8th June 2005, 11:19 PM
Could expand forever this thread.... I think one key point is that all "henges" are unique. To be a bit topical here, how on earth can we justify making grand one-way decisions over a sacred landscape like Thornborough on the basis of a commercial evaluation of a silly-percentage of the site? That aside for a mo, was having a silly moment with the mob on site t`other day and this came up: How about Neolithic communities seeing celestial bodies as holes in the sky? How about henges as a way of joining up the holes to access the beyond? We just don`t know enough. Time and again, current understanding has been radically shaken when known monuments are (through new work) placed within their landscape context. This should not be read as a green light to rape sacred landscapes in pursuit of knowledge! For me, the enigmatic nature of Neolithic and Bronze-Age monuments places them at the top of any priority list. At the pinnacle of the period and, at the extreme ends of the behavioural spectrum, prehistoric monumentalism is, our pyramid complex.