Entering, and returning from, the underworld: reconstituting Silbury Hill by combining a quantified landscape phenomenology with archaeoastronomy

Abstract

Landscape phenomenology limits the number of possible narratives for interpreting prehistoric monuments through the embodied experience of walking their remains in their landscape. While this method may improve upon an archaeology that narrows interpretation to single site excavations isolated in Euclidean space, it has been criticized for deploying unsubstantiated metaphors as an interpretative resource. Contemporary archaeoastronomy's dominant methodology submits regional groups of prehistoric monuments to rigorous statistical methods for testing whether perceived alignments were in fact intended by their builders. However, it is presently unable to saturate alignment findings with meaning, and reaches its limits when monuments are found to align on local landscape features rather than ‘astronomical’ bodies. Through a detailed examination of Silbury Hill in its landscape and late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age monument context, this article shows that problems in both methods can be transcended by studying the emergent properties generated by their combination. These emergent properties are consistent with the predictions of a recent anthropological model of lunar‐solar conflation. Résumé La phénoménologie du paysage limite le nombre d'interprétations possibles des vestiges préhistoriques à celle obtenue par l'expérience vécue d'un arpentage dans leurs alentours. Bien que cette méthode puisse enrichir l'archéologie, qui restreint l'interprétation aux seules fouilles du site isolé dans l'espace euclidien, elle est critiquée pour l'usage de métaphores infondées comme sources d'interprétation. Par ailleurs, la méthodologie dominante de l'archéoastronomie contemporaine consiste à appliquer à des groupes régionaux de monuments préhistoriques des méthodes statistiques rigoureuses pour vérifier si les alignements perçus avaient effectivement été projetés par leurs constructeurs. Elle ne peut cependant pas saturer de signification les alignements retrouvés et atteint ses limites quand les monuments s'avèrent alignés sur des repères locaux du paysage plutôt que sur des corps « astronomiques ». À travers un examen détaillé de Silbury Hill dans son paysage et dans son contexte monumental du Néolithique et du Bronze ancien, l'article montre que les points faibles des deux méthodes peuvent être transcendés si l'on étudie les propriétés émergentes nées de leur combinaison. Ces nouvelles propriétés sont cohérentes avec les prédictions récentes d'un modèle anthropologique de rapprochement entre temps lunaire et temps solaire.

Returning from the Underworld: The West Kennet Palisades in the Avebury Monument Complex

“…The emergent properties found by combining the archaeology, landscape phenomenology, and archaeoastronomy of the Late Neolithic/EBA Avebury monuments supports the materiality model's view that their structures of stone and wood are part of an integrated, contemporaneous complex. In addition to confirming that the West Kennet Palisades are part of this complex, the findings also confirm that the complex includes a Fox Covert start to the Beckhampton Avenue and, as suggested in 2009 (Sims 2009a;2009b), that one of Silbury Hill's functions was to act as a 'dynamic lunar facsimile in dark Moon rituals' (Leary et al 2013, 204). This analysis suggests that the Avebury monument complex is designed as a virtual underworld for the living to conduct initiation rituals.…”

“…In the last few decades some archaeologists' scholarly understanding of the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age (EBA) Avebury complex has set the traditional view of these monuments in disarray. Half of the complex has been written out of existence (see below) and an early preliminary suggestion from landscape phenomenology and archaeoastronomy (Sims 2009a) to re-assess the issues was rejected (Leary et al 2013, 204). However, that early paper by the present author did not include a consideration of the West Kennet Palisades.…”

Solarizing the Moon: Essays in honour of Lionel Sims

“…Somehow, the conversation moved to Avebury and Silbury Hill. Summarising the findings of a then recently published paper (Sims 2009b), Lionel challenged me to place myself in the shoes of a prehistoric visitor to Avebury. His descriptions were exciting and vivid, almost as if he had been there himself.…”

Nancy Gonlin and April Nowell, Archaeology of the Night: Life after Dark in the Ancient World

“…Van Gilder notes that "for a Hawaiian speaker in the centuries before European contact, the word Põ would have invoked all of these meanings simultaneously" (p. 157). It is interesting to consider that a concept similar to Põ, if not the actual word, resonates across time and space with Sims' proposition of the positioning of the underworld in respect to Neolithic processional routes to Avebury and Stonehenge (Sims 2009(Sims , 2020. Again, Van Gilder's prose at times is highly evocative: it was really the night sky, bookended as it was with the rising and setting of the sun on the horizon, that brought a sense of location.…”