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Ronald Hutton
To cite this article: Ronald Hutton (2014) The idea of order: the circular archetype in
prehistoric Europe / Stonehenge: exploring the greatest Stone Age mystery, Time and Mind,
7:4, 395-400
Article views: 46
book, which will prevent it from achieving These are two important books by two
success and persuading readers, is its leading British experts in the Neolithic
framing. Its publisher, its cover, its empha- and Bronze Age indeed Bradley is
sis on entheogenic experience and spiri- probably the pre-eminent one at the pre-
tuality: all of these place it very firmly sent time which make a fine contrast
within a context of hippy alternativism. with each other, fitting the personae of
Contexts, of many kinds, are the issue their authors. Bradleys is the more
throughout the way in which Fadiman and overtly scholarly, cautious, ambitious,
his colleagues contextualize the experience and solid: a building block in a better
of the psychedelic voyage, the historical con- understanding of European prehistory.
text of the closure of the doors of percep- Parker Pearsons is the more populist,
tion (183) in the 1960s, the cultural accessible, and flamboyant: a summary
associations of LSD and other such sub- of knowledge at a particular moment in
stances, the context of alternative lifestyle time which generates a set of exciting
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choices, and the context of academia speculations. The fact that one is a hard-
today: these all rub up against each other back and the other a paperback is indica-
to produce a book with a complex but tive of their respective natures. Both are
intriguing character. major events in the publishing history of
The Psychedelic Explorers Guide is British archaeology.
several things part exposition of research It seems my fate to review another
old and new, part polemic, part guide, and impressive book by Richard Bradley every
part clarion call. Both frustrating and fasci- few years, and the present one keeps to
nating, it is at times a testing read, but that pattern. His concern is with a feature
perhaps in some ways, a worthwhile one. of European prehistory which has been
noticed by various commentators, includ-
Jenny Walklate ing myself, but never systematically studied:
University of Leicester the manner in which square or round
jenny.walklate@gmail.com shapes predominate in the making of struc-
2014, Jenny Walklate tures at different places and times. Bradley
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ now gives the matter sustained and coher-
1751696X.2014.978132 ent consideration, in his trademark style
depending on a succession of thematic
chapters which unite data from all over
The idea of order: the circular Europe (though he has a preference for
archetype in prehistoric Europe, by the British Isles and Scandinavia), alternating
Richard Bradley, Oxford: Oxford University detailed case studies with passages of gen-
Press, 2012, 242 pp., 67.00(hbk), ISBN eral reflection. No review of anything like
978-0-199-60809-6 reasonable length can do justice to the
richness of the material and the ideas furn-
Stonehenge: exploring the greatest ished by this approach, as insights are pro-
Stone Age mystery, by Mike Parker vided into the possible meanings of so
Pearson, London: Simon & Schuster, many different sites, of such different
2012, 406 pp., 9.99(pbk), ISBN 978-0- kinds. The general conclusions drawn can,
857-20732-6 however, be readily summarized.
396 Book reviews
Bradleys starting point is an influential curvilinear designs; and the Bronze Age
paper by Kent Flannery published in 1972 Scandinavians had such designs on their
(and heard by Bradley himself at his first metalwork while living in long buildings, at
academic conference). Drawing on eth- the same time that people in Britain and
nographic data, it suggested that round- Italy had round houses but angular
houses, being limited in their potential for designs on their artifacts. Sometimes
expansion, storage space, and privacy, things were a little more complex, but
were associated more with hunter-gath- the same patterning held, so that for
erers and pastoralists, who favored small example Late Neolithic Britain and
and mobile communities. Societies which Ireland had round monuments, angular
carried on intensive mixed farming, in designs on pottery, mostly curvilinear
larger and more sedentary groups, it con- designs on rock art, and a mixture of
tinued, favored rectangular buildings; and both in passage grave art. The general
this was reflected in the Mesolithic- point is proven, however: both anthro-
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Neolithic transition. Bradley points out pology and archaeology suggest that dif-
the prima facie problems with this, ferent designs often play different roles
which have been aired from the 1970s within the same society.
onward: the social and economic types Bradley turns now to specific types of
concerned were themselves extremely monument, starting with the chambered
varied in lifestyles, and the modern socie- tombs or tomb-shrines of Neolithic
ties studied by ethnographers are not Europe, which he identifies as mostly in
necessarily good representatives of long mounds in northern Europe and
those in prehistory. He goes on to look mostly in round equivalents in the
at the symbolic significance of buildings, western Mediterranean and along the
showing how they both reflect and influ- Atlantic seaboard. He casts doubt on
ence human views of the world, so that the long-repeated idea that they were
to woodland and mountain communities houses of the dead, imitating contempor-
space is instinctually linear and to those in ary dwellings in more permanent form, as
open landscapes it is more likely to be their chambers are not often self-evi-
circular and domed. He rounds on the dently like houses, and those which are
Mesolithic-to-Neolithic transition in one tend to be later in the sequence of build-
of Flannerys core areas, the Near East, ing rather than earlier. He does, however,
and finds that it did not, in fact, make note a link between the treatment of
much difference to the ritual practices homes and the dead, both being left to
of people or the symbolic importance decay naturally at the end of their lives or
of their dwellings. occupation in England, and both burned
The intellectual terrain thus cleared, in Ireland.
he imports a different insight from ethno- Similarly exciting ideas emerge from his
graphy: that circular buildings can domi- consideration of standing stones, in the
nate in societies where visual culture is course of which he endorses the concept,
predominantly linear. This does seem to propounded by Mike Parker Pearson and
fit a lot of the prehistoric European evi- his Malagasy colleague Ramilisonina, that in
dence, as the Linear Pottery Culture of Neolithic Britain the living were repre-
early Neolithic northern Europe had sented by wood, the dead and the ances-
longhouses and pottery with (initially) tors by stone. Bradley is interested in the
Time & Mind 397
fact that Continental monoliths tend to be ceremonial structures, above all the so-
sculpted to resemble human bodies (the called Roman-Celtic temples. In Sicily the
so-called statue-menhirs); sculpted or not, Iron Age natives lived in roundhouses
they are arranged in rows like the famous and at first resisted the taste of Greek
series at Carnac, and erected near long and Phoenician invaders for rectangles.
mounds. By contrast, in the British Isles Later, they succumbed to it for domestic
they are unshaped and are normally set architecture but retained circular plans
up in circles, and associated with the for shrines and temples, as if they
round mounds of passage graves rather retained a sacred significance. Something
than with long barrows. He speculates similar happened in the lowlands of
that the islanders either thought it wrong Roman Britain, while round houses
to depict humans (in any media) or felt that remained in the highlands and beyond
stones required no modification to convey the imperial frontier. Ireland was the last
that idea: like most of his profession, he stronghold in Europe of the circle as the
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instinctually believes that, whether preferred shape for both houses and cer-
regarded as alive or as memorials, megaliths emonial enclosures, which persisted
represented people, probably deceased, there into the Middle Ages before finally
and he has little interest in their possible losing their power.
representation of spirits or deities. In similar Bradleys conclusion is that functional
manner, the Continental stone rows, studies, of the sort which dominated
sometimes with graded stones, may in his archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s,
view have mirrored processions with a have shown that rectangular houses are
hierarchical grading of people, while the indeed more efficient; but human beings
British and Irish circles could have reflected are just too odd to follow logic so
a more egalitarian, and communal, ethic. smoothly, Instead, he argues, the circle
He sees the banks of henges as possibly for cosmological reasons into which he
screening off the rites inside them from does not much enquire was the form
observers, and so making them more pri- preferred by prehistoric Europeans for
vate and mysterious, and the ditches inside structures concerned with the dead and
them, reversing the pattern of defensive the supernatural, and often for domestic
fortifications, as being appropriate for cer- buildings as well. Round houses had a
emonies of symbolic reversal such as initia- much greater impact on the form of
tion. Moving on to timber circles, he monuments than long houses, and while
suggests that they represented large south-western and western Europe pre-
rooms, for special gatherings such as feasts. ferred circles for all forms of architecture,
In Central and Eastern Europe he the northern and central regions privileged
finds Neolithic people living in rectangu- rectangular buildings but still often raised
lar houses and enclosures but making round monuments for the dead and for
circular earthworks and mounds for rituals. None the less, the more adaptable
ritualized activities. Likewise, Continental and efficient rectangle gradually became
round barrows were constructed in areas the standard unit for buildings of any kind
of rectilinear domestic buildings. In north- among more sophisticated and aggressive
western Europe, the late Iron Age and Europeans, who then slowly imposed it on
Roman period saw the combination of the whole of the continent. So concludes
circular and rectangular forms to create Richard Bradleys latest tour de force. His
398 Book reviews
method is so successful because it com- from the Mesolithic onward, by the pre-
bines the structuralism of much mid-twen- sence of a remarkable geological feature,
tieth-century archaeology, and its emphasis a series of glacial grooves cut in the chalk
on patterns, complementary and opposi- rock, pointing between the midsummer
tional, with the interest in symbolism char- sunrise and midwinter sunset; that the
acteristic of the later, post-processual Aubrey Holes were dug when the origi-
archaeologists. By collating large amounts nal bank and ditch of Stonehenge were
of old and new evidence from a large span constructed, between 3000 and 2920
of chronology and geography, and showing BC, and probably first held some of the
the structures of form and behavior that Stonehenge bluestones; that Stonehenge
emerge from it, he virtually proofs his work was used as a cemetery from that first
against most changes of knowledge and moment onward for up to half a millen-
fashion and gives an impression of a lasting nium; and that the Stonehenge Avenue
contribution to understanding. That is the had originally ended beside the Avon at
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Department of the Environments Central Ixer, Robert and Richard Bevins. 2014. The
Excavation Unit in the 1970s were a Vexed Question of the Stonehenge
Stones. Current Archaeology 138: 1621.
boozy crew regarded by other archaeolo-
gical teams as the equivalent of Hells
Ronald Hutton
Angels. Parker Pearson also has an eye
Department of Historical Studies,
for vivid and telling detail which recon-
Bristol University
structs prehistoric life, noting, for example,
r.hutton@bristol.ac.uk
that the largest house excavated at
2014, Ronald Hutton
Durrington Walls revealed higher levels
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/
of phosphorus beneath the bed furthest
1751696X.2014.978133
from the door (probably from children
wetting it) and the imprint of two knees
beside the hearth, left by the regular cook.
Wilderness in mythology and reli-
Stonehenge, in his resulting interpreta-
gion: approaching religious spatial-
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