Seeing straight
Richard Bradley
THE IDEA OF ORDER
The circular archetype in prehistoric Europe
264pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (US $110).
978 0 19 960809 6
Andrew Meirion Jones
PREHISTORIC MATERIALITIES
Becoming material in prehistoric Britain and Ireland
256pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (US $110).
978 0 19 955642 7
Peter S. Wells
HOW ANCIENT EUROPEANS SAW THE WORLD
Vision, patterns, and the shaping of the mind in prehistoric times
304pp. Princeton University Press. £24.95 (US $35).
978 0 691 14338 5
Published: 3 July 2013
An aerial image of Boscawen-Un Stone Circle, St Buryan, Cornwall
Photograph:
Robert Harding/Getty Images
“In laying the table there is trouble for the girl. At home her house is round; a straight line and the right angle are unknown to her . . . . Day after day therefore she will lay the cloth with the folds anything but parallel with one edge of the table. Plates, knives and forks are set down in a confusing manner, and it is only after lessons often repeated and much annoyance that she begins to see how things might be done.”
Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels.
What does a round building mean? Does it mean anything, or is the choice of one shape of house over another simply a matter of practicalities? It is, for instance, easy to build extensions on to a rectangular building, since extra rooms can simply be added onto the sides or end; if the owners of an Iron Age roundhouse want a bigger living room, they have little choice but to knock the whole thing down and start again. Roundhouses are more storm- and wind-resistant, while parts of a rectangular house can more easily be partitioned or closed off, to provide privacy or a secure storage place. But this is obviously not the whole story. None of these practical arguments applies to a burial mound, which might as well take the form of a rectangular barrow as a round tumulus. So when we find that prehistoric Europeans who lived in roundhouses also tended to build circular wall circuits around their towns, to erect round tombs to their dead, and to worship their gods in circular temples or enclosures, it becomes clear – as Richard Bradley argues in his absorbing new book – that we are dealing not solely, or even primarily, with a practical choice, but with a particular way of seeing the world: an “Idea of Order”, as his title suggests.
What does a round building mean? Does it mean anything, or is the choice of one shape of house over another simply a matter of practicalities?
Circles, unlike rectangles, are common in the natural world (fungi, the moon, the pupil of the human eye), and it is probably no coincidence that, with a few exceptions, prehistoric Europeans seem to have started off as circle-people. Roundhouses have traditionally been favoured by hunter-gatherers and pastoralist societies, while farmers prefer rectilinear structures (round cattle-byres, but square barns). Conversion to the right angle came at different points in different regions. In Britain, a long local tradition of roundhouses went into a steep decline after the Roman conquest, although, as Bradley notes, the inhabitants of Roman Britain and northern Gaul retained a most un-Roman preference for circular temples right down through the Roman period. The last part of Europe to retain a strong tradition of round buildings was Ireland, where circular earthworks (“raths”) and roundhouses remained the norm well into the early medieval period. Royal centres like Tara and Uisneach continued to be dominated by great circular and figure-of-eight enclosures. It was only with the Christianization of Ireland that the right angle finally triumphed here too: the early medieval island hermitage of Illaunloughan contained four traditional roundhouses but, ominously, a square Christian church and shrine, reflecting the shape of things to come.
Might a preference for round buildings also reflect a fundamentally different, perhaps more egalitarian mindset? Although a circle has an obvious centre – the place usually occupied by the hearth in the prehistoric roundhouse – it has no front or back, and it is more difficult to express status distinctions through the organization of space in a round building. British megalithic stone circles usually lack a clear focal point, and, as Bradley tentatively suggests, “It may be that the circular plan was intended to play down the distinctions between different people, employing a similar principle to the seating plan at King Arthur’s round table”. The stone circles in Orkney are made up of rocks from several different quarries, suggesting that “different communities could have contributed their labour on equal terms with other groups”; furthermore, if the individual monoliths were regarded as symbols of human figures, they “could have stood for the community rather than particular individuals”.
These kinds of idea have a long history. In the early 1930s, the Soviet city planner Mikhail Okhitovich claimed that the right angle in architecture originated in private land ownership: curvilinear structures, whether they be round buildings or chairs with curved backs, were therefore communist in principle. The best-known round building in the ancient Greek world is probably the Athenian tholos, a large circular structure in the south-west corner of the agora, the central public space of ancient Athens. This building served as a public dining and assembly hall for the prytaneis, the presiding officers of the Athenian democratic council, who seem to have dined sitting on benches around the edge of the circle. The tholos was built in the early fifth century BC over the ruins of a lavish rectilinear private house, which has attractively (if speculatively) been identified as the residence of the sixth-century Pisistratid tyrant dynasty, demolished and replaced by the new Athenian democratic regime in the last decade of the sixth century. Few archaeologists of Athens can resist the temptation to interpret the architectural form of the tholos, Okhitovich-style, as a straightforward reflection of the new egalitarian values of the radical Athenian democracy.
The problem with this approach, seductive though it is, lies in the whole idea that a building can “reflect”, “stand for” or “represent” something else. As Andrew Meirion Jones points out in Prehistoric Materialities, very many archaeologists (Bradley among them) believe that architecture can always be read “as a spatialized symbol of an underlying social order – a representation”. Jones is unconvinced by the notion that artefacts, whether buildings, pots or stone circles, can simply be reduced to vehicles for symbolic communication or “ciphers for social formations”. Instead, he insists that sites and artefacts take on meanings only through our own repeated interactions with them.
What does my kitchen “symbolize”? In itself, as a bit of architecture, nothing much; it’s just a long thin room with a fridge and cooker at one end. But if you watched us doing things in it for a couple of hours – me sitting over here, Sarah sitting over there, Alex using the room indiscriminately as an assault course – you would probably learn quite a lot about the underlying social dynamics of the Thonemann household. As Jones puts it, “architecture involves a process of interaction in which materials impinge upon, or interact with, the human performer; architecture is composed of materials that are performed”. That is to say, it is only bit by bit, through repeated, habitual actions, that buildings and objects get invested with meaning and significance. It is wishful thinking to suppose that we can read off the character of the Late Neolithic social order in Orkney from the ground plan of a roundhouse: we have to know what people did in the house, where objects were kept, even – as Jones argues – how light and shadow changed the appearance of the interior at different times of the day and year.
Architecture involves a process of interaction in which materials impinge upon, or interact with, the human performer; architecture is composed of materials that are performed
Jones’s “performative” approach to material culture has a lot going for it, and it is a pity that his prose is so hard going. It may well be true that “archaeological categories are composed of repetitious material performances with each category being made up of referentially related materials”, but there has got to be a clearer way of putting it. Jones could learn a thing or two from Peter Wells, whose How Ancient Europeans Saw the World covers much of the same ground (and a lot more besides) in beautifully crisp and elegant English. Wells is concerned with the visual experience of the European Bronze and Iron Ages (roughly the last two millennia BC), and, in particular, with what he identifies as two revolutions in visual culture.
The first revolution occurred in around 500 BC, with the emergence in northern
Europe of what is commonly known as “Celtic Art” (better described as the
Early La Tène Style: “Celts”, like “Aryans”, are a modern invention). For a
millennium and a half, from say 2000 to 500 BC, north European pottery,
jewellery, swords and scabbards had usually been decorated with regular
geometrical patterns. This sedate repertoire of triangles, spirals, zig-zags
and rectangles was abruptly replaced around 500 BC by an explosion of
strange curvy things. Prestigious objects are now covered in swinging
S-scrolls, weird hybrid creatures, squiggly tendrils and labyrinthine
patterns: the Battersea Shield (c.350–50 BC), in the British Museum, is a
famous example of the style.
Wells must surely be right that we are dealing not just with new artistic techniques, but with “a whole new way of seeing”. If we want to see the dragons and whirling horses of the Early La Tène style through Iron Age eyes, we have to picture them not under the hard, clear glare of museum spotlights, but moving back and forth through firelight and shadow. “Flickering light creates patterns of illumination and shadows that give objects decorated with zoomorphic ornament a lifelike character, almost as if the creatures are moving with the light.” For Wells, the ambiguity of Early La Tène animal figures – is it a deer, a horse, or something in between? – was part of the point; these strange shapes were designed “to make people look, to attract and hold their attention, to engage them in fascination and problem-solving”.
The origins of this exuberant new ornamental style are still obscure. Wells, all too obviously, has no real explanation to offer: S-curves, spirals and animal ornament were, he suggests, “a way of expressing new feelings of cosmopolitanism”, and hybrid animals served a “symbolic function in the contention for authority in a newly expanding world”. He is much more sure-footed in his account of the second revolution in the European visual experience, between 200 and 100 BC. In the second century BC, decorative styles become simpler, and animals return to being depicted in a naturalistic manner. Crucially, for the first time, we begin to see the mass production of wheel-made pottery, jewellery, coins and figurines right across northern Europe. Under the influence of novel Roman goods and technologies, Iron Age Europe underwent its first “consumer revolution”.
What is really new in this period is the growing uniformity of visual culture. In the earlier Iron Age, every clothing pin and every pot was a distinctive and unique object. The shape and decoration of your handful of cooking pots were different from those of the next village, or even the next house. Your drinking cup carried the impressions of your mother’s or aunt’s fingertips in the clay, and your ram’s-head brooch – perhaps the only “image” that your family saw from one day to the next – was completely individual to you:
“The character of the decoration on a Middle Bronze Age storage jar provided visual reminders of your connections to your family and community, and the details of the stylized representation of a figure on an Early La Tène brooch encoded kinship connections with individuals in neighbouring communities. But what kind of information could be conveyed by a Late Iron Age wheel-made jar that looks exactly like hundreds of others in use in the settlement?”
The prehistoric peoples of Europe are, by definition, voiceless; the absence of writing from their societies is what makes them part of prehistory rather than history. It is very difficult for us to tell exactly what a Neolithic roundhouse or a La Tène dragon scabbard may have meant to their original inhabitants or owners. What Peter Wells evokes so well is not what these artefacts meant, but why they meant what they did. His book deserves to be widely read and admired.
Peter Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman History at Wadham College, Oxford.
Wells must surely be right that we are dealing not just with new artistic techniques, but with “a whole new way of seeing”. If we want to see the dragons and whirling horses of the Early La Tène style through Iron Age eyes, we have to picture them not under the hard, clear glare of museum spotlights, but moving back and forth through firelight and shadow. “Flickering light creates patterns of illumination and shadows that give objects decorated with zoomorphic ornament a lifelike character, almost as if the creatures are moving with the light.” For Wells, the ambiguity of Early La Tène animal figures – is it a deer, a horse, or something in between? – was part of the point; these strange shapes were designed “to make people look, to attract and hold their attention, to engage them in fascination and problem-solving”.
The origins of this exuberant new ornamental style are still obscure. Wells, all too obviously, has no real explanation to offer: S-curves, spirals and animal ornament were, he suggests, “a way of expressing new feelings of cosmopolitanism”, and hybrid animals served a “symbolic function in the contention for authority in a newly expanding world”. He is much more sure-footed in his account of the second revolution in the European visual experience, between 200 and 100 BC. In the second century BC, decorative styles become simpler, and animals return to being depicted in a naturalistic manner. Crucially, for the first time, we begin to see the mass production of wheel-made pottery, jewellery, coins and figurines right across northern Europe. Under the influence of novel Roman goods and technologies, Iron Age Europe underwent its first “consumer revolution”.
What is really new in this period is the growing uniformity of visual culture. In the earlier Iron Age, every clothing pin and every pot was a distinctive and unique object. The shape and decoration of your handful of cooking pots were different from those of the next village, or even the next house. Your drinking cup carried the impressions of your mother’s or aunt’s fingertips in the clay, and your ram’s-head brooch – perhaps the only “image” that your family saw from one day to the next – was completely individual to you:
“The character of the decoration on a Middle Bronze Age storage jar provided visual reminders of your connections to your family and community, and the details of the stylized representation of a figure on an Early La Tène brooch encoded kinship connections with individuals in neighbouring communities. But what kind of information could be conveyed by a Late Iron Age wheel-made jar that looks exactly like hundreds of others in use in the settlement?”
The prehistoric peoples of Europe are, by definition, voiceless; the absence of writing from their societies is what makes them part of prehistory rather than history. It is very difficult for us to tell exactly what a Neolithic roundhouse or a La Tène dragon scabbard may have meant to their original inhabitants or owners. What Peter Wells evokes so well is not what these artefacts meant, but why they meant what they did. His book deserves to be widely read and admired.
Peter Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman History at Wadham College, Oxford.
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