the traces that survive today, sets limits with regard to how I am able to interpret them. As a consequence, I am prepared to accept that there are many more aspects of the past than there are of the contemporary world that unfortunately remain quite beyond comprehension, topics about which we might speculate, and nothing more. A student once said to me: ‘Don’t you get terribly depressed? You’ll never know what was really going on!’ Indeed, this might provide grounds for depression if there were only one simple holistic social reality out there in the past that I wanted to reproduce some way in my writings and represent as the social reality of the past in the present.
On the whole, however, I remain optimistic about the possibilities for reconstructing the past in the present, yet I have never regarded anything I have written to be a truth about the past, to be the past as it really was, the past conceived as radically separated from the present in terms of the binary opposition: past/present. The whole point of a phenomenological perspective is to go beyond the pervasive binary dualisms such as subject/object, past/present, nature/culture, fact/value—and I might add male/female—of our own modernity and refuse to frame any understanding in terms of these opposed categories. This has been the thrust of various other ‘post-processual’ writings in archaeology now for over twenty years (for instance, Bapty and Yates 1991; Hodder 1982; Miller and Tilley 1984; Rowlands 1984; Shanks and Tilley 1987a, b; Tilley 1990, to cite some of the older literature only). I do find it rather depressing and somewhat frustrating that more recent critiques, such as some of those mentioned or discussed above, still return us to the same old tired debates framed in terms of binary oppositions. This situation might be regarded, no doubt, as an excellent illustration of Derrida’s point about the powers of logocentric thought and the difficulty in trying to transcend them (Derrida 1977, 1978).
Intentionality might seem to be the fundamental concept in landscape research, but any discussion of it is based on a subject/object binary. We might, for example, want to know the reasons why people chose to settle in one place or another, built particular types of monuments where they did, how they moved around the landscape, where they procured, exchanged, and consumed material and non-material resources, deposited artefacts, and so on. It might seem, then, that if we are hoping to interpret the patterns we perceive in the landscape, we must interpret them in terms of intentions or reasons, how past peoples cognised their world: We have to become in some way mind readers. So, as we have seen above, Hodder invites me to think like a priest, Brück is concerned that I haven’t taken into account a weaver’s perspective, who is also a mother, a daughter, and so on, and Fleming thinks I’ve said nothing worthwhile about the ‘mindset’ of megalith builders in southwest Wales, and Meskell suggests this is impossible anyway, because I’m white, middle-class, modern, and male. All these diverse reactions are based on the proposition that we have to try to reconstruct the manner in which people thought about the landscape in order to understand the manner in which they lived in it. The attempts to reconstruct such mindsets in the literature—usually implicit, because particular types of cognitive processes (for example, prehistoric people thought in terms of binary oppositions) are never mentioned—currently range from the extremes of a utilitarian logic of practicality and rationalist efficiency (which appears to be the manner in which Fleming thinks they thought when he tries to account for building megaliths near to rock outcrops), to a symbolic logic without any constraint apart from, perhaps, its own internal coherence. Landscapes and their component physical and social and symbolic mediations either more or less determine what people do, or they are blank slates on which anything is possible to write.
Yet, whatever kind of logic we infer, whether it be these two alternatives or something in between, we are all very bad mind readers. Almost all statements in archaeological publications are replete with standard qualifications; the words ‘perhaps’, ‘could be’, ‘might be’, ‘possibly’ fill our texts simply because the one thing that we actually think that we can be certain about is that we can’t think like prehistoric people and can never know their minds.
This, of course, is only the tip of the interpretative iceberg of mind reading. Besides believing that people have intentions or reasons for their actions, we may need to consider differences between individual intentions (Hodder’s priest and Brück’s weaver with multiple personhood) and collective intentions not reducible to the mind of a single person. Then there are the unintended consequences, or outcomes of actions—differences between the reasons for making or doing something—and how they are received and understood by others. Furthermore, differences between discursive consciousness and practical, routinised, or ‘habitual’ thought may be important (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984).
A classic understanding in anthropological field research is that people frequently say one thing and do another. The reasons for their actions may typically be rationalised afterward and therefore do not provide a reliable guide to understanding why they have acted in one way or another. Fortunately, this is not a problem for archaeologists, because the archaeological record is the outcome of actual practice. Nevertheless, unacknowledged reasons or intentions are often fundamental: People may not be fully aware themselves of what they are doing and why. So any specific intentions that an archaeologist might try and reconstruct from the evidence might often not be the same as those held by prehistoric agents anyway, if it were possible to interview them. To cap it all, intentions or reasons for actions are rarely simple and singular. They are often complex and multiple, and the reasons someone might give for performing the same action can change over time.
So what are the consequences of all this? The first point to note is that there is never likely to be one correct way to understand landscapes in terms of intentions. Landscape interpretation is a complex field, and attempts to identify the actual or originary intentions in the minds of people as to why they built a monument in one place rather than another is an interpretive exercise fraught with difficulties. The meanings we ascribe inevitably are ours rather than theirs, but if we accept the implications of the argument that has been made above, the logical corollary is that the entire idea that we have to try and reproduce in our texts in some manner the kinds of thoughts they might have had is nonsense anyway. So, any attempt to reconstruct the past in terms of trying to reconstruct the intentions of the people of the past is an intellectual dead end, a form of idealism.
We require a different starting point, and that is provided by a phenomenological perspective that does away with mind/body and all the other dualisms mentioned above. We do not have a body that is separate from our mind, the mind is embodied, it forms part of the body. We all have embodied minds, and the distinctiveness of our human minds, as opposed to the minds of other species, such as rodents or dogs, is intimately related to the kinds of bodies that human beings possess as a species distinct from others. In other words, the manner in which we think is non-trivially related to the kinds of bodies that we possess.
I have already argued above and in Chapter 1 that I and you share the same kind of body with prehistoric people. Similarly, because our minds, like theirs, are embodied, we share the same kind of mind and may therefore have similar embodied thoughts. Just as we can walk on two legs as they did and have a similar perceptive apparatus, we can also think in the same way as they did, and features of the landscape will affect us just as they would have affected them; its mute agency will affect how both we and they experienced the world and thought about it. An embodied mind is a corporeal mind that thinks through the body. I have emphasised the word ‘think’, because I want to carefully distinguish between a process of thinking and having any particular historically and contextually situated thought. Such a particular thought we re-describe instead as a particular intention providing a reason for action— for example, ‘that’s a great place to go and build a long barrow, because it is intervisible with our sacred ancestral hill.’ The distinction being drawn here is exactly the same in character as the one drawn above between a universal human body and a socially constructed human body.
I have argued at length elsewhere that the essence of human thought, its primary and originary form, resides in the distinctively human capacity to think through things in terms of metaphors. These provide an essential way in which all human beings interpret and make sense of their worlds, past or present. Metaphors and metonymy (part-whole relations) allow us to see similarity in difference, to connect the pieces of the world, providing the basis for an embodied interpretative understanding. Furthermore, metaphors are not simply, or even primarily, linguistic in character; they also reside in material forms that may be re-described as material metaphors. Material forms are objectifications of thought and as often as not talk silently about human relationships and identities and relationships with the land in a manner impossible in words (Tilley 2006a). Although both linguistic metaphors and material metaphors vary culturally, all persons in all cultures speak in terms of metaphors, many of which have a bodily basis and in this respect are either non-arbitrary, or constrained (for instance, the foot of the hill, the brow of the hill, the face of the landscape, the redness of a thing relating to blood or its whiteness to milk or semen). This is the essence of what I have described elsewhere as a ‘phenomenological semiotics’ (Tilley 2008).
To be human is to have a particular kind of body and to think in a particular kind of way, through metaphoric means. The essence of metaphoric thought is that it is not binary in character but is an analogic logic in which one domain is made sense of in terms of another. It provides a way of connecting the world, seeing resemblances or similarities in difference. I have made this argument at length elsewhere and argued that metaphors are both the medium and the outcome of a phenomenological analysis. Although we share with prehistoric populations the capacity to think metaphorically, our way of putting these metaphors into words must differ from theirs. However, we are not dealing with linguistic metaphors but with material metaphors. We can observe their material productions and infer the metaphorical links being made—which is the interpretative strategy undertaken throughout this book. I refer the reader to more specific discussions and the scholarly books and papers cited there (Tilley 1999, 2004: Chapter 1, 2006, 2008). We can thus study and describe the material relations of bodies to landscapes in ways without needing to make reference to specific intentions in the minds of prehistoric people, and then readdress the question of what these landscapes meant to them through undertaking a ‘phenomenological walk,’ a walk of the walk (see Tilley 2008).
FIGURE 10.1 The phenomenological interpretative triangle.
Figure 10.1 presents the basic interpretative nexus of a phenomenological approach to landscape: the phenomenological triangle. It represents a set of relations between three basic terms: Body, Place, Path. These are all material entities and are not considered as separate, but as dialectically related, as part of one another, while not being subsumed by any other. For the sake of brevity, I discuss the relationships among these terms as a series of propositions:
The outcome of such a position stressing these material, dialectical relations is to argue that the archaeologist, by taking his or her body into the landscape and re-experiencing the prehistoric places and paths of movement through it, will understand that landscape in a new way providing a fresh basis for interpreting the nexus of relations between places (‘natural’ or ‘cultural’) and the paths that link them. The basis of landscape interpretation is to understand places in relation to one another through metaphorical or analogic reasoning, a form of reasoning derived from the physicality and materiality of the manner in which we encounter landscapes through our human bodies. Through the bodily process of experiencing the landscape, we learn to think in terms of metaphors, to think in the same style as prehistoric persons. To think in the same style as they do is a very different matter from trying to think intentionally as they thought. This is because our minds and our bodies inhabit the past in the present and not the past in the past, and we walk that past in the present. Thomas has recently remarked that ‘our experience of a place or artifact in its landscape context is of value because the thing itself is more than the product or outcome of extinct pattern of social life. On the contrary, it represents an integral and still-extant element of that pattern’ (Thomas 2008a: 305). What Thomas is writing about here is the relationship of embodied identities, personhood, and time. It is about establishing a reflexive and dialectical relationship with the past and an understanding that the past thing, be it monument or artefact, is also a present thing and is interpreted and understood in our present. Our metaphorical statements are thus part and parcel of the construction of the past in the present, a past that, because it is part of the present and experienced by our own contemporary cultural bodies, is neither past nor present. It is a landscape of the present-past.
Phenomenological approaches to landscape archaeology remain in their infancy. In some respects, too much has been expected—for example, in unrealistic demands for nuanced and multiple understandings of prehistoric constructions of personhood, demands whose advocates are incapable of achieving in their own interpretative practices. In other respects, what has been achieved may not have been sufficiently appreciated. Little over fifteen years ago, landscape archaeology was, for the most part, simply an unproblematic euphemism for digging holes in the ground and conducting field plans and surveys of sites and monuments, and, contra Fleming, I do not want to do anything other than to applaud the importance of this work in the historical development of the discipline.
If we consider the manner in which prehistory is written, particularly in all synthetic works rather than individual excavation or site reports (for example, Barrett 1994; Bradley 2007; Edmonds 1999; Hodder 1990; Megaw and Simpson 1979; Thomas 1999; Tilley 1996; Whittle 2003), what we consistently find is a kind of cherry-picking of significant sites. This usually means that those sites have been excavated, or well excavated, or extensively excavated. The interpreted results of these excavations then become generalised to a particular region or landscape or sometimes the whole of Britain, or even great swathes of Europe. So, generalisations are produced about mortuary practices, the significance of pottery styles, lithics, domestic settlement, and so forth and so on. Such generalisations, of course, necessarily subsume local differences and have to assume that unexcavated sites, which constitute the vast majority, somehow might fit into the pattern. This may, or may not, be the case, given the limitations of what either has been, or can be, excavated. So, in all cases, these outlines of prehistory are a kind of bricolage necessarily based on a tiny proportion of the evidence that might be available for study in an ‘ideal’ world in which everything was excavated and totally documented.
By conducting detailed phenomenological studies of the locations of sites and monuments in the landscape, we may possibly in the future be able to investigate local, regional, and inter-regional similarities and differences in a manner that will never be possible through excavation given financial, practical, social, and political constraints. It is possible to introduce destroyed site locations into the analysis, as well as places where nothing is visible on the ground—flint scatters, votive and hoard deposits, and so on. There is the possibility then of developing from phenomenological field research a much more nuanced and contextualised perspective on landscape that costs much less time and money than excavating every year, in a country such as the United Kingdom, a few thousand square metres of soil. (There are no statistics available, but it would be very interesting to know just how much soil archaeologists shift every year, and at what cost.) Given the protection of ancient monuments legislation, one currently has little possibility of excavating at all in the case of most scheduled or listed sites. In the Stonehenge area, for example, our entire knowledge of Neolithic or Bronze Age mortuary practices is, for the most part, based on barrow diggings undertaken between one hundred and two hundred years ago. The current Stonehenge Riverside Project has been given permission to excavate only a small segment of one, virtually destroyed, long barrow, obviously limiting the kind of new evidence that might be obtained.
We need comparative landscape studies, and there is an enormous amount of field research and experimentation still to be undertaken from a phenomenological perspective. This might provide one future for field archaeology that, in comparison with excavation, is non-destructive and very cheap—in the case of most of the field archaeology covered in this book, whatever its limitations, quite literally the result of the research of one man and his dog. During the mid-twentieth century, Leslie Grinsell was able to visit and record most barrows in Wessex and beyond, providing an invaluable record for the future, given the amount of subsequent destruction, mainly through ploughing, that has taken place (for example, Grinsell 1941, 1953, 1957, 1959, 1983). What might be achieved if a fraction of the funding currently spent on excavation were diverted to phenomenological landscape studies by small teams engaging with and recording the landscape in a fresh way? I would like to think that it might result in a complete revision of our current understandings.
The results of fieldwalking, survey, and aerial photographic documentation and interpretation conducted by the first generations of field archaeologists in the United Kingdom have provided us with a treasure trove of information regarding the distribution of sites and monuments and basic information about their size, morphology, and other features. My own work would not be possible without theirs. For example, I am entirely indebted to the work of Quinnell and Dunn (1992) for their patient and careful recording of the stone settings on Exmoor, and Quinnell recorded many of the cairns and barrows on Bodmin Moor listed in the Sites and Monuments Register. People such as these are, for the most part, the unsung heroes of field archaeology. I would like to think that the perspective advocated in this book builds on and complements their work. It represents a second phase of field research by returning to the field once more and thinking through the sites and monuments again in a fresh way through a reconsideration of their relationships to one another and the landscapes of which they form a part.
To end: Phenomenological approaches attempt to explore landscapes on the basis of the full depth of their human sensory experience. The process of dwelling in these landscapes and developing an understanding of them is not a value-free exercise. It is part of a radical politics whose imperative is to teach us to respect and to value, love, and cherish the land on which we dwell and the planet on which we live—and to challenge capitalist values in which everything and its worth becomes measured in terms of money, as well as the ‘rationalist’ and calculating logic associated with such an evaluation. It encourages thought about these landscapes that may allow us to emotionally re-connect with them, through an alternative poetic and metaphoric logic, rather than to destroy them. It is to further develop an understanding that, if we destroy these landscapes, we destroy not only our past but also our present and our future. To be a good phenomenologist is to try both to think through and to develop an intimacy of contact with the landscape akin to that between lovers. In so doing, we may develop not only a better understanding of our present-past but also of ourselves and our relationships to others.