My journey to Stonehenge takes me past military towns and ominous tracks cris-crossing the road with signs warning of tanks.
Latter, sitting on the grass, eating bread and olives, watching the literally hundreds of visitors arrive and circle the monument, the susurration of traffic sounds and wind and traffic is altered by the interruption of military aircraft flying over head, circling low and heading off into the trees beyond.
Stonehenge is the perfect Bronze Age monument; The Bronze Age is characterised as a warrior culture and Stonehenge is located within that area of Britain most famous as an army training ground
http://thingsinthree.blogspot.com/2011/08/stonehenge-end-of-august-2011.html
During the Bronze Age Stonehenge was already old. Stonehenge, it would have seemed, had always been there in one form or another. The car park of my time covers the Mesolithic beginnings of the site and a thousand years from now, British Heritage's gift shop will be just another fragment of the story.
The large sarsens fit together with woodworking skills passed on from the Mesolithic times. The ancient stones were treated as if made of wood, dressed as wood and fitted together with joins used in woodwork.
Trees were going to get scarce...
Stone is like bone, the chalk soil underfoot seems to grow nodules of flint shaped like bone...
The Bronze Age was a time when trade with far off lands was well established The amber coming from the Baltics, the remains of a quern buried at The Sanctuary made of green stone from the Alps.
Knowledge and stories spread with the goods traded between people.
The Bronze Age is a time when circles, rather than rectangular structures are in favour, and Stonehenge is circles within circles. The knowledge of how to smelt and use copper soon became specialised. Bronze is beautiful and useful, but I get the impression that its main function was decorative- for status and display. Copper dulls very quickly and loses its golden shine, add tin to the mix and copper becomes bronze- slower to dull, also harder. Exquisite gold and amber jewellery of that time make me think of the sun and are beyond anything I could make.
One of the main differences between the Neolithic barrows and the round barrows of the Bronze Age, is supposed to be the interment of an individual body. Long barrows such as West Kennet, contained several chambers, each containing bones from more than one person. But in fact this way of seeing the barrows and the way the dead were treated as signifying something about the way people lived is a little mistaken. Not all Neolithic barrows contained burials.
Not all Neolithic barrows were long -trapezoid. The oldest Neolithic monuments were the pit and the cursus; the long barrow seems to be a logical modification.
The pit could be for offering to the Great Below, or used to support posts.
Or both.
Or to provide earth for a mound.
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