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Cairn Wnda1
“The first truth is that humans dwell in a reality that is both material and ideal; that is, humans live in a physical world, but a physical world that they comprehend only through their own constructed models [...] the second is that humans make their own history, but they do so under circumstances transmitted from the past”
-Elizabeth Brumfiel, 20032
Abstract
Megalith sites in the British Isles materially express the entanglement of Neolithic people and their environment in the formation of ‘first places.’ The nature of these sites forces us to challenge human/nature dualisms, revealing the agencies of landscapes that unfold over vast timescales incomprehensible to (and unrecognized by) human minds. Much as forces such as erosion, forest growth, and tectonic plate activity shape landscapes, landscapes also become through humans – who act as inseparable conduits in landscapes’ perpetual process of emergence. Approaching landscapes through post-humanist lenses3 such as phenomenology and new materialism(s) force us to reconsider our perception and understanding of the past, freeing our minds of problematic and obfuscating social constructs of the modern west which include hierarchical social arrangement, individualism, linear progressive time, and dualist ontologies. Critical study of the impressions ancients left on landscapes doubly allows us to see the impressions landscapes left on ancients, which remain in our cultural understandings of humanity’s role in ecology to this day. Landscape architecture’s location at the interdisciplinary intersection of art, science, and design uniquely poises the discipline to tackle existential threats to the harmony of earth’s delicate systems. Social inequalities and environmental degradation are inextricably derived from what we perceive as public space and how we design/use it. Humans transform landscapes with everything they do; however, landscape design – as a tradition stretching back to the first megaliths – is the first and most intentional way humans have learned to modulate and understand how landscape was, is, and could be.
Anthropological Theory and Possible Pasts
Anthropology is unique within academia in that it is currently grappling with its crisis: a discipline founded on the premise that categorization of societies, artifacts, exchange, and eras is realizing that categorization itself is yet another underlying assumption that ‘comes between’ academics and truer understandings of reality. The grappling of physical anthropology (archaeology) poses questions about the traces humans leave upon landscapes to uncover ‘possible pasts,’ which have direct implications for lived realities today. Understanding and applying archaeological theory to landscape is the first critical step in becoming aware of how landscape manifests itself in our awareness of it – in other words – how perspective, self, and identity structure our perception of reality, a distinct phenomena from reality itself, a nuance humanity is only recently coming to comprehend.4 “Our” (modern, western) perception and understanding of reality is imperfect yet (fortunately) malleable. Without understanding how we come to understand the past, we cannot begin to understand how we find ourselves in and about landscape as we understand it today. Our lack of understanding precipitates the manifold impending crises we presently face. Understanding the reciprocal relationship between history and ontology is essential in uncovering where we went wrong, and acting presently to change the way things are going.
Like design, archaeology is a political act that insists the past is not divorced from the present and indeed is inseparable from our future.5 Yet the past most look to is not historicity 1 but rather historicity 2:6 thus, to understand how the past flows into the present, anthropologists must investigate both “the ways in which humans have actually lived in the past and in the ways history is constructed and deployed in contemporary social contexts,”7 in essence, ‘history’ is socially constructed in accordance with social or political agendas, traditionally in the maintenance of power structures. With the rise of conflict and feminist theories challenging traditional histories, it is unsurprising that there emerges a plurality of interpretations of the same past.8 One notable instance where archaeology disrupts ‘master narratives’ is evident in undermining western narratives of progress.9
Our inability to possess singular understandings of megaliths such as Stonehenge evidences a much deeper philosophical problem representing “our inability to escape imposing our own ontological assumptions [onto sites].”10 Archaeologists argue that the act of interpreting evidence necessarily entails the projection of our ontology into the past, reifying the ostensible truth of that ontological understanding, justifying extant power structures, and naturalizing divisive and destructive modern assumptions about the nature of reality and being. Megalithic landscapes are eternal battlegrounds of ideology – the narratives we construct ‘about’ them serve as a mirror, revealing how we in the present believe the world was, is, and should be. Megalithic sites, “well-worn” by the collective imagining of humankind, possess a near-impenetrable mythos-patina that preventing us from perceiving them clearly.
In the case of Stonehenge, Harris & Crellin use object itinerary to overcome ontological assumptions and describe the entanglement of ancient peoples and the stone with which they worked to create megalithic monuments. Object itineraries operate under ontological approaches that “don’t ask what a site means, or represents, but rather what it is, or what it does.”11 By emphasizing the agency of matter and de-emphasizing the uniqueness of humans, the authors offer a unique way of imagining that opens manifold avenues for our understanding and storytelling of human-landscape entanglement both of possible pasts and possible futures.12
Harris & Crellin argue that with [performative] new materialism, “the dualism between concept and thing, central to Western thought, is collapsed.”13 Once the boundaries between humans and their surrounding landscapes are eroded, we begin to see how the world ‘sees us’ in its own terms. Transcending our limited human timescale reveals the remarkable fluidity of all things14 – including stone and earth, ocean-beds, mountain ranges, and tectonic plates themselves. We encounter the stone and earth beneath our feet as solid in our lifetimes, but on a longer timescale, one would ‘see’ (or perhaps ‘feel’) their surfaces erode and slough-off before one’s eyes, building up soil alongside flora and fauna’s continual growth and death, all carved by water’s incessant rushing. Even species characteristics would emerge before one’s eyes, diverging and responding to the conditions in which each organism finds itself. No one individual unit carries so much weight; all species are caught in much longer ‘flows’ of action and interaction with inertia that no single actor can singlehandedly shift.15
On this timescale, landscapes are not simply mutable material awaiting human intent: they possess their own agential capacities wherein humans are but minute and temporary parasites. Stonehenge was significant to humans long before they began modifying the landscape there, due to natural geological features such as surrounding ridges and glacial fissures that align on midwinter sunsets.16 Through these synchronicities, the landscape “spoke” to these ancient peoples, “summoning” or “inviting” them to co-transform this space into a place. Stonehenge’s construction unfolded in phases over 500 years, prompting some archaeologists to speculate the existence of a stable hierarchical power structure required to marshal materials and labor towards these ends for such a lengthy period, while others argue that the site’s traces of interment practices imply significant ancestor veneration.17 However, Harris & Crellin argue that both interpretations privilege human agency and fail to acknowledge the role materiality played in the becoming of the assemblage of standing stones, conceptualized as a novel “folding” of the landscape’s fabric.18 Emphasizing the materiality of stone, the authors identify three types of stone that played a role in the creation of the site: distant bluestones moved from 140 miles away, sarsen stones moved from the nearby Avebury plains, and the soft chalk found beneath the site of Stonehenge itself. They note that transporting the more distant stones “would have left physical trails across the landscape, stretching out behind the stones as they moved.”19
Chalk, the most local of the stones, is often neglected by narratives of the site emphasizing the human action of shifting stones, despite being the literal foundation of the site’s unfolding. The authors emphasize the material properties of chalk – its ‘chalkiness’ – its propensity to coat that which it encounters.20 Interestingly, ‘dusty-coating’ is a passive property of chalk – surely it was also inhaled and came to rest in the lungs, entailing the potential harm of doing so. So too must have the transportation, shifting, and working of these stones left impressions upon the bodies of the humans with which they were entrained. Bodies, whether human or nonhuman, bear the traces of that with which they become entrained. Likewise, sarsen-stone took on the bodily properties of wood in the working of trilithons (one horizontal stone resting atop two vertical stones), with interlocking joints preventing the gradual slide of the top horizontal stone - this ball-and-mortice technique was originally developed in the context of woodworking.21 Oddly, treating stone (slow to disintegrate) as wood (quick to disintegrate) permitted that stone to stand long after it would ordinarily have toppled, and far longer than the wood posts and structures that were once part of the site.22 Without fluidity between these bodies and their material properties, Stonehenge would never have emerged as we know it today. This fluidity of form may have required humans as a conduit, but megalith stones (and indeed all stones) continually act upon each other in flows that unfold without human knowledge, intent, or action, opening a vast multitude of entailed relationships and entrainments - long after humans are gone, Stonehenge will continue to shift and settle, and will ultimately erode into sediment and be washed through tributaries into the ocean.23
[Figure 1 – Stonehenge] 24
Brück addresses ancient conceptions of self through the lens of conflict theory, positing that archaeologists’ interpretations of grave goods in the European Bronze Age have traditionally assumed early evidence of object exchange as inseparable from hierarchical systems of proto-capitalism.25 Brück, however, argues that this interpretation is a simplistic projection of our present ontology into the past.26 Brück’s investigation of these assumptions as radical implications for not solely for how we think of social organization, but our very conception of self.27 For example, archaeologists typically interpret extravagant grave goods found in men’s graves as evidence of chieftainship, and extravagant grave goods found in women’s graves as evidence they were a prized tribute bride from a suppliant neighboring tribe – sound familiar? When modern assumptions creep into historical interpretations, social constructs like gender roles are portrayed as timeless and unchanging universal human characteristics, obfuscating our capacity for change in our present situation. Likewise, rare grave goods originating far from the burial site are considered evidence of a system in which exotic valuables were bought and sold – Brück argues we should suspect bias when the ancient world ostensibly falls so neatly into our own handy categories,28 pointing out that “it is the distanced, ‘objectified’ and inanimate character of things that allows them to be freely bought and sold,”29 and arguing that this ontological understanding of object-hood is a modern social construct, not an innate characteristic of human perception. Brück challenges capitalist master narratives by proposing that neolithic evidence of exchange was a manifestation of the cultural phenomenon of gift-giving, ubiquitous through every human society.30
Brück argues that unlike alienable objects of consumption, objects in a ‘gift exchange economy’ are inalienable and are recognized as agential in the relational constituency of exchanging fractal ‘selves.’31 Implications for object-hood are necessarily implications for subject-hood, identity, and embodiment – in gift-exchange societies, people regard themselves not as “bounded individuals” but rather as constituted primarily through their relationships with others, relationships that are cemented with gift-giving.32 This is equally evident in ancients’ shifting mortuary rituals from this area and period – cremation overtook inhumation as the primary way of disposing of the deceased, whose ashes and shards of bone were dispersed among mourners. For Bronze-age Britons, the deceased both materially and spiritually became a part of their bereaved, indicating that they possessed a conception of personhood as “fluid, composite, and materially embedded.”33
This tradition has survived today: often, after one’s death, loved ones will keep some cherished object (if not fragments of bone) as material reminders of the deceased: in this way, ancient people possessed a different but not discontinuous way of being in the world from our own modern western perspective. Brück’s analysis of ancient ‘selves’ sheds light on how our contemporary concept of ‘selves’ as bounded entities somehow distinct from their surroundings is the consequence of individualistic understandings (rather than the ancients’ relational understandings) of reality that perpetuate humanity’s current destructive evolutionary cycle. Brück’s work reveals that the liminal space between ‘possible pasts’ is in fact a battleground of historical narratives that may either challenge or reinforce the status quo today: in this way, history is never apolitical.
[Figure 2 - Barclodiad y Gawres]34-Elizabeth Brumfiel, 20032
Abstract
Megalith sites in the British Isles materially express the entanglement of Neolithic people and their environment in the formation of ‘first places.’ The nature of these sites forces us to challenge human/nature dualisms, revealing the agencies of landscapes that unfold over vast timescales incomprehensible to (and unrecognized by) human minds. Much as forces such as erosion, forest growth, and tectonic plate activity shape landscapes, landscapes also become through humans – who act as inseparable conduits in landscapes’ perpetual process of emergence. Approaching landscapes through post-humanist lenses3 such as phenomenology and new materialism(s) force us to reconsider our perception and understanding of the past, freeing our minds of problematic and obfuscating social constructs of the modern west which include hierarchical social arrangement, individualism, linear progressive time, and dualist ontologies. Critical study of the impressions ancients left on landscapes doubly allows us to see the impressions landscapes left on ancients, which remain in our cultural understandings of humanity’s role in ecology to this day. Landscape architecture’s location at the interdisciplinary intersection of art, science, and design uniquely poises the discipline to tackle existential threats to the harmony of earth’s delicate systems. Social inequalities and environmental degradation are inextricably derived from what we perceive as public space and how we design/use it. Humans transform landscapes with everything they do; however, landscape design – as a tradition stretching back to the first megaliths – is the first and most intentional way humans have learned to modulate and understand how landscape was, is, and could be.
Anthropological Theory and Possible Pasts
Anthropology is unique within academia in that it is currently grappling with its crisis: a discipline founded on the premise that categorization of societies, artifacts, exchange, and eras is realizing that categorization itself is yet another underlying assumption that ‘comes between’ academics and truer understandings of reality. The grappling of physical anthropology (archaeology) poses questions about the traces humans leave upon landscapes to uncover ‘possible pasts,’ which have direct implications for lived realities today. Understanding and applying archaeological theory to landscape is the first critical step in becoming aware of how landscape manifests itself in our awareness of it – in other words – how perspective, self, and identity structure our perception of reality, a distinct phenomena from reality itself, a nuance humanity is only recently coming to comprehend.4 “Our” (modern, western) perception and understanding of reality is imperfect yet (fortunately) malleable. Without understanding how we come to understand the past, we cannot begin to understand how we find ourselves in and about landscape as we understand it today. Our lack of understanding precipitates the manifold impending crises we presently face. Understanding the reciprocal relationship between history and ontology is essential in uncovering where we went wrong, and acting presently to change the way things are going.
Like design, archaeology is a political act that insists the past is not divorced from the present and indeed is inseparable from our future.5 Yet the past most look to is not historicity 1 but rather historicity 2:6 thus, to understand how the past flows into the present, anthropologists must investigate both “the ways in which humans have actually lived in the past and in the ways history is constructed and deployed in contemporary social contexts,”7 in essence, ‘history’ is socially constructed in accordance with social or political agendas, traditionally in the maintenance of power structures. With the rise of conflict and feminist theories challenging traditional histories, it is unsurprising that there emerges a plurality of interpretations of the same past.8 One notable instance where archaeology disrupts ‘master narratives’ is evident in undermining western narratives of progress.9
Our inability to possess singular understandings of megaliths such as Stonehenge evidences a much deeper philosophical problem representing “our inability to escape imposing our own ontological assumptions [onto sites].”10 Archaeologists argue that the act of interpreting evidence necessarily entails the projection of our ontology into the past, reifying the ostensible truth of that ontological understanding, justifying extant power structures, and naturalizing divisive and destructive modern assumptions about the nature of reality and being. Megalithic landscapes are eternal battlegrounds of ideology – the narratives we construct ‘about’ them serve as a mirror, revealing how we in the present believe the world was, is, and should be. Megalithic sites, “well-worn” by the collective imagining of humankind, possess a near-impenetrable mythos-patina that preventing us from perceiving them clearly.
In the case of Stonehenge, Harris & Crellin use object itinerary to overcome ontological assumptions and describe the entanglement of ancient peoples and the stone with which they worked to create megalithic monuments. Object itineraries operate under ontological approaches that “don’t ask what a site means, or represents, but rather what it is, or what it does.”11 By emphasizing the agency of matter and de-emphasizing the uniqueness of humans, the authors offer a unique way of imagining that opens manifold avenues for our understanding and storytelling of human-landscape entanglement both of possible pasts and possible futures.12
Harris & Crellin argue that with [performative] new materialism, “the dualism between concept and thing, central to Western thought, is collapsed.”13 Once the boundaries between humans and their surrounding landscapes are eroded, we begin to see how the world ‘sees us’ in its own terms. Transcending our limited human timescale reveals the remarkable fluidity of all things14 – including stone and earth, ocean-beds, mountain ranges, and tectonic plates themselves. We encounter the stone and earth beneath our feet as solid in our lifetimes, but on a longer timescale, one would ‘see’ (or perhaps ‘feel’) their surfaces erode and slough-off before one’s eyes, building up soil alongside flora and fauna’s continual growth and death, all carved by water’s incessant rushing. Even species characteristics would emerge before one’s eyes, diverging and responding to the conditions in which each organism finds itself. No one individual unit carries so much weight; all species are caught in much longer ‘flows’ of action and interaction with inertia that no single actor can singlehandedly shift.15
On this timescale, landscapes are not simply mutable material awaiting human intent: they possess their own agential capacities wherein humans are but minute and temporary parasites. Stonehenge was significant to humans long before they began modifying the landscape there, due to natural geological features such as surrounding ridges and glacial fissures that align on midwinter sunsets.16 Through these synchronicities, the landscape “spoke” to these ancient peoples, “summoning” or “inviting” them to co-transform this space into a place. Stonehenge’s construction unfolded in phases over 500 years, prompting some archaeologists to speculate the existence of a stable hierarchical power structure required to marshal materials and labor towards these ends for such a lengthy period, while others argue that the site’s traces of interment practices imply significant ancestor veneration.17 However, Harris & Crellin argue that both interpretations privilege human agency and fail to acknowledge the role materiality played in the becoming of the assemblage of standing stones, conceptualized as a novel “folding” of the landscape’s fabric.18 Emphasizing the materiality of stone, the authors identify three types of stone that played a role in the creation of the site: distant bluestones moved from 140 miles away, sarsen stones moved from the nearby Avebury plains, and the soft chalk found beneath the site of Stonehenge itself. They note that transporting the more distant stones “would have left physical trails across the landscape, stretching out behind the stones as they moved.”19
Chalk, the most local of the stones, is often neglected by narratives of the site emphasizing the human action of shifting stones, despite being the literal foundation of the site’s unfolding. The authors emphasize the material properties of chalk – its ‘chalkiness’ – its propensity to coat that which it encounters.20 Interestingly, ‘dusty-coating’ is a passive property of chalk – surely it was also inhaled and came to rest in the lungs, entailing the potential harm of doing so. So too must have the transportation, shifting, and working of these stones left impressions upon the bodies of the humans with which they were entrained. Bodies, whether human or nonhuman, bear the traces of that with which they become entrained. Likewise, sarsen-stone took on the bodily properties of wood in the working of trilithons (one horizontal stone resting atop two vertical stones), with interlocking joints preventing the gradual slide of the top horizontal stone - this ball-and-mortice technique was originally developed in the context of woodworking.21 Oddly, treating stone (slow to disintegrate) as wood (quick to disintegrate) permitted that stone to stand long after it would ordinarily have toppled, and far longer than the wood posts and structures that were once part of the site.22 Without fluidity between these bodies and their material properties, Stonehenge would never have emerged as we know it today. This fluidity of form may have required humans as a conduit, but megalith stones (and indeed all stones) continually act upon each other in flows that unfold without human knowledge, intent, or action, opening a vast multitude of entailed relationships and entrainments - long after humans are gone, Stonehenge will continue to shift and settle, and will ultimately erode into sediment and be washed through tributaries into the ocean.23
[Figure 1 – Stonehenge] 24
Brück addresses ancient conceptions of self through the lens of conflict theory, positing that archaeologists’ interpretations of grave goods in the European Bronze Age have traditionally assumed early evidence of object exchange as inseparable from hierarchical systems of proto-capitalism.25 Brück, however, argues that this interpretation is a simplistic projection of our present ontology into the past.26 Brück’s investigation of these assumptions as radical implications for not solely for how we think of social organization, but our very conception of self.27 For example, archaeologists typically interpret extravagant grave goods found in men’s graves as evidence of chieftainship, and extravagant grave goods found in women’s graves as evidence they were a prized tribute bride from a suppliant neighboring tribe – sound familiar? When modern assumptions creep into historical interpretations, social constructs like gender roles are portrayed as timeless and unchanging universal human characteristics, obfuscating our capacity for change in our present situation. Likewise, rare grave goods originating far from the burial site are considered evidence of a system in which exotic valuables were bought and sold – Brück argues we should suspect bias when the ancient world ostensibly falls so neatly into our own handy categories,28 pointing out that “it is the distanced, ‘objectified’ and inanimate character of things that allows them to be freely bought and sold,”29 and arguing that this ontological understanding of object-hood is a modern social construct, not an innate characteristic of human perception. Brück challenges capitalist master narratives by proposing that neolithic evidence of exchange was a manifestation of the cultural phenomenon of gift-giving, ubiquitous through every human society.30
Brück argues that unlike alienable objects of consumption, objects in a ‘gift exchange economy’ are inalienable and are recognized as agential in the relational constituency of exchanging fractal ‘selves.’31 Implications for object-hood are necessarily implications for subject-hood, identity, and embodiment – in gift-exchange societies, people regard themselves not as “bounded individuals” but rather as constituted primarily through their relationships with others, relationships that are cemented with gift-giving.32 This is equally evident in ancients’ shifting mortuary rituals from this area and period – cremation overtook inhumation as the primary way of disposing of the deceased, whose ashes and shards of bone were dispersed among mourners. For Bronze-age Britons, the deceased both materially and spiritually became a part of their bereaved, indicating that they possessed a conception of personhood as “fluid, composite, and materially embedded.”33
This tradition has survived today: often, after one’s death, loved ones will keep some cherished object (if not fragments of bone) as material reminders of the deceased: in this way, ancient people possessed a different but not discontinuous way of being in the world from our own modern western perspective. Brück’s analysis of ancient ‘selves’ sheds light on how our contemporary concept of ‘selves’ as bounded entities somehow distinct from their surroundings is the consequence of individualistic understandings (rather than the ancients’ relational understandings) of reality that perpetuate humanity’s current destructive evolutionary cycle. Brück’s work reveals that the liminal space between ‘possible pasts’ is in fact a battleground of historical narratives that may either challenge or reinforce the status quo today: in this way, history is never apolitical.
New materialist approaches such as these35 have emerged as the prevailing philosophical trend in physical anthropology today, yielding concepts such as object itinerary (tracing objects’ origins and resting-places) and entrained action (getting caught up in flows of matter and energy), two methods to overcome some of the assumptions we bring to the table due to our relatively ‘weak’ temporal sense.36 Post-humanist theory argues that the past/present/future is a continuum within which we find ourselves at given moments: time is not discontinuous; only our perception of it.
Entrainment
Entrainment can be thought of as ‘getting caught-up in flows of matter and energy,’ as ‘inertia,’ or ‘the way things are headed,’37 a conception Bauer & Kosiba use to problematize our modern conception of agency as belonging to human subjects alone.38 To confront our dualistic understanding of agency, the authors consider the example of a house, which serves as a concrete reification of norms surrounding family structure and the ways in which life unfolds, segmented by the physical ’programming’ of space -- in this way, designed spaces possesses an agency over those who occupy them.39 Consider the way in which western children typically have bedrooms that they can shut their parents out of - both a result and reification of our society’s construction of individualism. Entrainment goes beyond object-oriented ontology (OOO) - where material things are active participants in the creation of a social order - further arguing that human/nonhuman assemblages produce emergent and self-perpetuating outcomes that are "directional” and derived from the interaction of specific material properties of actants and energy exchanges of systems, better explained by ’sciences’ such as ecology, biology, geology, chemistry and physics than by the human/social concept of agency as it applies to the human concepts of subjects or objects alone.40 OOO might argue that megaliths and the materials from which they are composed possess an agency41 as they become entrained in important facets of human social reproduction, which are in turn reciprocally entrained in the creation and maintenance of megalith sites.42 Yet entrainment perspectives argue that this presents an incomplete understanding of materiality because it tends to superficially focus on the social importance of objects, which implies that things only matter in terms of how they entangle with humans,43 which is theoretically unsatisfactory because it recenters human intent as the object of analysis, neglects the very substance of the 'thing’ in question, and fails to escape our anthropomorphizing tendencies.
Rather, to better escape anthropomorphizing tendencies, Bauer & Kosiba argue that we should focus on the substance of materials themselves, or how the properties of things enable them to do certain things44 (emphasis mine). OOO and new materialisms possess a tendency to slip back into human terms because they operate under relational ontologies45 when they should also consider the physical properties of the things in question – Bauer & Kosiba argue that the “the context and substance of materials together contribute to how they act when they enter into situated relationships with other things and people.”46
To demonstrate their ‘entrainment’ approach, Bauer & Kosiba identify ways in which Iron Age South Indians modified their rolling landscapes with rock-edged reservoir pools to catch rainfall, earthwork terracing to prevent soil erosion to create conditions conducive for agriculture and pastoralism, and stone megaliths offering a visual anchor and a sense of place.47 They argue that “agriculturalists and pastoralists do not make crops or livestock,”48 rather, they encourage conditions which allow or promote the development of recursive ‘energy feedback’ growth cycles. In the South Indian Iron Age, social conditions evidenced in landscape design were entrained within natural processes such as rainfall, soil movement, and nutrient cycles, and were always in flux, requiring constant renegotiation.49 Furthermore, domesticated animals themselves contributed to the geomorphology of the landscape - animal behavior entangled with natural erosional processes and necessitated cascading human design interventions to stabilize these conditions.50 Broadening considerations of agency reveal that even soil is agential – the ground upon which we stand is alive and moving.51 The forms into which landscapes manifest cannot solely be attributed to human actions, or vegetative tendencies, or animal behaviors, or natural processes; rather, the complex intertwining of a near-infinite array of entrained variables all co-created the landscapes we experience today. Privileging one explanation (such as human intention) above others necessarily impoverishes the strength of the overall site description and analysis, the ‘truth’ of what unfolded within a place.52
Object Itinerary
Working in a similar vein, Joyce seeks to refine anthropology’s concept of object biographies into object itineraries to avoid anthropomorphizing the “flows” or “trajectories” of objects by personifying them in the linguistic and stylistic tropes of human biographies. In other words, our tendencies to put things in human terms may offer us pleasing resolutions such as a beginning (birth), middle (life), and end (death), but in doing so fail to grasp the true nature of object-hood.53 Joyce’s reframing of biographies into itineraries maintains the schema of a temporally extended ‘journey’ or ‘trip,’ a path, enabling us to trace “the lines along which”54 objects and bodies travel. Joyce takes flows of entrainment and parses them into discrete, traceable lines, arguing that maintaining our tendency to discrete-ize ‘bodies’ of matter that remain cohesive and ‘travel together’ through space and time is helpful in creating object itineraries - losing this delineation (the drawing of boundaries ‘between’ things) may be a productive philosophical thought experiment, but with a loss of distinction necessarily follows a loss of definition in our ability to tell the stories of things. Parsing objects from surrounding objects allows us to distinguish a “meshwork” or “matrix” of interconnected nodes from otherwise homogenous matter.55
The intellectual failings of the biographical approach’s propensity to describe and understand object-bodies in the realm of human bodies is particularly evident in the question of when an object ceases to be a ‘social object’56 and becomes an ‘archaeological object.57&58 Biographical approaches erroneously account for archaeological objects as an “afterlife” of social objects.59 Joyce argues that objects never die - objects in museums are still living social objects that inform our interpretation and understanding of the past - still active participants in the construction of historical narratives and present social conditions. Museums play a crucial role in constructing public narratives of the past, but are often uncritically anthropocentric in doing so, consistently placing value in objects solely in their relation to the human activities that produced them while denying the ways in which they continue to exert agency when presented as evidence supporting a narrative.60
The same is increasingly argued not only of “mobile things,” but also of entire archaeological sites and hyperobjects such as landscapes,61 particularly in questions of conservation and preservation. Can we honestly believe that any landscape remains somehow an unchanging relic of the past, rather than an active participant in the construction of contemporary social conditions, particularly when the timescales in which landscape processes unfold are so vast they elude human comprehension? Which landscapes do we venerate and attempt to ‘freeze in time?’ Which landscapes do we deny historic importance and develop over? Venerated ‘historic landscapes’ actively reify highly nuanced and often conflicting ‘claims’ to past and present landscapes, both ‘positively’ in the case of visibilizing and supporting indigenous claims to life and land, or ‘negatively’ in the construction of nationalist ‘golden age’ narratives – i.e., which places and parts of “our” past matter enough to preserve? Whose past matters, and consequently, who has legitimate claim to specific landscapes?
Object itineraries emphasize origins62 and destinations, with the understanding that no destination is truly final, indeed, all things are always in motion, while some have simply found ‘resting places’ wherein their movement has temporarily slowed.63 Furthermore, these ‘resting-places’ both define and are defined by the properties and relationships of objects which come to rest within them.64 Coupling conceptions of object itineraries with performative new materialist approaches and ancient ontological understandings leads us to a conception of landscape-human assemblages wherein landscapes become our tools, our shelters, our pathways, our sustenance: landscapes both become us, and become through us, in an unending iteration of forms derived from and by the same materials which at certain times aggregate into and disaggregate out of distinct bodies we call objects and our ‘selves.’ We may perceive landscapes as occupying ‘resting points,’ but we should understand that they exist in a prolonged state of flow, or ‘creep.’
No landscape is a historical landscape just as no landscape is a contemporary landscape – all landscapes always occupy a superposition between these pasts, presents, and futures. Ancient sites such as the megaliths are not ancient at all, they are as contemporary as we ourselves, agential in their offering of a set of limitations and possibilities structuring reality and reality-narratives today.
Our scientific, objectivist approach to history, which assumes ‘the way things are now’ are ‘the way they have always been,’ prevents us from asking questions about subjective phenomena such as meaning and aesthetics and clouds a clear view of the past. Shedding modern lenses allows us to extrapolate facets of ancients’ understandings of themselves as relationally construed and materially embedded within landscapes. Ancient ways of understanding can teach us about landscapes and our relationships to each other and the world around us today – returning agency to ancients and landscapes, rather than flattening their realities and understandings into imposed historical narratives. Remnants of megalithic sites can serve as ‘elders’ offering a pathway towards how we may come back into harmony with the world by honestly understanding our pasts.
[Figure 3 – Maen y Bardd]65
Megalith Architecture as Human-Landscape Entrainment
Having outlined object itinerary and entrainment, we turn now to megalithic landscapes which embody past ontologies. Fowler & Cummings investigate a recurrent phenomenon related to megalithic sites in regions surrounding the North Irish Sea – arguing it’s no coincidence that a significant majority66 of these sites are located on rocky coastal outcroppings such that the sea can be seen from the megalithic structure (and importantly, though not discussed in the article, the megalith can be seen from the sea).67 The authors provide descriptions of horizonal view-fields of several sites, a phenomenological consideration of landscape critical in understanding why these megaliths came to be built within these sites “between the mountains and the sea.”68 Phenomenology takes seriously the physical characteristics of sites as they manifest in human awareness through the body’s specific perceptual apparatuses, resulting in phenomena such as ’perception-horizons.’
Fowler & Cummings argue that careful human intent was only part of the equation in determining the location of these sites – furthermore, human intent was summoned to and restricted by extant landscape materials and features, i.e., rocky outcroppings overlooking the sea – a prime example of the agential capacities of landscape in structuring human action.69 In addition to considering the ways in which these sites are perceived within their landscape contexts/surroundings, they consider the ways in which the materials used to construct these coastal megaliths were intentionally drawn from and used to mimic the surrounding environs.70 Working with this material palette, ancients became entrained in their landscape on its own terms, in its own language, in a heightening-of-the-essence of these liminal spaces.71 Megalithic landscapes are as much a product of human action as they are eons of material processes and preconditions that ‘called out to’ or ‘summoned’ human intent upon them. These landscapes possessed plural possible futures only attainable in concert with humans, a realized future wherein highly novel forms, experiences, and selves emerged.
Archaeologists rely as much upon the detritus of human activity as they do sites themselves: refuse tells a story of where activities such as tool production, food consumption, and waste deposition occurred, revealing the ‘programming’ of certain spaces within landscapes, and prompting considerations of why certain activities may have unfolded in some spaces but not others. Interestingly, there is scant evidence of food consumption near these megalithic sites, despite their proximity to coastlines offering an abundance of gustatory options.72 Furthermore, neighboring settlement sites - where those who created these sites are presumed to have dwelled - bear no evidence that these megalith builders consumed ‘sea food’ at all, possibly due to the transformative death rituals that unfolded within coastal megalithic sites.73 Thus, landscape-human assemblages seem to ‘determine’ or demarcate certain places as ‘more or less’ appropriate for certain human-landscape interactions such as production, consumption, deposition, reproduction, and modulation.
Fowler & Cummings investigate what the substances used to construct these monuments do, an exercise which Gamble et al. argue is central to proper new materialist inquiry.74 Among the stones used, quartz – found in high frequency in the portal stones and inner chambers of many coastal megaliths – likely held profound associations for the architects of these sites.75 Quartz has translucent qualities, glistens in sunlight or firelight, and can in certain conditions take on the properties of water, creating “a similarity of effect between parts of the megalithic complex and the reflective surface of the sea.”76 Fowler & Cummings argue that the intentional interworking of naturally occurring quartz deposits into the structure of these sites brings the sea closer to the stone, and the stone closer to the sea, embodying the aesthetic properties and ever-shifting qualities of naturally occurring coastlines.77
[Figure 4 – Cup-Engravings at High Banks] 78
With regard to High Banks, Dumfries, and Galloway, natural recesses in stone slabs jutting from the ground in these sites have been carved-into, exploiting the water-retaining properties of these concavities for functional and visual effect, capturing rainwater, creating ripples in the rock visually imitating ripples in the surface of water, and ultimately ‘bringing the water closer to the stone.’79 The ontological erasure of the boundaries between fixed and fluid, stone and water, manifested in material and aesthetic ‘mirrors’ anchoring the use of megaliths as sites of transformation from life to death – many megaliths are tombs, containing human remains.80 Depositing bodies near waterways and coastlines was significant in the physical (decomposition, decay) and spiritual (swept out into the ‘next life’) transformation of human bodies back into the landscapes from which they emerged.81 Like Brück’s findings of Bronze-Age Britons, the Neolithic Welsh likely understood their ‘selves’ as extending beyond the boundaries of their bodies and encapsulating/entangling with the material assemblages about them.82 Alongside the use of liminal materials (such as quartz and wavy water-worn stone), the megaliths’ location in liminal spaces - “somewhere in-between” rocky outcroppings and the sea - may have mirrored ancients’ understanding of the liminal space transgressed in the passage between life (solidity, stone) and death (fluidity, water).83 Indeed, Brück argues that for ancient peoples, “death – like other rites of passage – was considered not an end, but a point of transformation from one state to another.”84
[Figure 5 – Entoptic Phenomena Engraved in Stones at Newgrange]85
Fowler & Cummings liken the experience of entering these megaliths to submerging oneself underwater,86 suggesting that the experience of ‘plunging’ underwater was intentionally cultivated through acoustic properties, engravings of entoptic phenomena,87 and shifting of low lighting deep in the bellies of earthly cavities, indicating the possibility that these spaces were designed for use in ritual trance activities.88 The altered states of consciousness integral to trance are thought to have been induced by the ritual use of hallucinogens, introducing an entrained flow guided not only by humans, stones, and water, but also naturally occurring local entheogens such as psilocybin-containing mushrooms.89 Early human experiences of altered states of consciousness, alongside the landscapes within which they unfolded, likely played a role in establishing and maintaining ancient relational ontologies.90
Indeed, certain types of stone, such as quartz, may have been prized for their aesthetic qualities such as translucency, clarity, and crystalline structure, all properties which lend themselves to enhanced visual transformation in altered states of consciousness.91 This conjecture prompts a consideration of how humans afford value to substances differentially based on their aesthetic and material properties – a heirophany of substance – or as Durkheim might put it, the division between ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’ materials. Thus, megaliths presented an overlapping array of liminal spaces and materials92 which heightened the transformative qualities of altered states of consciousness in conjunction with the physical transformation of bodies between states of life and death. The design implications of working alongside materials and sites to create experiential conditions in accordance with states of mind (i.e. hallucination) presents extraordinary possibilities informing the design of spiritual architecture and landscapes in which increasingly mainstream psychedelic-assisted therapy93 occurs.
[Figure 6 - Carreg Samson]94
Being in Landscape
Semantics is critical in epistemological queries, as language structures our understanding of reality: consider the collectively held understanding, ‘being about something.’ ‘About’ as a preposition is ‘on the subject of,’ while when used as an adverb, it is closer to ‘around,’ implying a spatial relationship. Should a paper be ‘about’ something, it would surround or approach that thing, but to confuse the paper with the thing itself would be an error. Though some thing may be the subject of the paper, so too is that thing subject to the paper: every subject is constituted by that which is ‘about’ it.
Converging these meanings – wherein to be proximate to something is to be ‘subject’ to it – spatializes our conception of knowledge into a branching tree, with each branch embodying a realm of knowledge’s purview, ever-branching outwards, with ever-finer shoots diverging and branching-off in kind from ever-more-central shoots, peripherally overlapping and intertwining with other realms’ roots and branches. Visualizations such as these allow us to consider lacunae, or gaps, in our understandings of the world, located between or surrounded by other ways of knowing, but not yet falling within their boundaries; as well as ‘contested areas’ where converging realms of knowledge vie for occupation of the same knowledge-space.95
What this is ‘about,’ is the yawning lacuna in our understanding of reality in the tree of knowledge caused by the knurl of western science - the application of new materialist and phenomenological considerations to our interpretation of ancient human-landscape entanglement96 opens our minds to ancient ways of seeing and understanding the past-present-future continuum. We have mathematicalized our perception of space and time into predictable sequences, resulting in our perceptual delusion of time’s linearity.97 However, many cultural traditions possess understandings of time as circular or spherical – wherein all possibilities overlap and coexist simultaneously in infinitely smooth one-sided superpositions. Regardless, one’s perception of space and time are highly socially conditioned, yielding vastly different philosophical interpretations about the meaning of reality and humankind’s place within it.
Two new materialist conceptions, object itinerary and entrainment, prompt us to visualize extra-dimensional being, wherein every object does not (truly) rest only where we perceive it (as a point in space), but rather rests in every point it has ever occupied, however lengthy or brief, ‘stretching back’ to when it was itself hewn or extracted from its constituent material, just as that constituent material in kind occupies all points along its ‘path’ until it is inseparable from its constituents, back to the very stardust flung from the beginning of this universe – but one of infinitely many matrices entrained in the ‘meshwork’ of flows revealed upon relinquishing our sense of the discrete nature of things. This view requires us to surrender much of our human understanding of reality – a challenging prospect indeed – to glimpse a truer manifestation of reality. To understand landscape, we must come to realize, again, that time is not discontinuous – only our perception of it. Landscape is in fact an unending series of ever-manifesting inevitabilities sedimented from continuous improvisational and inertial flows of matter and energy within which humans are but one stream. Landscape structures all aspects of the human experience, from determining the conditions of life’s unfolding challenges or restraints98 to spawning those possibilities which sustain our life.99 In this way, landscape affords human life: there is a ‘place’ for humans in the world – but we should not confuse our human perception of the world with the world itself.
Gamble et al. argue that performative new materialism “radically undermines a discrete separation between humans and matter”100 by recognizing the inseparability of observation from being.101 Collapsing this distinction forces us to reconsider the nature of reality, decentering humans from our tellings of the stories of things.102 Deconstructing our ostensible ‘objective vantage point’ from which we presume to possess understandings of reality furthermore involves decoupling observation-being from objectivity.103 The implications of this turn are manifold and profound.104
Gamble et al. furthermore argue that matter is fundamentally generatively indeterminate – unpredictable in its unfolding but neither random nor probabilistic - more, that it is improvisational: while also actively unfolding, creating new situations in-itself.105 Moreover, they argue that “indeterminacy is increasingly determined” within a self-perpetuating iterative process that is never entirely complete106 – while this process is also self-caused (not the result of some ex-nihilo ‘vital animating force,’ God, or in any way contingent upon human perception of matter – nothing ‘set it in motion’ but itself).
Pause for a moment to consider the following:
“This is a notion of history in which humans, when they are involved, are reading and writing as particular performances of matter reading and (re)writing itself.”107
This realization forces us to consider humans as inseparable from landscape; indeed, humans are merely the latest and fastest108 way in which landscape self-derives its form. The fate of humanity rests on understanding and applying post-human philosophy to direct the maintenance of, rather than extraction from, the earth’s delicate yet resilient ecologies. What remains to be seen is whether the promise inherent in this way of knowing and creating will be heeded in time to avert existential climate crises while offering restitution to peoples and places harmed by colonial extraction, or whether discourse continues to devolve into fifteen-second fragments of inflammatory and divisive political rhetoric where superficial appearances supersede substantive policy changes.
In the West, we think of ourselves as highly “advanced,” yet our societies have never been more unequal, and our environment has never been so degraded. Anthropology’s most prescient contribution to the knowledge-tree is that “advancing” or “progressing” scientifically or technologically actually constitutes the loss of some forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, revealing that there is only so much humans can know. Consider the mass extinction of folk language, tradition, and land-knowledge around the world; consider how many of us no longer know how to grow our own food or identify species in the wild that could feed us (or kill us) or know the many ways the sky reveals eminent rain, or what kind of trees or stones make good tools or materials for shelters. In sum, ‘progress’ has enveloped humankind in an ever-thickening gauze that alienates us from our very human essence – intuitive understandings of and connections to the world around us.109 Revisiting our understandings of megalithic sites – the sites of our earliest self-understandings and where the tellings of humanity’s story so often begins – is the place to begin revising our current understandings of our place in the world: have we always been capitalist? Have we always been gender-binary and patriarchal? Have we always been individuals?
Or are these only more recently developed delusions of grandeur?
Endnotes
1 https://m.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=4290
2 Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, “It’s A Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology,” (Annual Review of Anthropology 32, 2003), 217.
3 Post-humanist critique “challenges the easy assumptions about the ontological centrality of humans to the world” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies from old materials: Towards Multiplicity,” in Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality, edited by Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2019), 59.
4 Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne’s Doubt, (1964). and Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, (Northwestern University Press, 1970). and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, (Martino Fine Books, 2019).
5 “People continually look to the past to understand their current circumstances, to choose their future course of action, and to justify their choices.” Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, “It’s A Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology,” (Annual Review of Anthropology 32, 2003), 207.
6 Bauer & Kosiba cite Trouillot in the distinction between “that which happened (Historicity 1), and that which is said to have happened (Historicity 2).” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 118.
7 Brumfiel, “It’s A Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology,” 207.
8 Brumfiel states that “archaeological data are ambiguous in many ways,” yet “there are many stories that are simply not compatible with the physical evidence […] archaeology also has the ability to police more serious ideas, such as the American idea of progress.” Brumfiel, “It’s A Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology,” 213.
9 Brumfiel states that “agriculture is usually considered an advance because it can support larger populations, greater material wealth, and more complex divisions of labor than most foraging economies. However, archaeologists point out that the adoption of agriculture was accompanied by a range of adverse outcomes: declining nutrition, increased tooth decay, greater infectious disease, more arthritis, shorter stature, and shorter life spans.” Brumfiel, “It’s A Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology,” 213, not to mention agriculture’s entailments of social stratification, famine when weather fails to cooperate, and political units capable of war and genocide.
10 Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” in Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality, edited by Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2019), 55.
11 Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 55.
12 “What would happen if we considered the stones to be alive? To be moving? What would happen if our boundaries between wood and stone were not defined as absolute? What if we treated all of these ideas not as the mistaken beliefs of past people, but as ontological realities about how the world worked?” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies from old materials…” 55.
13 Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 57.
14 “the world is always in the process of becoming; it is in flow and in flux. Temporary gatherings, or assemblages, emerge from this world though they too are always changing […] the world is not made of complete and fixed phenomena but rather is always shifting and emerging.” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 59.
15 Harris & Crellin on the nature of reality: a “complex, and knotty, a multiplicity that cannot be fully untangled” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 60.
16 Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 62.
17 Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 65.
18 Their full quote: “each stone would have had its own history, its own events, its own temporality […] Outside of our Euclidean geographies these stones linked topologically to their quarry sites and as such folded the world of Late Neolithic Britain in new ways, like a once-flat handkerchief now crumpled up” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 67.
19 Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 69.
20 “Chalk was not moved far, simply from ditch to bank, but in so doing it colored and bounded the site; it coated people and things; it opened itself to hold stones, to grip them to the land. These histories could be seen in the colors and textures of all three types of stone. Each was worked differently within the site, using different tools, requiring different techniques, and responding in different ways.” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 69.
21 Stonehenge’s trilithons “had to have tenon and mortice and tongue-and-groove joints. Each of these are techniques that were adapted from woodworking (a point long acknowledged by archaeologists); three stones merely placed on top of one another are more likely to fall and collapse […] using wooden construction techniques allowed the creation of a monument that still stands today” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 68.
22 This co-constituency of material properties and human craft-understanding created “a world in which the capacities of stone shifted and emerged as potentially wood-like in order to allow the monument to endure,” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 68,
like the shifting between the properties of water, quartz, and stone discussed by Fowler & Cummings.
23“The falling of a stone might also be seen as the rejection of one particular stone by another – the chalk – requiring new intercessions by people on behalf of the fallen stone to erect it in a new place, one where the chalk might be more willing to allow it to stand […] this is a world in which stones move, live, and have opinions. Here, different stones play active roles in their own histories and are not merely brute dead matter: people and stones, along with many other materials, write history together” Harris & Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies [...],” 70.
24 https://www.olympus-europa.com/company/en/news/stories/2021-02-11t15-03-07/olympus-sheds-light-on-the-origins-of-stonehenge.html
25 Joanna Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” (European Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1, 2006), 73.
26 “It is widely accepted that this indicates not only increasing social differentiation but also the emergence of an ideology of the individual” Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 74.
27 Wherein the “idealized person [of the past] is characterized as an autonomous individual occupied by the rational pursuit of economic and political gain” Brück, “Death, Exchange, and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 74.
28 On historians’ reading of capitalism into the past: “this is interesting, as it bears striking similarities to [our own] conceptualization of objects in a commodity exchange economy.” Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 75.
29 Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 75.
30 In gift exchange economies, “Objects may be considered an extension of the self; not only are they an expression of the essential attributes of the person, they make us who we are. Even in the modern, western world, the loss of a favourite piece of jewellery, for example, may leave its owner feeling bereft – as if part of the self were missing […] objects afford us agency – they create us as particular types of people who are empowered to act in specific ways. It is therefore hardly surprising that in many societies, objects too are thought of as possessing a spirit or soul.” Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 76.
31 “Acts of giving and receiving locate the person in a web of social relationships that defines identity […] in societies where gift exchange is the main mechanism by which objects circulate, the self is constructed as a fractal, relational entity, an aggregate of substances constituted through a network of links with persons and things outside of the physical boundaries of the body” Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 76.
32 Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 76.
33 Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 84.
34 https://www.visitwales.com/attraction/historic-site/barclodiad-y-gawres-cadw-1443808
35 Which Gamble et al. argue is not new, nor a monolith, with at least three emerging divergent interpretations, each with their own metaphysical assumptions and implications. Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?”
36 Our inability to clearly perceive what unfolded before (even within) our own existence—as well as our inability to ‘project’ much further ahead than our own death.
37 Bauer & Kosiba define entrained action as the “associations of social practices, things, materials, and people that have taken on lives of their own.” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 117.
38 Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 118.
39 “Because of its durable features and its static spatial position, [a house] can take on a special social role as an enduring object that authenticates authoritative speech and validates ritual” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 119.
40 Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 119.
41 The ability to make change in the world.
42 Such as rituals surrounding birth, death, ‘coming of age,’ and reproductive constructs such as marriage that have ripple effects out into infinite other actions and interactions within assemblages.
43 Relational approaches fail to encapsulate reality because within them “things are solely imbued with social efficacy through the cultural imposition of meaning” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 119.
44 Bauer & Kosiba provide a possible route out of the relational quagmire in the example of how “people at C¸atalho¨yu¨k continually worked with clay to reinforce their walls and floors, and consequently, formulated ideas of clay as ‘‘flesh,’’ largely because of clay’s unique ability to layer and encase other materials […] In these instances, careful attention to the substances of materials—their constitutive elements and what they physically do in specific contexts—may open the possibilities for new understandings of the actions of things, how things come to be understood in specific cultural contexts, and how things affect human affairs.” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 120.
45 Defined by the authors as “a theory that the ‘‘being’’ of things depends on their associations with other things” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 121.
46 Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 121.
47 Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 126-7.
48 Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 128.
49 Such as the “creation of a reservoir further uphill to capture water before it flowed into another pool on a lower terrace, the adjustment of retention walls so that sediment would be either redeposited or stabilized” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 129.
50 Hilltop sites which bear evidence of extensive herding “show higher proportions of soil erosion, and there is a greater quantity of colluvium and alluvium in apron and fan deposits at the base of hills that were extensively used by Iron Age inhabitants.” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 129.
51 “The propensity of clays to swell and shrink as they absorb water, evidenced in the study region by striated fabrics and structured clays among some deposits on the hills, affected plants and megalithic monuments as the materials expanded and contracted [… and] necessitated the maintenance of pools and retention walls.” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 130.
52 “The social roles of materials arise from potentialities that emerge in historically and contextually specific flows of action, which are given direction by the perceptions of people, the values of a community, and the dynamic properties of physical forms and materials.” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act [...],” 123.
53 Rosemary A. Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” (Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 26, no. 1, 2015), 21.
54 Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 22.
55 Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 22.
56 An object considered ‘alive’ by virtue of its connection to or circulation among the original social context from which it emerged.
57 An object unearthed by archaeologists after its ‘death,’ or deposition by the humans who originally made and used it.
58 Itineraries encourage “considering the contemporary engagements of things with researchers and publics as part of things’ lives, rather than as a somewhat hazy afterlife following a sharp break between an absolutely distant past and a completely divorced present.” Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 31.
59 Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 24-25.
60 Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 26.
61 Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 26.
62 “Things remain intimately, materially connected to the places where their components originated, and they may demonstrate those connections on multiple levels […] archaeologists trace conversions from source material to worked object to reworked object to repurposed object, in what in theory is an infinite chain, limited only by the time elapsed since the geologic material became a focus of human activity.” Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 28.
63 Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 28.
64 Joyce, “Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality,” 30.
65 http://www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone/maenybardd.htm
66 Chris Fowler and Vicki Cummings, “Places Of Transformation: Building Monuments From Water And Stone In The Neolithic Of The Irish Sea,” (Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 1, March 2003), 3.
67 “At these sites the sea would be visible behind the monument as a person approached the fore court and chamber. These sites are therefore framed against the sea which forms the visual context for the stone monument.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 4.
68 Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 4.
69 “Had these monuments been positioned a few hundred metres from their present location, the views of mountains and sea would have been lost” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 4.
70 “Many megaliths may have been designed or employed to create visual effects reminiscent of the sea and sea-shore through the substances used to build them or in their use […] megaliths may have been thought to ‘contain’ or encapsulate both stone and water.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 5.
71 “Often, stone to build the megaliths was quarried from the very stone outcroppings on which they are situated, made of boulders and stone that possess a “wavy appearance” from sedimentary/volcanic ripples, or are smooth, undulating, and “water worn.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 5.
72 Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 7.
73 “Neolithic remains from megalithic contexts which have been subjected to stable isotope analysis indicate that marine foods were not consumed […] If bodies and bones were washed down rivers towards the sea, perhaps this goes some way to explaining the cultural logic behind the avoidance of fish-eating. Perhaps creatures living in the sea bore a close affinity with the dead (and also therefore the living); perhaps they were even manifestations of the spirits of the dead.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 15.
74 “Matter is what it does.” Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 112.
75 “[Quartz] has a number of properties which make it quite distinct from other stones, and easy to transform. For example, when two quartz pieces are rubbed together they glow, shed sparks, almost seeming to catch fire, and give off an acrid smell. It is extremely reflective, and heterogeneously so, producing a sparkling effect when well lit. Like flint, quartz can be worked, and may display ripples when struck.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 7.
76 Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 7.
77 “[Quartz] seems to have been a key substance in connecting megaliths with water and stone, and the inland mountains and streams with the coastal zone and the sea. It seems that both the location of monuments and the substances used in megalithic places created connections between water and stone.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 8.
78https://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=a312&file=index&do=showpic&pid=206853&orderby=
79 Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 11.
80 Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 9.
81 “Transformations applied not only to the ‘landscapes’ and the ‘bodies of the sites,’ but to human bodies as well […] sites drawing on the transformative connotations of water would have also emphasized the fluidity of the person – how one person was connected by flows to others” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 13-14.
82 As our own ‘selves’ do today, though we fail to acknowledge this fact.
83 “Transition and fluidity were central metaphors in a Neolithic understanding of the physical world and personal composition. The interplay between water and stone may have been a crucial way of exploring and expressing these metaphors.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 13. However, it should be noted that to ancient peoples these sites and materials were not ‘metaphors’ or ‘symbols’ of transformation (as we may read them today), they were valid ontological realities within which they lived – these beliefs were inseparable from reality and constituted the really real, revealing how they may have thought of themselves, their bodies, and the landscapes around them as part of a larger intertwined continuum.
84 Brück, “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age,” 86.
85 https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170705180808-newgrange-entrance-full-169.jpg
86 “The experience of entering a chambered tomb may also have had associations with water. Plunging into an earth-covered megalithic chamber in summer-time is not unlike jumping into a river; the loss of light and warmth is a noticeable change.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 15.
87 Entoptic phenomena, which present enough material for a dissertation unto themselves, are visual imagery ubiquitous across ancient world cultures which recall altered states of consciousness such as visual imagery experienced under the effects of classical hallucinogens.
88 Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 16.
89 “Altered states of consciousness are often described as providing the effect of being under water […] trance experiences are also often bound up in ritualized practices described as being a kind of death followed by a rebirth and, in such situations, are key events in personal transformation. In many cases, rites of passage are accompanied by trance, disorientation, and bewildering episodes. Furthermore, if people were in trance-like states, perhaps induced by dancing, music, fasting, or hallucinogens, stone may actually have taken on fluid properties.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 16.
90 Entheogens are known to afford liminal experiences of death, ego-dissolution, and eroded boundaries between the self and surroundings, often described as ‘profound’ and ‘mystical’ by trial participants. See Frederick S. Barrett and Roland R. Griffiths, “Classic Hallucinogens and Mystical Experiences: Phenomenology and Neural Correlates,” (Behavioral Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs, edited by Adam L. Halberstadt, Franz X. Vollenweider, and David E. Nichols, vol. 36, 2018), 396. As well as K.H. Preller and F.X. Vollenweider, “Phenomenology, Structure, and Dynamic of Psychedelic States,” (Behavioral Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs, edited by Adam L. Halberstadt, Franz X. Vollenweider, and David E. Nichols, vol. 36, 2018), 230.
91 “Some stone – like quartz – may have been more ‘fluid’ than others [in visual effects stemming from altered states of consciousness] and more often utilized in acts of personal transformation.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 16.
92 “Quartz, in particular, could have been thought of as fossilized fluid, acting as a liminal substance between the solid and the fluid.” Fowler & Cummings, “Places Of Transformation [...],” 16.
93 Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, (Penguin, 2019).
94 https://www.britainexpress.com/wales/pembrokeshire/carreg-samson.htm
95 Trees and the forest they comprise necessarily occupy definite space - does all possible knowledge hypothetically already exist all around us, waiting to be ‘uncovered’ (grown-unto) upon attaining the proper perspective into a vein? Leibnitz’ monadology is wormhole we won’t enter here, yet it's worth referencing for its application to this train of thought, implications for panpsychism, and further disruption of Cartesian dualisms.
96 Bauer & Kosiba define entanglement as: “processes by which people become entrapped in relationships of dependency with the things that they use, and vice versa” Bauer & Kosiba, “How Things Act: An Archaeology of Materials in Political Life,” (Journal of Social Archaeology 16, no. 2, 2016), 133.
97 We as beings exist in three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, with the zeroth dimension occupying a point. Just as each spatial dimension starts as a point, extends to a line, expands to an area, and extrudes to a volume, so too does time begin as a point, extend to a line, expand to an area, and extrude to a volume. When we view the three spatial dimensions from the zeroth perspective of time, we see three dimensional spatial entities at their ‘point’ in time. When we view four dimensions from a fifth-dimensional (historical) perspective we see fourth dimensional entities as extending between their points, traveling along ‘lines.’ Yet time’s sixth and seventh dimensions are especially perplexing, entailing the superposition of all possible alternative realities coexisting atop, among, or within one another, collapsed by increasing determinacy into our experience of this reality, as we are not extra-dimensional beings capable of living atop, among, and within all possible realities, only fourth-dimensional beings with a weak fifth-dimensional sense. Delving deeper into time’s dimensions could be considered the ’branching’ of fourth dimensional possibilities into channels of divergent realities.
98 Climactic events, distributions of material resources, terrain that must be traversed.
99 Such as flows of water which themselves modulate landscape and support systems yielding digestible energy in the form of food, also derived-from-and-modifying-landscape.
100 Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail, “What is New Materialism?” (Angelaki 24, no. 6, November 2, 2019), 112.
101 Gamble et al. argue that “a performative understanding of science in which every act of observing also constitutes, at once, a transformation of what is being observed.” Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 112.
102 This is accomplished by challenging the “presumption that humans uniquely occupy an objective vantage radically external to (the rest of) matter that enables us (and only us) to access matter’s true nature or essence” Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 113.
103 On objectivity and observation, Gamble et al. argue that “humans can never observe the universe as though from outside of it […] As such, humans (like everything else) always partly constitute and are partly constituted by that which they observe” Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 123.
104 They state that “if there is no radical or absolute boundary line between things, including between humans and non-humans, then humans have no more monopoly over what counts as intelligence, language, or even scientific inquiry than anything else does.” Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 124.
105 This is demonstrated by the following thought experiment: “if humans are fully material beings who do mathematics, then matter does mathematics […] indeed, how else could nature have produced human mathematicians if it were not already mathematical? How else could it have generated the very principles that mathematicians claim to discover? And why else, finally, do those principles, despite their undeniable success, never quite manage to fully quantify or predict matter – unless matter is also inherently performative and improvisational?” Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 124.
106 Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 125.
107 Gamble et al., “What is New Materialism?” 127.
108 Faster as in operating on a far shorter time scale than tectonic movements, water cycles, and vegetative growth. Other forms of fauna fulfill this self-modulation niche as well; consider beavers which dam rivers, creating the conditions necessary for wetland biodiversity, or social insects such as bees, which create highly geometric hives, and serve as stewards (pollinators) enabling biodiversity in flowering plants, or ants, which turn and aerate the soil, creating conditions favorable for roots.
109 James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, (Verso Books, 2018).
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All images are cited in endnotes with hyperlinks.