Time and Mind

The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture

ISSN: 1751-696X (Print) 1751-6978 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtam20

The idea of order: the circular archetype in

prehistoric Europe / Stonehenge: exploring the
greatest Stone Age mystery

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

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2014.978133

Published online: 11 Nov 2014.

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book, which will prevent it from achieving
success and persuading readers, is its
framing. Its publisher, its cover, its empha-
sis on entheogenic experience and spiri-
tuality: all of these place it very firmly
within a context of hippy alternativism.
Contexts, of many kinds, are the issue
throughout the way in which Fadiman and
his colleagues contextualize the experience
of the psychedelic voyage, the historical con-
text of the closure of the doors of percep-
tion (183) in the 1960s, the cultural
associations of LSD and other such sub-
stances, the context of alternative lifestyle
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choices, and the context of academia
today: these all rub up against each other
to produce a book with a complex but
intriguing character.
The Psychedelic Explorers Guide is
several things part exposition of research
old and new, part polemic, part guide, and
part clarion call. Both frustrating and fasci-
nating, it is at times a testing read, but
perhaps in some ways, a worthwhile one.
Jenny Walklate
University of Leicester
jenny.walklate@gmail.com
2014, Jenny Walklate
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/
1751696X.2014.978132
The idea of order: the circular
archetype in prehistoric Europe, by
Richard Bradley, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012, 242 pp., 67.00(hbk), ISBN
978-0-199-60809-6
Stonehenge: exploring the greatest
Stone Age mystery, by Mike Parker
Pearson, London: Simon & Schuster,
2012, 406 pp., 9.99(pbk), ISBN 978-0-
857-20732-6
Time & Mind 395
These are two important books by two
leading British experts in the Neolithic
and Bronze Age indeed Bradley is
probably the pre-eminent one at the pre-
sent time which make a fine contrast
with each other, fitting the personae of
their authors. Bradleys is the more
overtly scholarly, cautious, ambitious,
and solid: a building block in a better
understanding of European prehistory.
Parker Pearsons is the more populist,
accessible, and flamboyant: a summary
of knowledge at a particular moment in
time which generates a set of exciting
speculations. The fact that one is a hard-
back and the other a paperback is indica-
tive of their respective natures. Both are
major events in the publishing history of
British archaeology.
It seems my fate to review another
impressive book by Richard Bradley every
few years, and the present one keeps to
that pattern. His concern is with a feature
of European prehistory which has been
noticed by various commentators, includ-
ing myself, but never systematically studied:
the manner in which square or round
shapes predominate in the making of struc-
tures at different places and times. Bradley
now gives the matter sustained and coher-
ent consideration, in his trademark style
depending on a succession of thematic
chapters which unite data from all over
Europe (though he has a preference for
the British Isles and Scandinavia), alternating
detailed case studies with passages of gen-
eral reflection. No review of anything like
reasonable length can do justice to the
richness of the material and the ideas furn-
ished by this approach, as insights are pro-
vided into the possible meanings of so
many different sites, of such different
kinds. The general conclusions drawn can,
however, be readily summarized.
 396 Book reviews
Bradleys starting point is an influential
paper by Kent Flannery published in 1972
(and heard by Bradley himself at his first
academic conference). Drawing on eth-
nographic data, it suggested that round-
houses, being limited in their potential for
expansion, storage space, and privacy,
were associated more with hunter-gath-
erers and pastoralists, who favored small
and mobile communities. Societies which
carried on intensive mixed farming, in
larger and more sedentary groups, it con-
tinued, favored rectangular buildings; and
this was reflected in the Mesolithic-
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Neolithic transition. Bradley points out
the prima facie problems with this,
which have been aired from the 1970s
onward: the social and economic types
concerned were themselves extremely
varied in lifestyles, and the modern socie-
ties studied by ethnographers are not
necessarily good representatives of
those in prehistory. He goes on to look
at the symbolic significance of buildings,
showing how they both reflect and influ-
ence human views of the world, so that
to woodland and mountain communities
space is instinctually linear and to those in
open landscapes it is more likely to be
circular and domed. He rounds on the
Mesolithic-to-Neolithic transition in one
of Flannerys core areas, the Near East,
and finds that it did not, in fact, make
much difference to the ritual practices
of people or the symbolic importance
of their dwellings.
The intellectual terrain thus cleared,
he imports a different insight from ethno-
graphy: that circular buildings can domi-
nate in societies where visual culture is
predominantly linear. This does seem to
fit a lot of the prehistoric European evi-
dence, as the Linear Pottery Culture of
early Neolithic northern Europe had
longhouses and pottery with (initially)
curvilinear designs; and the Bronze Age
Scandinavians had such designs on their
metalwork while living in long buildings, at
the same time that people in Britain and
Italy had round houses but angular
designs on their artifacts. Sometimes
things were a little more complex, but
the same patterning held, so that for
example Late Neolithic Britain and
Ireland had round monuments, angular
designs on pottery, mostly curvilinear
designs on rock art, and a mixture of
both in passage grave art. The general
point is proven, however: both anthro-
pology and archaeology suggest that dif-
ferent designs often play different roles
within the same society.
Bradley turns now to specific types of
monument, starting with the chambered
tombs or tomb-shrines of Neolithic
Europe, which he identifies as mostly in
long mounds in northern Europe and
mostly in round equivalents in the
western Mediterranean and along the
Atlantic seaboard. He casts doubt on
the long-repeated idea that they were
houses of the dead, imitating contempor-
ary dwellings in more permanent form, as
their chambers are not often self-evi-
dently like houses, and those which are
tend to be later in the sequence of build-
ing rather than earlier. He does, however,
note a link between the treatment of
homes and the dead, both being left to
decay naturally at the end of their lives or
occupation in England, and both burned
in Ireland.
Similarly exciting ideas emerge from his
consideration of standing stones, in the
course of which he endorses the concept,
propounded by Mike Parker Pearson and
his Malagasy colleague Ramilisonina, that in
Neolithic Britain the living were repre-
sented by wood, the dead and the ances-
tors by stone. Bradley is interested in the

fact that Continental monoliths tend to be
sculpted to resemble human bodies (the
so-called statue-menhirs); sculpted or not,
they are arranged in rows like the famous
series at Carnac, and erected near long
mounds. By contrast, in the British Isles
they are unshaped and are normally set
up in circles, and associated with the
round mounds of passage graves rather
than with long barrows. He speculates
that the islanders either thought it wrong
to depict humans (in any media) or felt that
stones required no modification to convey
that idea: like most of his profession, he
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instinctually believes that, whether
regarded as alive or as memorials, megaliths
represented people, probably deceased,
and he has little interest in their possible
representation of spirits or deities. In similar
manner, the Continental stone rows,
sometimes with graded stones, may in his
view have mirrored processions with a
hierarchical grading of people, while the
British and Irish circles could have reflected
a more egalitarian, and communal, ethic.
He sees the banks of henges as possibly
screening off the rites inside them from
observers, and so making them more pri-
vate and mysterious, and the ditches inside
them, reversing the pattern of defensive
fortifications, as being appropriate for cer-
emonies of symbolic reversal such as initia-
tion. Moving on to timber circles, he
suggests that they represented large
rooms, for special gatherings such as feasts.
In Central and Eastern Europe he
finds Neolithic people living in rectangu-
lar houses and enclosures but making
circular earthworks and mounds for
ritualized activities. Likewise, Continental
round barrows were constructed in areas
of rectilinear domestic buildings. In north-
western Europe, the late Iron Age and
Roman period saw the combination of
circular and rectangular forms to create
Time & Mind 397
ceremonial structures, above all the so-
called Roman-Celtic temples. In Sicily the
Iron Age natives lived in roundhouses
and at first resisted the taste of Greek
and Phoenician invaders for rectangles.
Later, they succumbed to it for domestic
architecture but retained circular plans
for shrines and temples, as if they
retained a sacred significance. Something
similar happened in the lowlands of
Roman Britain, while round houses
remained in the highlands and beyond
the imperial frontier. Ireland was the last
stronghold in Europe of the circle as the
preferred shape for both houses and cer-
emonial enclosures, which persisted
there into the Middle Ages before finally
losing their power.
Bradleys conclusion is that functional
studies, of the sort which dominated
archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s,
have shown that rectangular houses are
indeed more efficient; but human beings
are just too odd to follow logic so
smoothly, Instead, he argues, the circle
for cosmological reasons into which he
does not much enquire was the form
preferred by prehistoric Europeans for
structures concerned with the dead and
the supernatural, and often for domestic
buildings as well. Round houses had a
much greater impact on the form of
monuments than long houses, and while
south-western and western Europe pre-
ferred circles for all forms of architecture,
the northern and central regions privileged
rectangular buildings but still often raised
round monuments for the dead and for
rituals. None the less, the more adaptable
and efficient rectangle gradually became
the standard unit for buildings of any kind
among more sophisticated and aggressive
Europeans, who then slowly imposed it on
the whole of the continent. So concludes
Richard Bradleys latest tour de force. His
 398 Book reviews
method is so successful because it com-
bines the structuralism of much mid-twen-
tieth-century archaeology, and its emphasis
on patterns, complementary and opposi-
tional, with the interest in symbolism char-
acteristic of the later, post-processual
archaeologists. By collating large amounts
of old and new evidence from a large span
of chronology and geography, and showing
the structures of form and behavior that
emerge from it, he virtually proofs his work
against most changes of knowledge and
fashion and gives an impression of a lasting
contribution to understanding. That is the
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secret of his well-deserved success.
Mike Parker Pearsons book is an
exposition, for the general reader and
students of British archaeology, of the
story and findings of the Stonehenge
Riverside Project, of which he was the
original source of inspiration and became
one of the leaders. It was one of the
largest archaeological projects in recent
history, lasting for seven years (20039)
and carrying out 45 excavations in the
Stonehenge World Heritage site and
more in the Preseli Hills. This much it
has established beyond doubt: that
Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were
not separate monuments from different
periods, but complementary creations,
the former being used for ritual and bur-
ial and the latter acting as a seasonal
village for huge gatherings and a setting
for feasting as well as ceremonies; that
they were connected by the River Avon,
to which avenues ran from both, and by
similar internal structures (at Stonehenge
in stone, at Durrington in wood), and
alignments on sunrises and sunsets at
the solstices; that the animals eaten at
Durrington, and so presumably their
owners, mostly arrived from regions
beyond the Wessex chalk hills; that the
site of Stonehenge was made special,
from the Mesolithic onward, by the pre-
sence of a remarkable geological feature,
a series of glacial grooves cut in the chalk
rock, pointing between the midsummer
sunrise and midwinter sunset; that the
Aubrey Holes were dug when the origi-
nal bank and ditch of Stonehenge were
constructed, between 3000 and 2920
BC, and probably first held some of the
Stonehenge bluestones; that Stonehenge
was used as a cemetery from that first
moment onward for up to half a millen-
nium; and that the Stonehenge Avenue
had originally ended beside the Avon at
the site of a circle of megaliths, again
probably bluestones which were later
removed to Stonehenge itself while a
henge was built in their place.
Parker Pearson is, however, prepared
to grant certainty to a range of further
propositions. He is convinced that the
relationship between Stonehenge and
Durrington Walls confirms his theory
(with Ramilisonina) that wood symbolized
the living and stone the dead to the
Neolithic British; and, as said, he has con-
vinced a lot of colleagues. The actual pat-
tern is that wood is found at monuments
associated with feasting and occupation
and stone with those that are not. This
could fit the living-dead polarity, but also
others; and it is notable that like Richard
Bradley, Parker Pearson is far happier to
identify spiritual beings as human ancestors
than to consider that they might have
been deities or nature spirits (save for big
cosmological abstractions such as sun and
earth). He calls his projects undoubtedly
wonderful discovery of a Neolithic quarry
at Craig Rhosyfelin in Pembrokeshires
Preseli Hills the smoking gun which
finally proves that the Stonehenge blue-
stones were brought by human labor
from the Preselis, and not moved to
England by glaciation. What it has actually

proved is that bluestones of the
Stonehenge kind were quarried on the
Preselis during the Neolithic. This makes
the argument that the Stonehenge stones
were fetched from the Preselis by people
much more likely, but does not clinch it, as
Rob Ixer, one of the geologists on whom
Parker Pearson relies, has acknowledged in
a recent issue of Current Archaeology.
Indeed, the projects discovery that the
Aubrey Holes probably held bluestones
actually makes the argument more proble-
matic: it seems logical that the huge effort
of transport from Wales would fit the
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construction of the unique monument
which is the developed Stonehenge, but
why would it be expended on an unex-
ceptional burial enclosure half a millennium
before? In the same manner, Clive Ruggles,
the national expert in archaeoastronomy,
is quoted as pronouncing that Stonehenge
was definitely aligned on the movements
of both sun and moon (4849), but things
are a little more subtle than that: Ruggles
stated that the solar orientations of the
monument are certain, and the lunar
equivalents probable. Likewise, it is prob-
able but not absolutely proven that the
Aubrey Holes and those by the river
held bluestones: they are the right shape
and size, but clinching evidence is missing.
The size of the village at Durrington is
understandably emphasized in the book,
with a possible estimate of more than
four thousand inhabitants, but this does
not quite deal with the problem most
clearly identified at the Glastonbury lake
villages, that if individual houses were suc-
cessively built and abandoned, the total
population at any one time could have
been much smaller than the number of
dwellings would suggest.
This assertiveness where caution
might be wiser is accompanied by a jaun-
diced view of opponents and critics. This
Time & Mind 399
is understandable; some of Parker
Pearsons ideas met with fierce opposi-
tion when first stated, and his initial bid
for funding for the Stonehenge Riverside
Project was rejected because reviewers
thought it too speculative. His book
therefore represents a victory parade in
front of the former critics and doubters,
but it also, less inevitably, conveys a sense
that archaeologists in the mass are carp-
ing or vicious. Individually, they are better
treated, especially Geoff Wainwright and
Tim Darvill who led the rival and simul-
taneous SPACES project. The consider-
able degree of cooperation between the
two teams is emphasized, though Parker
Pearson still comprehensively rejects
Darvills theory that Stonehenge was a
healing shrine. Similarly, the Druids who
opposed the projects recovery of human
remains from the monument without a
set date for reburial are condemned as
extremists with silly ideas, but the point is
made that this description need not be
extended to all Pagans. Judgments are
also passed on former archaeologists
and antiquaries, so that the reputation
of Richard Atkinson makes a further des-
cent on its long decline, while Lieutenant-
Colonel Hawley gets a mixed assessment
and William Stukeley is warmly praised.
If the book is equivocal about archae-
ologists, it is wholehearted about archae-
ology. Indeed, it is one of the finest in
conveying the excitement and camarad-
erie of the discipline as well as its practical
technicalities. In few if any other texts on
the discipline would a reader learn such
details as the naming of the favorite tipple
of the projects first season a cocktail of
gin, Campari, and ginger beer as the
Durrington Dong, after a flint phallus.
References to fry-up meals cooked in
wheelbarrows raise a veil on the archae-
ological world, as does the insight that the
 400 Book reviews

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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tion, is a monument of national unity, sym-

ities, cosmologies, and ideas of wild
bolizing the reconciliation of the peoples of
nature, edited by Laura Feldt, Boston/
the future Wales, Scotland, and England in a
Berlin, De Gruyter, 2012, 341 pp.,
peaceful society where common cultural
$138.60 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-614-51224-0
styles and beliefs were embraced by people
of diverse ethnic origins. The relevance of
Of the 12 contributors to this edited
this vision for present-day Britain is obvious,
book on wilderness and religion, 11 are
and it is a noble and generous one, though
professors in religious studies and one is
the informed reader is left to wonder where
an anthropologist. Yet many of the con-
the other Wessex superhenges, above all
tributors refer to concepts which are
Avebury, fit in. If it is a snapshot of an
anthropological in origin, particularly that
ideological moment in Britains history, how-
of liminality (van Gennep 1909; Turner
ever, so it is one of a moment in the knowl-
1977). With the exception of the chapter
edge of Stonehenge. Archaeological
written by the only anthropologist,
discovery waits for nobody, and a new
Morten Axel Peterson, the book does
Anglo-German project is already coming
not have much explicit treatment of
up with discoveries in the Stonehenge area
material cultural remains, let alone the
based on ground survey techniques which
relationship between these remains and
in turn make us reconsider traditional beliefs
what is conceived as wilderness. At first
about the monument. The story of the
glance then, archaeologists and anthro-
Riverside Project is, however, so interesting
pologists who are inquisitive about how
in itself, and has contributed so much to data
to identify wilderness on the landscape
and ideas, that it is good to have it so well,
through material culture or landscape
and accessibly, told.
features may feel disappointed. But
although these things are not treated
References explicitly, the contributors present a
Flannery, Kent. 1972. The Origins of the Village as number of thought-provoking ideas
a Settlement Type in Mesoamerica and the
Near East. In Man, Settlement and Urbanism,
about wilderness, some of which archae-
edited by Peter Ucko, Ruth Tringham and G. ologists may be able to incorporate into
Dimbleby, 2353. London, Duckworth. their interpretations.