Thinking About Stonehenge
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I'm writing a kid's book on the history of architecture.* I just finished a chapter on building in stone: fieldstone walls, pyramids, megaliths and standing stone circles. I wrote several paragraphs about Stonehenge, none of which made it to the final version. I started to recycle them into a blog post,** then I realized that I had already written a much more interesting post about our visit to Stonehenge several years ago.
From the archives:
We caught our first glimpse of Stonehenge from the highway--the familiar stone circle silhouetted against the sky. I felt a flutter of excitement. After all, Stonehenge is a major Bronze Age site, built at roughly the same time as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Like the pyramids, it's built from monolithic stones, some brought from more than 200 miles away. Unlike the pyramids, we don't really know why*** it was built or by whom.**** As far as ancient mysteries go, it's one of the most mysterious.
My Own True Love, who was not really interested, asked "Couldn't we just say we've seen it and drive on?" As it turned out, he had the right idea.
The day was cold and gray. The wind was relentless. The line to get into the site was long. Protestors stood just outside the fence that defined the site, with signs urging that the ongoing excavations be shut down.*****
Once we got past the ticket gate, the day was still cold and the wind was worse. The guidebooks had made it clear that visitors are no longer allowed into the stone circle itself without making special arrangements. Instead, you walk around the monument on a tarmac and grass path made for the purpose. Under the right circumstances, this could be an awe-inspiring experience--like circumambulating a Buddhist stupa. These were not the right circumstances. The crowd moved in clumps, stopping when their audio tours told them to stop and occasionally posing to take each other's pictures with the stones in the background. On a warm day, it might have been festive. As it was, there was a dogged quality to the whole thing. Halfway around the circle, we looked at each other and said, "Let's blow this pop stand."
Close up, the grandeur was gone. We'd have been better off with the view from the highway.
*Thanks to all of you who wrote to me with your own stories of being fascinated by similar books as a kid.
**No sense in letting perfectly good words go to waste.
*** Most scholars believe the circle served as a celestial calendar, based on the alignment of its stones with sunrise and sunset at the summer and winter solstices. Recent discoveries suggest it could be part of a giant mortuary complex (there are some 500 Bronze Age burial mounds within a three-mile radius of the site).
**** But we do know it wasn't the Druids, who date from 1500-2000 years later.
*****The wind was so high that I didn't take notes--a fact I'm kicking myself for in retrospect. My memory tells me the signs cited reverence for a sacred site, reverence for the first kings of Britain, and respect for the dead. All good things--and yet….
Image credit: gianliguori / 123RF Stock Photo
Sticks and Stones and Mammoth Bones
I am once again writing a book on a short deadline. Unlike Heroines of Mercy Street, it is not a book that the Marginalia will have any interest in. My friends and family will feel no need to buy or read it.* I won't post the cover here.** There will be no interviews, guest posts, articles in Time.com, speaking gigs. And yet it is a useful book on a topic in which I've long been interested: a history of architecture for kids.
When I was kid myself, I poured over a similar book time and again. It was part of a series that came with a set of encyclopedias. The books are long gone. I can't remember the title of the series. But I see them clearly in my mind. I remember how they caught my imagination. If I can evoke the same sense of wonder/delight/curiosity in even one kid, this book will be a success as far as I'm concerned.
At the moment, I'm working on the way the shelters built by early humans developed into vernacular architecture--structures built from local materials by local craftsmen in local traditions. The kind of architecture that needs no architect.
The earliest shelters of all, built by nomadic hunters long before we learned to farm, are pretty fascinating. Sometimes early humans took advantage of the natural shelter provided by caves and rock ledges. More often they made camp near water and built temporary shelters from the materials at hand.*** The oldest known example of such a camp is the Terra Amata site near Nice, France--built some 300,000 years ago. (Yes--that is three hundred thousand. No extra zeroes floating around.) The shelters in the camp were more than just hides thrown over some sticks. They dug out a foundation, built a palisade wall of brushwood and set roof supports down the center. The final result was about the size of a mobile home. Even more amazing, there is evidence that they came back year after year and built new huts on the old foundations, kindling the fires in the prior year's ashes. These were not just huts. They were homes.
Humans built shelters on the same basic design for hundreds of thousands of years. One variation in particular caught my imagination: Between 30,000 and 18,000 years ago,**** a culture of mammoth hunters lived in what is now the Ukraine. The region was largely tundra and wood was scarce. The mammoth hunters built huts for a semi-permanent winter camp using framework of mammoth bones instead of wood. Each hut took several hundred mammoth bones--no small feat, even if, as some archaeologists speculate, they gathered bones of animals that had died natural deaths. (Does anyone else get an image of bones scattered across the tundra like litter from a giants' picnic?)
This recreation at Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science is much creepier than the one in my imagination.
The moral of the story for me? Humans are ingenious.
*Though My Own True Love is reading the chapters as I produce them: finding the errors, pointing out the things that don't make sense, asking the tough questions. He is the best.
**Unless it turns out to be too cool not to share.
***Because caves weren't always available and they weren't always safe. No one wants to share lodging with a cave bear or other wild predator.
****Practically yesterday compared to the site at Terra Amata
Image courtesy of Momotarou2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24773798
Social Science or Humanities? It’s a Conundrum.
Several weeks ago, this question appeared in my email:
The history department at MSU is part of the College of Social Science with Social Work. Yesterday a colleague said she thought it should be in Humanities. I'm curious what you think.
As it turns out, this is something I've spent some time thinking about over the last 30 years.* History is also part of the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago, where I did my graduate work, along with anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology. As someone who worked primarily with sources from literature and the visual arts,** it never felt like a good fit. Today, as a historian-storyteller, I feel more strongly than ever that history belongs with the humanities. My historian friends who use lots of statistical data disagree.
I throw the question out to you, Gentle Readers: History: social science or humanities?
*Actually, now that I stop and count, it's been 36 years. Eeep!
**Though I did build a nifty spreadsheet and perform some statistical analysis regarding the number of Orientalist works in exhibits at the Royal Society in London and the Paris Salon over the course of the nineteenth century--a task that consumed far more time than the final results warranted.