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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
Michael Rowlands and Christopher Tilley
MONUMENTALIZING THE PAST
Monuments and memorials exist as a means of
fixing history. They provide stability and a
degree of permanence through the collective
remembering of an event, person or sacrifice
around which public rites can be organized. This
is a fairly straightforward understanding of why
tangible heritages of objects, archives, museums,
monuments and memorials exist in order to
make us believe in the permanence of identity.
Moreover, following Nora’s now classic work
on lieux de mémoires, these sites of memory are
consciously held ideas of the past, constructed
usually in the midst of upheaval (Nora 1989).
The rise of national memory emerged in Europe
in the midst of a crisis of authority. The founda-
tion of the Louvre museum in 1793 belongs to a
revolutionary era in France, whose agents, in the
midst of upheaval, needed to fashion a stable
image of the past. As Lowenthal suggests, the
projection of of an image of permanence on to a
landscape serves to deny the realities of change
(Lowenthal 1985). As history destroys the capa-
city for ‘real memories’, Nora argued that it con-
structs instead sites of memory as a social and
encompassing symbiosis maintained through
objects and performances (cf. Nora 1989;
Connerton 1989). He draws attention to the
alienated status of memory in modern times: an
estrangement concretized in monuments, muse-
ums and sites of memory (Maleuvre 1999: 59).
The monumentalizing of time is therefore
inseparable from changes in social memory.
A monument is an object taken out of history, by
history. Yet it stands for history in terms of what
it has left behind, as a mnemonic trace that also
separates it from the present. The nature of the
monument lies in the distance it creates for the
viewer from both past and present; it belongs
neither to an original setting from which it has
been abstracted or copied nor to the present, in
which it resists assimilation (cf. Maleuvre 1999:
59). Monuments create uncanny spaces of public
display and ritual that also function to perform
what Boyer refers to as ‘civic compositions that
teach us about our national heritage and our
public responsibilities and assume that the urban
landscape is the emblematic embodiment of
power and memory’ (Boyer 1994: 321). Johnson
also emphasizes the duplicitous character of
monuments that are materially experienced
memorially through the visual and other senses
while simultaneously functioning as social
symbols (Johnson 2004: 317). Monuments are
powerful because they appear to be permanent
markers of memory and history and because
they do so both iconically and indexically, i.e.
they can evoke feelings through their material-
ity and form as well as symbolize social narra-
tives of events and sacrifices retold in public
rituals.
Alois Riegl also argued that the appearance of
the ‘modern monument cult’ depended on a
combination of different value judgements; ‘his-
torical value’ as time-specific and documentary
and ‘age value’, which includes signs of tempo-
ral duration from patina and damage to incom-
pleteness and everyday wear and tear. Both
defer to time and yet lace it with anxiety over
the consequences of change (Starn 2002: 51).
Monumental time is constructed as an index of
an unchanging value but does so only by losing
touch with what is actually remembered. As
such monuments and memorials resist memory
as much as they celebrate it. On the one hand we
have museums for everything from agricultural
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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
tools to space exploration as part of the fear that
everything in our self-liquidating modernity is
threatened with oblivion (cf. Berman 1982) and
on the other, for anything to deserve to be pre-
served suggests that it has already been forgot-
ten. The real becomes cultural heritage, because
according to Nora, reality as unproblematic
memory has already disappeared. As many
have observed, the cult of modern monumen-
tal time is therefore imbued with nostalgia.
‘Nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inau-
thenticity of all repetition and denies the repeti-
tion’s capacity to form identity’ (Stewart 1984:
23). Instead the failures of the present must be
apprehended through the acquisition of some
redemptive history that promises eventual sal-
vation. This combines with mourning for lost
individual autonomy, loss of spontaneity and
simplicity and the claim that monumental time
is a form of historical consciousness that leads
to alienation from our surroundings. Susan
Stewart argues that nostalgia is a form of sad-
ness without an object; that it always only exists
as a narrative, which attaches itself to an impos-
sibly pure belief in the experience of a utopian
origin. As such ‘This point of desire which the
nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the
very generating mechanism of desire – nostalgia
is the desire for desire’ (Stewart 1984: 23).
A distinct fascination with things memorable
is therefore a feature of modernity. ‘Collective
memory’ emerged as an object of scholarly
inquiry in the early twentieth century. In The
Social Frameworks of Memory Maurice Halbwachs
argued, against the neurobiologizing, individu-
alizing or racial views of the time, that memory
is a specifically social and collective phenome-
non (cf. Connerton 1989). The boom in memory
studies, as a feature of the 1980s, is witnessed by
the appearance of influential works such as
Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory volumes (1996)
and David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign
Country (1985). They share a dissatisfaction with
historicist approaches which claim to provide
objective, critical reconstructions of the past. In
part the heritage debate relates to various anti-
historicist trends in postmodernism, claiming
that heritage is a late twentieth-century form of
social memory which appeals to a sense of the
popular and the sensory which had become lost
to the objectivism of history. The most common
strategy identified public memory with a collec-
tion of practices associated with material culture,
most obviously in the form of public architec-
ture, archives, museums and monuments, and
with more everyday forms of material culture –
domestic objects, photographs, mementoes
and souvenirs, children’s toys, etc. Memory
501
objectified in material culture becomes an active
agent with therapeutic powers (cf. Hoskins
1998; Young 1993). Memory as re-enchantment
merges with recent work on trauma theory
to promise recovery from loss and denial
(Feuchtwang 2003). Memory work is thought
most likely to subvert the totalizing varieties
of historicism because our epoch has been
uniquely structured by trauma and its effects.
Moreover Nora’s belief that true memory has
disappeared could be challenged by the growth
of heritage studies showing that memory sur-
vived as an authentic mode of discourse in the
use of material culture or as a counter-history
that challenged the false generalizations of
exclusionary history (Samuel 1994).
We have therefore several explanations for a
new memorializing of the past. Klein (2000: 143)
summarizes these rather well as, first, following
Pierre Nora, that we are obsessed with memory
because we have destroyed it with historical
consciousness. Modern memory is a conscious
construct projected on to a sense of place.
A second holds that memory is a new experience
that grew out of the modernist crisis of the self
in the late nineteenth century and has evolved
into current usage as part of a cure and a heal-
ing process. A third would identify memory as
the pre-modern that, contra Nora, we still dis-
cover in the ethnographic periphery or as ‘real-
life’ experience of the poor, of minorities and
the oppressed. Fourth, and following on from
the third, that memory is a mode of discourse
natural to people without history and so its re-
emergence is a salutary feature of decoloniza-
tion. Finally that memory is now inseparable
from identity politics as a post-1980s feature
linked to postmodern crises in historical con-
sciousness and the production of totalizing
narratives.
MONUMENTS AND PUBLIC MEMORY
There is a large literature on how official urban
landscapes of memory – e.g. museums, memo-
rials and monuments – act as stages or back-
drops in framing myths of national identity (cf.
Johnson 2004; Till 1999: 254). It is practically
impossible to conceive of any modern urban
landscape which is not saturated with the
materiality and style of public buildings and
spaces, designed and built in a relevant phase
of nation building (in Euro-America e.g.
c. 1870–1914). Always they were intended to
inculcate a sense of belonging, civic conscious-
ness combined with the everyday familiarity of
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502 PRESENTATION AND POLITICS
moving and working in an urban environment.
The redesign of the Ringstrasse in Vienna
(Schorske 1980) or Haussman’s rebuilding of
Paris (Edholm 1993) exemplify the monumen-
talizing of urban form in late nineteenth-
cèntury Europe and North America as the
expression of triumphant middle-class values.
Mosse’s study of the rise of German national-
ism from the Napoleonic Wars to the rise of
National Socialism shows how this ‘new poli-
tics’ drew people into a common sense of
belonging through their participation in
national rites and festivals (Johnson 1995; Mosse
1975). These spaces of public display and ritual
are civic compositions that aim to teach us
about national heritage and our public respon-
sibilities and assume that the urban landscape
is the emblematic embodiment of power and
memory (Boyer 1994: 321). Cultural practices
and rituals such as laying wreaths at national
memorials or festive parades that take place
along a prescribed route serve still to ‘natural-
ize’ a collective identity as citizens enact what is
normal and appropriate for a group in a partic-
ular setting (cf. Till 1999: 254). More often still,
the twentieth century became associated with
totalitarianism and the transfixing of fantasies
of total and enduring power in highly person-
alized monumental landscapes. Saddam
Hussein’s ‘victory arch’ in Baghdad, built to
nearly twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe,
was made from a cast of his forearms, showing
every bump and follicle (Makiya 2004).
Dissident groups may not agree with these
rhetorics and may fight to take them over or to
create alternatives that are territorially and
socially distinct. In the nineteenth century,
there were many such disputes over the appro-
priate nature of monumental urban landscapes,
(e.g. Johnson 1995). But disputes over who has
the authority to create, define, interpret and
represent collective pasts through the creation
of place also serves to reinforce the principle
that this is how identity should be framed
(cf. Kaplan 1994; Mitchell 1988). The formation
of nineteenth-century urban imperial landscapes
was also inseparable from the building of colo-
nial urban landscapes. The building of Delhi by
Lutyens, for example, which grafted British
imperial ambitions on to earlier Mughal archi-
tectural styles created built forms that were
imported back into metropolitan colonial archi-
tecture in Britain and the construction of war
memorials after the First World War.
Public memory can become even more
‘entangled’ with the very objects of its negotia-
tion, including historical narratives, oral histo-
ries, street landscapes, films, photographs and
other cultural productions of collective memory.
By collective memory is meant the way in
which groups map their myths about them-
selves and their worlds on to a specific time and
place (Connerton 1989, and Chapter 20 in this
volume). Collective memory is not an accumu-
lation of individual memories but includes all
the activities that go into making a version of
the past resonate with group members. This
borrows from Halbwachs (1950) the notion that
personal recall is localized in specific social and
spatial contexts and is reconstructed in the
social environments of the present. Hence col-
lective memories are always open to renegotia-
tion and change. But as Till (1999), Sturken
(1991) and others stress, ‘the cultural arena
rather than the academy is the domain of public
memory‘ (Till 1999: 255). They contrast the pro-
duction of public memory through the media,
cultural landscapes, entertainment and public
ceremonies and festivals with historical dis-
courses relying on scholarly exegeses and formal
university and other institutional networks. The
struggle between social groups to gain cultural
authority to selectively represent and narrate
their pasts includes the production of these
means and therefore the right to engage in a cul-
tural politics and to participate in a democratiz-
ing process (cf. Hall 2000).
Since the 1980s this struggle has increas-
ingly taken the form of ‘heritage’ to describe
the expanding range of commemoration in our
time (Bodnar 2000: 957). Lowenthal argues that
heritage is at present much less about ‘grand
monuments, unique treasures and great heroes’
and now ‘touts the typical and the vernacular’
(Lowenthal 1995). Samuel concludes that ‘her-
itage’ has become a nomadic concept that is
attached to almost anything, including land-
scapes, houses, family albums, souvenirs, street
signs and sport. The suspicion exists that an
earlier nationalist link between public memory
and official space is being drained of politics
and inequality. A commodified ‘heritage’ may
instead promote a pseudo-democracy where
people are free to pursue a myriad of personal-
ized pasts and leisure-time fantasies and thus
be diverted from reality (Bodnar 2000: 957).
By contrast, Philippe Aries’s description of
the rise of commemorative monuments and
practices in the nineteenth-century in Europe
informs us that the passing of loved ones and
their commemoration was related to a new per-
sonal awareness of the fact that lived experience
of the past can never be directly recalled (Aries
1974; Hutton 1993: 2). ‘Heritage’ is part of col-
lective memory and inseparable from the rise of
a modernist identity politics. It is a modern and
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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
more conscious sense of past that promotes a
politics of belonging by embedding it in per-
sonal narratives of loss, redemption and recon-
ciliation. Aries argued that such a need for
personal commemoration and longing for a
past flowed over into various public acts of
monumentalizing heroic figures and events in
the nineteenth century as the personal was har-
nessed to galvanize the public realm (Aries
1974). Tensions and conflicts existed in harness-
ing the forces of tradition to promote a national
culture but it became increasingly difficult for
an alternative, more personal, desire for a future
to exist without them. This relates to Nora’s
claim that the nineteenth century saw a transi-
tion from ‘pre-modern environments of memory’
where the personal was embedded in a living
memory to ‘sites of memory’ as places designed
to perpetuate a consciously held sense of the
past (Nora 1989).
Bodnar argues that whilst the monumentalis-
ing of the public realm in the nineteenth
century was consistent with the rise of civic
consciousness and tensions over the relation of
democracy and tradition in France and America,
the twentieth century saw this uneasy relation-
ship shattered by war. Violence and the demands
of the state for personal sacrifice on a huge
scale undermined a nineteenth-century ‘natu-
ralizing’ of personal commemoration and the
public sphere and replaced it with grief and a
struggle to justify enormous loss through the
iconography and presence of war memorials.
(Bodnar 1992, 2000; Sturken 1991). The rise of
‘heritage’ as nomadic and detached from any
particular sense of place or monument repre-
sents therefore a distinct change in the nature of
public memory. A late twentieth-century turn
towards the personalization of local groups and
identities is inseparable from a growing recog-
nition of cultural diversity, the objectification
of cultural memory and increasingly a sense
of crisis in claims to cultural authority (cf.
Johnson 2004).
MOURNING AND WAR MEMORIALS
During the twentieth century, public memory
became charged with the responsibility to
recognise the suffering caused by warfare. Prior
to this memorials and statues were built for war
heroes or for military triumphs but the majority
of those who died in war disappeared unrecog-
nized into unmarked graves. Individual recog-
nition of the dead from major conflicts begins
with the American Civil War and the Boer War
503
but was only fully recognized and demanded
by the families of the dead as a consequence of
First World War trauma (cf. Winter 1995). Aries
recognized that commemorating the dead had
become an increasing personal and family
matter during the latter part of the nineteenth
century and that this had enervated a sense of
national belonging. (Aries 1974). It was also to
become the basis for the refusal by the living
survivors and families to accept lack of recog-
nition of the sacrifice of loved ones. Recovery
from death and trauma is invariably associated
with the assertion of love and intimacy in the
mourning process and twentieth-century mass
death projected this on to a landscape of mourn-
ing and suffering.
In the aftermath of the First World War
each combatant state attempted to inaugurate a
landscape of national remembrance (Saunders
2004). In France, the state agreed, where possi-
ble, to pay for the return home of the bodies of
the dead and frequently their individual names
were inscribed on local memorials (Sherman
1994; Johnson 1995: 56). In Britain it was decided
(controversially) to bury the bodies of the dead
near the battlefields of the western front and
resist any attempt to return them to their fami-
lies. Instead enormous efforts were made to
identify individuals, initially to be inscribed on
monuments and subsequently on individual
headstones in cemeteries of standard dimen-
sions and materials regardless of status or
rank. The recognition of individual dead con-
tinued after the Second World War where
names were often added to First World War
memorials. The Vietnam war memorial in
Washington extends the principle of equality
to the point of listing the dead chronologically
by the day of the year of their death (Sturken
1991; Rowlands 1998).
First World War sites were grouped to form
landscapes in which cemeteries, memorials, bat-
tlefield sites and museums are ‘mapped’ to
facilitate the visitor’s experience of an event that
personally they can have little means of imagin-
ing at first hand. The principal site for war
remembrance in the United Kingdom is the
cenotaph, an empty memorial designed by
Edwin Lutyens and placed in Whitehall. This
was accompanied by the burial of the Unknown
Soldier in Westminster Abbey and both are
linked with rites conducted at the same time
throughout the country at similar memorials in
towns and cities (Lacqueur 1994; Johnson 2004).
What was considered to be an appropriate mon-
ument to the dead was already hotly disputed
immediately after the First World War (cf.
Saunders 2004). The cenotaph was attacked as
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504 PRESENTATION AND POLITICS
‘nothing more or less than a pagan memorial’
(cited in Johnson 2004: 324) whilst a memorial
to the Anzacs in Sydney was finally never
accepted because of the public outcry over its
lack of respect for the dead (Rowlands 1998).
Controversy over the Vietnam war memorial
also centred on what was considered to be (lack
of) proper respect (Sturken 1991). Werbner
describes the monument built outside Harare
in honour of the dead who fought against white
supremacy in Zimbabwe as a form of anti-
memory, given its precise objective to ‘forget’
the mass slaughter of the Ndebele that also
formed the basis of the creation of the
state (Werbner 1998). The Peace Museum in
Hiroshima is equally an attempt to break with
a memorializing tradition that promotes accep-
tance of mass sacrifice and promotes instead
a wish never to forget and recognition of the
consequences of mass death. Disturbance and
shock can be seen as the aims of the counter-
monuments described by Young (1993) and
more broadly those representations of mass
trauma that lead inevitably for many to ask
why so many had to suffer and die.
Of these, the Holocaust has undoubtedly been
the focus both of an effective means to silence
the past and to come to terms with it. The US
Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, has
been criticized for the way in which the memo-
ries of survivors are appropriated for the display
of an idealized and liberal American identity, for
the way that Jews are exhibited only in death or
as a people and culture that exist only as having
a past (Crysler and Kusno 1997). Young also
points out that, whilst America puts so much of
its resources into a Jewish Holocaust Museum, it
refuses a similar commitment to a museum of
slavery or the genocide committed against
Native Americans. Via the Holocaust America
can remember its tolerance and liberalism and
forget its own past (Young 1993). Post-Nine-
eleven and the debate over the memorializing of
the ground zero site has effectively transformed
the issue of remembering into a more charged
issue of what should never be forgotten regard-
less of any crimes or intolerances endured along
the way. The state and its citizens are now united
in the assertion of a single identity the future of
which is seen to be in peril and in their intoler-
ance of critique (cf. Kapferer 2002: 149).
DISGRACED MONUMENTS
Since the nineteenth century and earlier, mon-
uments and statues have attracted controversy
and hostility. If an imperial project could be
pursued through developing an appropriate
memory space where only the ‘thinkable’ would
be allowed, equally the opposite can occur. In
part this may be as much a question of neglect,
since monuments, as supposedly permanent
markers of memory and history, require both
physical and symbolic maintenance. There is
no reason to assume therefore that nineteenth-
century national and imperial projects were
always successful in achieving their purpose
(Johnson 1995). In Dublin, for instance, statues
celebrating overtly nationalist leaders like
O’Connell and Parnell were erected side by side
with existing statues to George II or Queen
Victoria. As the latter were either destroyed or
removed, Irish nationalism asserted itself
through a lengthy process of transforming the
urban memory space of Dublin (Johnson 1995).
Widespread destruction of a previously
unwanted past is particularly a feature of post-
socialist states in Eastern Europe and Russia. In
Budapest the city council removed over twenty
monuments erected in the previous communist
era. Statues in Moscow, St Petersburg and else-
where in Russia have been removed and taken
to special parks or a heritage space where those
who want to can come and see them. Forest and
Johnson (2002) explore the formation of a post-
Soviet national identity through a study of the
political struggles over key Soviet era monu-
ments and memorials in Moscow. They show
how the new elites used the decision to pre-
serve or remove these sites to define their own
positions within the new political hierarchy
and with the public in order to gain prestige,
legitimacy and influence (Forest and Johnson
2002). By erecting memorials in a public space,
attempts are made to define the historical
figures and events that become the formative
events of a national identity. Disgracing exist-
ing monuments is a process of redefining this
agenda and replacing them with new narra-
tives. For example, Till has described the con-
flicts between different groups that negotiated
the redesign of the Neue Wache memorial in
Berlin (Till 1999). The destruction of the Berlin
Wall was a more overt expression of the public
‘speaking back’ to the state whilst the history of
Tianeman Square and the events of 1989 show
an alternative sequence when the state ‘strikes
back’ (Wu Hung 1991). What they share is the
power to transcend time, to bring historical
events back into the present and make bodies,
objects and monuments effective again in
mobilizing social movements. Verderey, in the
context of Romania, describes how the wielding
of ‘symbolic capital’ by political elites is essential
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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
to political transformation. (Verderey 1999)
and Coombes’s discussion of the fate of the
Vortrekker monument outside Johannesburg
illustrates how even ‘disgrace’ may be an
ambivalent notion when the monument is
retained in a ‘state of disgrace’ to remind future
generations (Coombes 2003). The aim is not
to challenge the need for national identity nor
the desire to create a sense of sacred identity
through the manipulation of the past but to
reassert that after a short period of struggle,
identities crystallize again and become once
more difficult to challenge.
Finally the destruction of monuments shades
into descriptions of iconoclastic destruction of
emotionally charged sites and objects. Barry
Flood’s description (Flood 2002) of the destruc-
tion of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in
Afghanistan specifically warns against some
attributioin of atavistic fury to the destruction
of images in Islam but rather their destruction
as a consequence of a calculated act by Mullah
Omar to make the point that the West was more
concerned with the loss of a heritage site than
the consequences of economic sanctions on the
lives of Afghans. The destruction of the mosque
at Ayodhya is an even more telling description
of how the emotional attachment to objects and
monuments can be manipulated for political
nationalist purposes (cf. Layton et al. 2001).
COUNTER-MONUMENTS AND
NON-MONUMENTS
The association of public memory with monu-
ments and memorials is biased towards a
particular historical experience. Although
monuments are powerful because they appear
to be permanent markers of history and
memory, they can weigh heavily on the capacity
to change and to allow alternative renditions of
the past. We should not be surprised therefore
to detect strong evidence that we are moving
perhaps towards the end of monumentalizing
the past. Young suggests that counter-monu-
ments in Germany are more subversive than
providing alternative modes of representing
historical events and personalities. Counter-
monuments serve more radically to destabilize
the basic premise that the past is stable and
enduring (Young 1993). Klein summarizes
some of the evidence suggesting that we suffer
from a ‘surfeit of memory’ and a politics of vic-
timization at present. Memory and identity are
typically yoked together in postmodernist dis-
course to replace history and to re-enchant our
505
relation to the past and with the world (Klein
2000: 145).
Monuments and memorials, however, share
some of the oppressive influence of historical
discourse, shaping our sense of the past in defi-
nite and figurative ways. By contrast, much of
the writing on memory evokes a tendency to
employ it as a mode of discourse natural to
people without history. The reification of sub-
jectivity and the revival of a primordialism of
origins is a view of authentic memory that
resolves that it should no longer be consigned to
a pre-modern world destroyed by history but
recognized as still with us and capable of taking
the place of the latter. The tension between
history and memory is therefore being reborn
as one between discourse and feeling, between
secular critical practice and therapeutic practice
(cf. Klein 2000). But it need not be so and we
seem to be moving towards some kind of recon-
ciliation. Memory has now subsumed what
used to be called oral history or popular history
into a single field, described as the leading term
in the new cultural history (Megill 1998). It is
not surprising that material culture has played a
significant role in this reconciliation between
history and memory. Objects provide more than
a mnemonic device for memory to be attached
but also the means to privatize and secularize
memorial practice. The idea of building per-
sonal archives through photographs, memen-
toes and other mnemonic traces implies that
this new ‘historical consciousness’ married
history and memory in new personal and mate-
rial terms. It links monuments, memorials and
museums with a much more diverse range of
non-monumental sites, including intangible
forms of song, music, design, dance and cul-
tural performance. The danger here perhaps is
to reiterate an earlier dichotomy espoused by
Nora, that memory in opposition to history
and consciousness belongs specifically to the
peoples of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific
as pre-modern sensibility. But a more careful
strategy can pursue the useful insights drawn
on the relationship between memory and mate-
rial culture to suggest that a continuity of forms
exist, which subverts the dichotomies of both
pre-modern/modern and memory/historical
consciousness.
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF
MONUMENTS
Given the enormous number and variety
of monuments worldwide any attempt to
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506 PRESENTATION AND POLITICS
summarize the archaeological literature on
monument building is impossible. Instead we
review some innovative archaeological inter-
pretative approaches to Neolithic and Bronze
Age monuments in Britain and north-west
Europe. Even just within this literature there is
now an extraordinarily rich and varied discus-
sion about different aspects of monument con-
struction and use with regard to earlier Neolithic
long mounds and megaliths, cursus monuments
(long linear monuments defined by parallel
banks and ditches), causewayed (circular inter-
rupted ditched) enclosures, later Neolithic
henge monuments (circular enclosures with an
external bank and internal ditch broken by one
or a number of entrances), Bronze Age stone
circles, barrows and cairns. We consider five
interlinked areas of inquiry: studies of monu-
ments and landscapes, the architectural forms of
monuments, monuments in relation to cosmolo-
gies, mortuary practices, time and memory.
MONUMENTS AND LANDSCAPES
There have been a number of recent archaeolog-
ical studies which have suggested a mimetic
relationship between monuments and land-
scapes, with the monument being a microcosm
of the surrounding world. Tilley has argued that
the megalithic tombs in Västergötland, central
southern Sweden, reflect the landscape in which
they are found in terms of the use of building
materials and chamber and passage orientation.
The megalithic tombs here rest on a flat plain
composed of sedimentary rocks. Blocks of these
materials were used for the orthostats of the
tomb passages and chambers. The plain is
broken up dramatically by steep-sided and flat-
topped hills of igneous rocks. These were pref-
erentially used for the roofing stones. Thus the
choice of building materials duplicates the
high/low contrast between the sedimentary
rocks and the igneous hills towards which one
faces entering the tomb. The tombs frequently
occur in staggered north-south rows and their
chambers are orientated north-south. This also
duplicates a north-south axis of the landscape
as defined by the orientation of the igneous hills
and valley edges. The passages are low and ori-
entated west-east, the chambers high. On enter-
ing the tombs a person metaphorically makes
his or her way towards the mountain, crawling
down the low passage but being able to stand
up in the chamber (Tilley 1996a: 208ff).
Scarre has noted similarities in shape and
profile between the mounds of some passage
graves in Brittany and local land forms (Scarre
2000). He also notes the liminal sea edge loca-
tions of tombs and a preference for a marine
backdrop in the lineal arrangements of cairns,
and links this with the transformative power of
the land/sea boundary (Scarre 2002a). Bradley
(2000) and Tilley and Bennett (Tilley et al. 2000;
Tilley and Bennett 2001) have discussed rela-
tionships between granite rock outcrops and
chambered tombs in south-west England and
whether the latter resembled the former or the
former provided direct inspiration for the con-
struction of the latter and the manner in which
later prehistoric populations may not have
found it easy to distinguish between natural
features such as tors, or rock outcrops, and
ruined monuments (see also Bender et al. 2005).
The orientations and locations of the mounds
of Neolithic long barrows and long cairns and
the passages and chambers of megaliths and
Bronze Age cairns have been studied in relation
to such topographic features as prominent hills,
rock outcrops and ridges, hill spurs and valley
systems (Tilley 1994, 1996b; Cummings 2002)
and their relationship to topographic features of
the coastline, waterfalls and river systems inves-
tigated (Bradley 1998; Fowler and Cummings
2003; Fraser 1998; Scarre 2002a; Tilley 1999;
Tilley and Bennett 2001). The locations and sig-
nificance of other types of Neolithic and Bronze
Age monuments such as temples, henges and
stone circles have also been studied in relation
to their landscape settings (Bender et al. 2005;
Berg 2002; Bradley 1998; 2002; Cooney 2000;
Edmonds 1999; Edmonds and Seabourne 2002;
Richards 1996; Tilley 1995, 2004a) and standing
stones or menhirs (Calado 2002; Tilley 2004a).
These studies have all suggested that in various
ways the significance of the monuments and the
activities that took place in and around them
was dialectically related to their landscape set-
tings: the land itself, its forms and features, gave
power and significance to the monument and
vice versa.
The materiality of the monuments themselves
has been a significant point of departure for
their study: the shapes, textures, colours, the
hardness or softness and roughness or smooth-
ness of the stones and other materials used to
construct them (Jones and MacGregor 2002;
Cummings 2002; Tilley 2004a). Cummings has
shown how different parts of monuments were
built of rough or smooth stones and argues that
this relates metaphorically to the general role of
such monuments in transforming human expe-
rience as one moves in and out of and around
them. Tilley has contrasted the visual appear-
ance and the feel of stone monuments as part
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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
of their phenomenological experience. For
example, some Breton menhirs appear visually
to be smooth yet feel incredibly rough and
coarse. Others look rough, gnarled and cracked
yet feel smooth and silky. He has related this to
the changing forms of the stones, the manner in
which they can look dramatically different
when approached from different directions.
White quartz, a substance that has very special
properties (it glows when pieces are rubbed
together, creates sparks, gives off an acrid smell,
gleams and shines in the sun and artificial light)
and is frequently found on mountain tops, was
not only deposited in megalithic monuments
but was frequently used to embellish their exter-
nal appearance, the most famous example being
Newgrange in Ireland (O’Kelly 1982; see discus-
sion in Fowler and Cummings 2003).
Parker-Pearson and Ramilisonina (1998)
have argued, on the basis of analogies with
monument construction in Madagascar (see
Bloch 1971; Feeley-Harnik 1991) that the hard-
ness and durability of stone was symbolic of
the fixed nature of ancestors and ancestral
powers and in opposition to wood, associated
with the living. They contrast the nearby henge
monument of Durrington Walls with its inter-
nal wooden circles surrounded by earthen
banks and ditches and the construction of the
stone circle of Stonehenge, suggesting that
the former was associated with feasting and
the world of the living and the latter with the
ancestral dead. They argue that a processional
route led between the two, at first following
the course of the river Avon, and then marked
by the earthen banks and ditches of the monu-
ment known as the Avenue that runs from the
river up to Stonehenge. The study of monu-
ments in relation to paths of movement through
the landscape has formed a major focus of
research (see, e.g., Barclay and Harding 1999;
Barrett 1994; Bradley 1998, 2000, 2002;
Exon et al. 2000; Edmonds 1999; Tilley 1994,
1995, 1999).
For the construction of some monuments the
materials came from some considerable dis-
tance away, the most famous example being the
bluestones at Stonehenge, transported from the
Prescelli mountains of south Wales (see discus-
sions in Cunliffe and Renfrew 1997). Part of
their significance was not only that they were of
an exotic non-local material but also where they
came from, their place of origin and its charac-
teristics, their paths of movement, and the
myths and stories associated with them. The
sources for lithic materials used for construct-
ing megalithic monuments in the Boyne valley,
Ireland, were many and numerous, including
507
quartz from the Wicklow mountains at least
40 km to the south and granite and siltstones
from the Carlingford mountains about the
same distance to the north, together with a vari-
ety of more local stones: greywacke, limestones
and sandstones (Mitchell 1992; Cooney 2000:
136). Similarly numerous types of stones were
used to construct Swedish passage graves
(Tilley 1996a: 127). This bringing together of
raw materials from different local and more
distant sources suggests that these monuments
had an integrative role, linking human experi-
ence of different local and distant landscapes in
the form of the monument itself through the
transported raw materials used to construct it.
MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE
AND ITS EXPERIENCE
The recent use of a phenomenological perspec-
tive has stressed the sensuous dimensions of the
human experience of monuments and its rela-
tionship to the manipulation of architectural
space. Prior to this these monuments tended to
be both archaeologically represented and inter-
preted as plans, providing an entirely abstract
and somewhat surreal two-dimensional view of
them in which the only questions that tended to
be asked were of a typological or classificatory
nature (Richards 1993: 147). The majority of pas-
sage tombs, such as Maes Howe on Orkney,
have spacious chambers which contrast with
low, narrow passages to move along which one
must stoop, or crawl. This physically restricts
movement into and out of the tomb and empha-
sizes the liminal character of the passage linking
the outside world of the living with the world of
the ancestral dead buired in the chamber. Loud
noise is dampened in the chamber but projected
out down the passage to the outside like a
megaphone. Such sound effects have been stud-
ied in detail (Watson and Keating 1999).
Visibility and degrees of illumination by the sun
at different times of the year have been shown
to be crucial to the interpretation of the spaces
(Bradley 1989b), as has passage orientation and
mound orientation (see e.g. Burl 1987; Ruggles
1997) and the direction in which the passage
entrance faces (Tilley 1994). The passage entrance
to Maes Howe in Orkney faces north-east,
allowing the rays of the setting sun to shine
down it and into the chamber on the midwinter
solstice. A special roof box constructed above
the passage entrance at New Grange in Ireland
allows the sun’s rays to enter the chamber on
the midwinter sunrise (O’Kelly 1982). Passages
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508 PRESENTATION AND POLITICS
of other tombs are often aligned with relation to
the equinoxes.
Such experiences of light and darkness,
sound, and warmth and coldness, dampness
and dryness, have been linked by some to
trance experiences and altered states of con-
sciousness, and the geometric art found in some
tombs has been interpreted as entoptic images
(Bradley 1989a; Dronfield 1995). The more gen-
eral point is that the architecture of monuments
acts on people. It structures where and how
they can move, bodily posture, and so on, and
thus may be a fundamental element structuring
the interpretation and understanding of these
places. This embodied perspective on monu-
ments has been linked by a number of authors
to the ideological legitimation of power, the
masking of social inequalities and the reproduc-
tion of dominant discourses.
The idea that monumental architecture
was often periodically remodelled in relation to
the production of a new social order has been
widely discussed (Barrett 1994: 24; Bradley
1998: Chapter 6; Thomas 1991: 43, 1996: 170 ff.).
Tilley (1996a) has used an emulation model of
social competition to explain the changes in
architectural form of megalithic monuments
from long dolmens to round dolmens to pas-
sage graves in southern Scandinavia in an
attempt to account for (1) the close spatial
groupings of these different tombs in some
areas and (2) their great differences in size and
morphology. He argues that initially different
groups competed in terms of building longer
and longer dolmen mounds with more and
more chambers. This is subverted by one group
building a new type of tomb, the round dolmen
with a chamber in a round mound. A final
phase in this model attempts to account for the
fact that some large monuments have compar-
atively few artefacts deposited in and around
them while much smaller ones may have many.
He argues that social competition for prestige
and power switches from monument building
to ceremonies involving the deposition and
ritual sacrifice of wealth in the form of artefacts.
In general the architecture of Neolithic funer-
ary and ceremonial monuments divides up and
creates segmented spaces with varying degrees
of accessibility knowledge of which, deemed
essential for the well-being of the social group,
may have been socially restricted in relation to
age and/or gender (e.g. Barrett 1994; Richards
1993; Shanks and Tilley 1982; Thomas 1991: 51,
1993; Tilley 1984). The basic argument is that
human subjects were formed through their
differential engagement with, and knowledge
of, the material forms of these monuments,
what the architecture does, rather than what it
Page 508
might specifically mean. The power of certain
individuals may have only been manifested in
relation to particular types of monument in par-
ticular places (Thomas 1996). Many were the
medium for different and competing discourses
and interpretations (Bender 1998; Brück 2001;
Edmonds 1999). Bender (1998) stresses the way
in which Stonehenge has been during the past
few hundred years a place radically open to dif-
ferent kinds of interpretation in relation to dif-
ferent interests of individuals and groups: ‘a
multitude of voices and landscapes through
time, mobilising different histories, differentially
empowered, fragmented, but explicable within
the historical particularity of British social and
economic relations’ (1998: 131). In her account the
‘contested’ nature of the Stonehenge landscape
is much more evident and nuanced in the pre-
sent than in the past. Perhaps this is just simply
a reflection of the far greater evidence available
for interpretation today (we can see the people
and hear the cacophony of contemporary dis-
courses), or alternatively, it might suggest a fun-
damental difference between the ordering of
social life and the relation of the individual to
society in the past contrasting with the present.
Edmonds stresses the multiple possibilities
for interpreting the evidence from monuments
such as the Etton causewayed enclosure:
There are bundles of cattle bone placed in ditches
while still fresh. Some may have still held flesh
when buried. Fragments of people were often
treated in a similar manner, but there were also
human bones that were overlooked. Scattered
unnoticed from one part of the enclosure to
another, these were weathered and gnawed at by
dogs. It is difficult to make sense of the material.
The residues of formal moments lie cheek by jowl
with traces of domestic activity, an amalgam of rit-
ual and routine. There is an entanglement of roles
and values, as if different qualities of the monu-
ment were pulled in and out of focus over time.
(Edmonds 1999: 111)
In relation to the Mount Pleasant henge monu-
ment Brück (2001) similarly argues that its
meaning and social relevance would very
much have depended on who visited and how
and when, on their social role and status, and
this might account for the ‘messy’ and often
contradictory sets of artefacts and their associa-
tions: ‘people would have experienced several
parallel versions of social reality constructed
through different kinds of knowledge and
informed by different concerns and interests’
(2001: 663). It seems quite clear that certain
types of monument such as causewayed enclo-
sures and henges had multiple meanings and
37-Tilley-3290-Ch31.qxd 11/16/2005 5:54 PM Page 509
MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
identities, perhaps precisely because they had a
wide variety of different uses criss-crossing any
division between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘ritual’.
Other types of monuments such as long barrows
or dolmens may have had a far more restricted
range of meaning and greater formality and
control in their use.
COSMOLOGIES
The cosmological significance of monuments
has been widely discussed, their link with the
seasons of the year, the passage of day and
night, the rising and setting of the sun, and the
movements of the moon, their relationship to
land forms, etc., as mentioned above. Bradley
has argued that the circular form of monu-
ments in the British (Bradley 1998: Chapters
8–10) Neolithic and Bronze Age suggests that
the circle was a basic template for understand-
ing the world. The burial mounds and cairns
are circular, surrounded by circular kerbs of
stones or ditches, the ceremonial monuments:
henges and stone circles are circular and may
contain circular structures within their interiors,
and so are domestic dwellings. The whole
world was, in effect, circles within circles, and in
some cases the internal organization of domes-
tic houses and burials is very similar in terms of
the locations of pits, entrances, burials, metal
deposits, etc. The houses of the living and those
of the dead appear to be a structural transfor-
mation of the other.
Bradley draws an interesting distinction
between ‘permeable’ monuments such as stone
circles where one can look out beyond and have
a view of the world and the enclosed interior
spaces of henges where the world is blocked
out. Henges are generally located in lowland
landscapes, stone circles in much more dra-
matic rocky and rugged highland landscapes.
Stone circles, he argues, often acted as
metaphors for the surrounding landscape (see
also Richards 1996):
the building of such permeable enclosures in such a
varied topography made it possible for the features
of these monuments to refer directly to the world
around them. This is what seems to have happened
through the astronomical alignments in the plan-
ning of some of these sites. They located the newly
built monuments within a wider sacred geography.
(Bradley 1998: 145)
Fieldwork on the Bronze Age of Bodmin Moor
has again emphasized the importance of a
circular template for making sense of the
world. Ring cairns enclose not only burials but
509
rocky outcrops, or tors (Tilley 1995, 1996;
Bender et al. 1997, 2005). The houses on settle-
ment sites have entrances that are oriented so
as to look out towards distant cairns and tors.
Huge boulder spreads below the main rock
outcrops, known locally as clitter, may have
been deliberately manipulated so as to create
different visual and experiential effects and
‘monuments’ that ambiguously transcend a
nature/culture distinction (Tilley et al. 2000;
Bender et al. 2005). Unaltered stones were just
as significant and meaningful as culturally
erected stones such as the stone circles and
houses. The houses themselves incorporated
large ‘natural’ stones, or grounders, in their
perimeters at particular cardinal points or as
back stones opposite the house entrances.
Some abandoned houses were turned into
cairns, or houses for the dead, and were modi-
fied by having their interiors and entrances
altered or blocked (Bender et al. 2005).
The origins of European megalithic monu-
ments and long mounds have created endless
controversy and discussion. They have been
variously argued to be objectifications of
movements of people or religious ideas (e.g.
Childe 1957), territorial markers erected along
the Atlantic seaboard of Europe as a result of
population pressure (Renfrew 1973a, 1976), or
a new set of ideas involving house symbol-
ism (Hodder 1984, 1990; Bradley 1998) and
the manipulation of the body and the dead
(Thomas 1991, 1999a; Tilley 1996a) in various
ways. Despite huge variety in the forms of these
monuments at a European or even at a local scale
of analysis it is always assumed that something
broader links them together (for a discourse
analysis see Tilley 1999: Chapter 3). The most
significant general points about these monu-
ments are (1) their durability and the manner in
which they mark the landscape and relate to it;
(2) the variability in their architectural forms;
(3) the burials and artefact deposits found in and
around them. The first two points have been dis-
cussed above and we will now consider the third.
MONUMENTALITY AND DEATH
A close connection has been suggested between
different ways of treating the dead and the archi-
tectural forms of Neolithic megalithic monu-
ments. Often the dead were buried in sealed
chambers in the earlier monuments. Many of
these were single burials of intact bodies. Later
monuments were constructed so as to permit
access to the burial chamber via a shorter or
longer passage. In these monuments collective
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510 PRESENTATION AND POLITICS
burial was practised of unfleshed bones. This
involved the selection, disarticulation, arrange-
ment and rearrangement of bones in various
ways (see e.g. Edmonds 1999; Jones 1998;
Fowler 2001; Richards 1988; Shanks and Tilley
1982; Thomas 2000) Some of the ‘absent’ or
‘missing’ bones were taken out of these monu-
ments to circulate as relics among the living or
deposited in other monuments in a variety of
ancestor rites (see e.g. Barrett 1988; Bradley
1998; Thomas 1991, 1999a; Tilley 1996a). The
practice of collective burial has been variously
interpreted – as a sign of an egalitarian society
in which the individual on death becomes
dissolved into the social body, as an ideological
representation masking social inequalities in life
(Shanks and Tilley 1982), or as citations of dif-
ferent types of personal relations in life, indicat-
ing agency as ‘partible’ or ‘fractual’ in which
personal identity is in a continuous process of
contextualization, as argued by Strathern (1988)
in relation to Melanesia (Fowler 2001).
Homologies have been argued to exist
between the treatment and circulation of
human bones and the deposition of artefacts.
Tilley notes that elaborately decorated pottery
and stone axes were smashed up and sacrificed
outside the entrances to Scandinavian passage
graves, being disarticulated and rearranged in
a comparable manner to the skeletal remains
inside the tombs. These artefacts were ‘persons’
that were destroyed and turned into ‘corpses’
of their original forms (Tilley 1996a: 315 ff.).
Edmonds has made similar arguments in rela-
tion to the deposition of artefacts in earlier
British Neolithic monuments (Edmonds 1999:
124 ff.) while Thomas has argued that the circu-
lation of people between places and monuments
and the circulation of bones and artefacts were
homologous in a variety of ways. For example,
the ‘quarrying and depositing of artefacts,
extraction and backfilling of monumental build-
ing materials … amounts to a set of relations of
reciprocity with the earth itself in which extrac-
tive labour and acts of deposition brought mean-
ing to place’ (Thomas 1999b: 76). He contrasts
the earlier Neolithic pattern with that in the later
Neolithic, where contexts for social action multi-
plied and became mutually exclusive, objectified
in a very different ‘economy of substances and
depositions’ (Thomas 1996: Chapter 6).
A shift from Neolithic collective burials to
individual burials under barrows and cairns in
the early Bronze Age of Britain has been ele-
gantly interpreted by Barrett as a movement
from ancestor rituals to funerary rites (Barrett
1988, 1991, 1994). The two, he argues, are quite
distinct in terms of their organization and
purposes. The former bring the living into the
presence of the ancestral dead located in special
places – megalithic monuments. These rites
need not necessarily involve fresh interments
but presence ancestral remains in relation to the
social strategies of the living. The architecture
of these monuments including forecourts and
accessible chambers containing ancestral bones,
provided spaces for the congregation of the
living and places for the deposition of offerings.
It was during the Bronze Age that the land-
scape became filled up with thousands of
round barrows and cairns many of which cov-
ered a single primary act of body interment.
The funerary rituals associated with these
places were explicitly concerned with the burial
of the deceased and the realignment of social
relations among the living. These graves repre-
sent the concluding moment in a complex series
of funerary rituals and symbolically sever the
ties between the living and the dead. Burial was
thus a means of forgetting. Subsequently fresh
burials, often cremations, might be inserted in
the mound or cairn or others built in its vicinity
leading to the development of a barrow ceme-
tery. In each case these subsequent events
related back to the first burial so that genealog-
ical lines of descent could be traced in, for
example, the spatial distribution of barrow
lines or clusters. Barrett links these changes in
burial practice to different ways of inhabiting
the landscape, much more mobile and fleeting
during the Neolithic, much more fixed and
tenurial during the Bronze Age. In the Neolithic
the ancestral dead were co-present with the
living, during the Bronze Age they became part
of the past, placing them in a genealogical rela-
tionship to the living. While this interpreta-
tion remains excellent as a general model it
necessarily ignores and cannot cope with the
enormous variability in the Neolithic and
Bronze Age mortuary practices being discussed
(Thomas 2000: 658 ff.) nor the distinctive
regional relationships of the barrows and cairns
to the landscape. (For recent work see Tilley
1996a, 1999: Chapter 6; Tilley 2004a,b; Woodward
2000; Exon et al. 2000.)
MONUMENTALITY, TIME AND
MEMORY
Earlier ‘processual’ functionalist models of
monument types attempted to slot and iden-
tify them in relation to an evolution of social
types. So while long barrows and megalithic
monuments and causewayed enclosures might
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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
represent small-scale segmentary ‘lineage’ type
societies, henges were linked with the evolu-
tion of hierarchy and ranking in the form of
chiefdoms (Renfrew 1973). For Barrett (1994)
and others (e.g. Edmonds 1999; Thomas 1996)
by contrast, monuments do not passively reflect
changing social relations, they actively serve to
produce those relations or bring them into
being. Barrett succinctly puts it this way:
architecture structures the possible dispositions
employed between those who inhabit its spaces. It
creates the physical conditions of a locale which are
drawn upon by practices which, in turn, sustain
their meanings by reference to the conditions which
they occupy. Architecture is a material technology
enabling the regionalization of a place to emerge
through practice, creating different categories and
moments of being.
(Barrett 1994: 18)
Monument construction may have had
intended consequences in terms of the effects it
had on people. It also almost certainly had unin-
tended effects on social practices. Interpretations
of the structural sequences of monuments such
as Stonehenge and Avebury (e.g. Cleal et al.
1995; Bender 1998; Bradley 1998; Pollard and
Reynolds 2002; Whittle 1997) or Maltese tem-
ples (Tilley 2004a) have shown they were con-
stantly being modified and altered and were
often left unfinished. They were not realized
and planned in the mind first and then con-
structed on the ground. Their architecture pro-
vided both ‘affordances’ and constraints which
were modified through time in a continual
dialectic between persons, practices and mater-
ial structures.
Monuments are often fundamental to the
persistence and direction of social memory,
frames for the inscription and reproduction of
social values. They can also be means of forget-
ting and reworking social relations. Edmonds
puts it this way:
recruited by the living, they can change in form
and significance. They can bolster ideas or posi-
tions far removed from those which held sway at
their first construction. They can even become a
focus for competing visions of the order of things.
At the same time, they retain a sense of the time-
less and eternal. The assertion of new values often
goes hand in hand with the evocation of continu-
ity, of an unbroken line between present and past.
(Edmonds 1999: 134)
His book is an outstanding exploration of these
ideas in relation to the earlier British Neolithic
monuments and causewayed enclosures in
511
particular. Bradley (2002) has written an
intriguing study of how past monuments might
have been understood in the past. Ancient mon-
uments would, of course, have been visible in
the past, as they are today. How might people in
the past have experienced and understood their
past and how might they have used it as a
resource to construct their future? They could
be ignored, destroyed, reworked, renewed or
reinterpreted in various ways, for example the
ruins of earlier structures could be used in cre-
ating later ones or earlier structures incorpo-
rated in new monuments in new ways to create
new structures of experience, as can be seen, for
example in the relationship between Bronze
Age stone rows and reaves (linear boundary
systems), cairns and houses on Dartmoor
(Bradley 2002: Chapter 3).
CONCLUSION
From the Neolithic onwards monuments and
memorials have littered the landscapes of the
past, and the present. Their material endurance
is clearly fundamental to their power and sig-
nificance. There are two major aspects to this:
that which they signify, or can be interpreted
to signify, and the effects their very material
presence has in relation to persons, groups,
nation states, etc. A key concept is memory,
although mediated by current debates on its
alienated associations with modernity. There
are, of course, many cultures in the past and the
present which have no need to publicly objec-
tify their identities in this manner. These are
exclusively cultures without history in the
modernist sense and documented archaeologi-
cally and ethnographically. To characterize
such cultures as somehow possessing authentic
and non-alienated memory, and thus having no
need for monuments, is clearly inadequate. To
further complicate matters, cultures ‘without
history’ also erect and use monuments. We still
have a poor comparative understanding of
why it becomes necessary to erect monuments
in different social and historical circumstances.
To simply link their construction to crises of
legitimation, whatever form these might take,
is an all too easy generalization. Perhaps part of
the problem may arise from our own rather
restricted cultural definition of what monu-
ments are. Landscapes, or humanly unaltered
features of those landscapes, such as significant
hills, large trees, deep valleys, etc., might them-
selves be considered to be monuments: so why
‘improve’, alter or, quite literally, build on them?
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512 PRESENTATION AND POLITICS
A mimetic relationship between artefact and
landscape may be part of the answer here in
some circumstances: one draws attention to that
which is already there and emphasizes it.
Alternatively monuments may be significant by
drawing attention towards themselves and
away from the landscapes of which they are a
part. They may thus gather together or differen-
tiate place. They may also punctuate time by a
stress on events, and the event of their own con-
struction, or alternatively suggest the endless,
the repetitive and the cyclical. The ways in
which pyramids, classical temple architecture
and other monumental forms continue to be
reused as either replication or pastiche suggests
a potency for decontextualized forms regardless
of apparent meaning. Thinking about these rela-
tionships and how they relate to the individual-
ity (or otherwise) of the material form of
monuments and memorials ought to be a sig-
nificant direction for research.
Another problem area, comparatively little
considered, concerns the relationship between
public and official discourses and the private
and the personal. How do the former mediate
the latter and vice versa? and how does the tan-
gible heritage of monuments and memorials
and performances using them intersect with the
‘intangible’ heritage of dance, and song, cloth-
ing, body decoration, etc.? For example, exactly
what are the social, moral and political implica-
tions of UNESCO designating certain monu-
ments and places as world heritage sites today
and then discovering, in retrospect, that many
nations or cultures apparently have none?
The entanglement of monuments and memo-
rials with shifting social identities is no more
obvious than in post-socialist societies and the
postcolonial world with various attempts to
incorporate, appropriate, destroy or simply
abandon and neglect the monuments of the past.
We need further comparative ethnographic
study of what happens, and how, in these very
different contexts. To what extent does these
very different histories relate to similar or differ-
ent relationships to different types of monuments
from the past today: graveyards, buildings,
public sculptures, parks and gardens?
REFERENCE
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