Stonehenge for the Ancestors part 1: landscape and monuments
            <b>Stonehenge for the Ancestors part 1: landscape and monuments</b>
            , by Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Chris Tilley and Kate Welham, Leiden, Sidestone Press, 2020, 602 pp., Illus. 425, €140.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9789088907036; €69.95 (Paperback), ISBN 9789088907029

Leivers, Matt

doi:10.1080/00665983.2021.1894754

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…12; see also Marshall et al 2024). The two largest heroic feats of assembly and building, Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, are very different in conception Parker Pearson et al 2020;Whittle 1997a;1997b;Leary et al 2013) but similar in outrageous scale. The current consensus view is probably that the major sarsen phase (Stage 2) at Stonehenge preceded the building of Silbury Hill, these taking place perhaps a century or so apart at c. 2500 and c. 2400 cal BC res pectively (Darvill et al 2012;Parker Pearson et al 2022;Parker Pearson 2023.14;Leary et al 2013), though in my view there may still be unresolved questions of detail about the currently available chronology of Stonehenge (Bayliss et al 2007b) and these two constructions might be closer in time, offering rival, more or less contemporary, conceptions of the origin of the cosmos (Whittle 1997a;1997b).…”

Section: Late Neolithicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though great strides have been made in recent years in the understanding of Stonehenge and its wider context (Parker Pearson et al 2020;Parker Pearson 2023), there is much still that we do not easily comprehend. Our knowledge of mortuary practice at this time, which had shifted to dominant cremation rites, is limited, though small cremation cemeteries could be consistent with all manner of kinship arrangements in line with practice earlier in the Neolithic (Willis 2021).…”

Section: Late Neolithicmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Kinship questions

Whittle

2024

Doc. praeh.

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Kinship, diverse webs of relationship generated by people in their social practice, has long been analysed and debated by anthropologists, from an earlier dominance of lineage theory to the current, much more fluid emphasis on relatedness. Since the days of processualism, archaeologists have given more attention to kinship than in the early years of the discipline, but in rather limited and general ways until very recently. With the advent of successful aDNA investigations, and with some prompt from posthumanist theory, that interest has been renewed recently. I discuss some inconsistencies between the accounts of kinship by anthropologists and archaeologists, notably the emphasis by the former on diversity, relatedness, the possibilities and implications of bilateral descent, and the uncertain relationship between biology and kinship. To begin to investigate how this might all work out in archaeology, I sketch three scenarios from successive parts of the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland, across the fourth to third millennia cal BC, attempting specific rather than generalised models and indicating the outlines of a possible trajectory through time.

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Section: Late Neolithicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Late Neolithicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kinship questions

Whittle

2024

Doc. praeh.

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“…Stonehenge is an astonishingly complex monument, which can be understood only by taking into account both its landscape context and the long chronology of its successive phases of construction and use (Gaffney et al 2018;Parker Pearson et al 2020, 2022. There is, however, no doubt that the most spectacular and best known of these phases, defined by the monumental 'sarsen' settings, exhibits a clear astronomical alignment; due to the flat topography and good visibility of the horizon from the site, this setting refers both to the summer solstice sunrise and to the winter solstice sunset.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Archaeoastronomy and the alleged ‘Stonehenge calendar’

Magli

Belmonte

2023

Antiquity

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In a recent Antiquity article, Darvill (2022) proposed that the mid third-millennium BC Stage 2 sarsen settings of Stonehenge (comprising the Trilithon Horseshoe, Sarsen Circle and the Station Stone Rectangle) were conceived in order to represent a calendar year of 365.25 days—that is, a calendar identical in duration to the Julian calendar. In the present article, the authors argue that this proposal is unsubstantiated, being based as it is on a combination of numerology, astronomical error and unsupported analogy.

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The Army Basing Programme, Stonehenge and the Emergence of the Sacred Landscape of Wessex

Leivers¹

2021

Internet Archaeol.

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Recent excavations for the Army Basing Programme on the periphery of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site have revealed extensive evidence of Early, Middle and Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age activity, including a causewayed enclosure, burials, occupation, pit groups, henges, post alignments and circles. Several of these either incorporate or refer to features of the landscape such as solution hollows, dry valleys, hilltops and rivers, as well as to astronomical phenomena. An appraisal of this evidence alongside other recent programmes of research around Stonehenge suggest an accreting pattern of development of this landscape that begins in the 38th century BC, and which throws new light on the location and meaning of several of the ceremonial earthworks, including Stonehenge itself.

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Cited by 4 publications

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Kinship questions

Kinship questions

Archaeoastronomy and the alleged ‘Stonehenge calendar’

The Army Basing Programme, Stonehenge and the Emergence of the Sacred Landscape of Wessex

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