Whether he’ll touch on this aspect of it isn’t clear, but one of Parker Pearson’s signal contributions to Stonehenge knowledge was an idea that initially made him laugh out loud.
In an effort to get beyond what he called the “distorted mirror” of 20th Century Western thinking about Stonehenge, Parker Pearson in 1998 invited Ramilisonina, a long time archaeologist friend from Madagascar, to walk the grounds with him.
Along with others in his homeland, Ramil’s family “still follows ancient traditions of moving and raising large stones to commemorate the dead,” Parker Pearson explains in a written account of their encounter.
Parker Pearson’s reasoning was that Ramil’s grounding in a culture that today does what the builders of Stonehenge did from 3000 to 1,500 B.C.E. might help him to work out the puzzles from the pieces of evidence at hand.
Among those pieces is a series of wood henges — structures of similar design but of that material — found on England’s Essex Plain. There is, in fact, one called Woodhenge.
One of the basic questions on Parker Pearson’s mind was: “Why were the stone and wood structures both there?”
Looking at him “in disbelief” (or as though his head were full of rocks), Ramil wondered how a man as smart as Parker Pearson could miss was seemed so obvious.
It remains a simple fact of Ramil’s culture that “perishable materials — wood, fabric, plants — are used for the living, to close and house them during the brief span of human life, before they spend the eternity of death in a (non-perishable) stone tomb.”
“My first reaction was to laugh,” Parker Pearson recalled.
Then, he began to think.
Our use of cut flowers at funerals symbolizes the impermanence of human life. The past use of wooden crosses as temporary monuments fit the pattern that continues today when we have the sense that we have unfinished business with the departed until a stone marker is placed.
“We regard such things as practical, pragmatic actions,” Parker Pearson writes, “but there’s usually more to human behavior at such moments.”
One reason for his initial surprise seems natural.
The very naming of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age casts our understanding of human development in terms of changing technology. It would be only natural, then, to view the wood and stone structures along the River Avon in the light of their relationship with that technology.
Ramil’s angle was that the materials instead express the way we perishable people understand our relationship not with technology, but with our own perishable nature: using what is impermanent during our lives and trying to express what is permanent (including the past) in stone.
And that doesn’t even touch on the presents of all the stone monuments in places like Washington, D.C. and the meanings invoked at times when Martin Luther King, Jr. returned to the Lincoln Memorial on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation to echo words that had literally been written in stone.
After his visit with Ramil, Parker Pearson began wondering whether the wood henges and stone henges might have been used at the same time, the wood ones as ceremonial structures for the living and the stone ones as ceremonial monuments honoring the dead.
The result is what we now call a paradigm shift.
“Judging by the large number of prizes and awards that the research (on the theory) has received,” the work done after he stopped laughing and started thinking has become a consensus opinion.
As with all things at Stonehenge, there’s much more involved.
Since so many sites seem also to have been built to observe the longest and shortest days of the year, it seems the builders were thinking not only about the relationship of the living to the ancestors, but of all humans to the workings of the larger universe and our presence in it.
Different kinds of stones on Stonehenge provide other clues about the builders. Because bluestones at Stonehenge are found in present day Wales, it’s thought that the builders might have come Wales and brought the bluestones to Stonehenge in tribute to their ancestors and ancestral home.
Then, of course, there is what a press release about Tuesday’s event calls “the most captivating question of all … how and why (the massive) stones from 180 miles away were used to create Stonehenge,” a feat that itself bears evidence to the culture of the time.
“As leader of the Stones at Stonehenge Project,” it continues, “Professor Parker Pearson will give his professional opinion along with new results from the field.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m expecting that what he has to say is going to send me back to the Stone Age.
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