Theorising Landscapes, And the Prehistoric Landscapes of Stonehenge

Theorising Landscapes, and the Prehistoric Landscapes of StonehengeAuthor(s): Barbara BenderReviewed work(s):Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 735-755Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2804172 .

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THEORISING LANDSCAPES, AND THE PREHISTORIC LANDSCAPES OF STONEHENGE

BARBARA BENDER

University College London

Given the contemporary British obsession with the preservation of the past, it is important to understand what is involved in the construction and appropriation of landscape. The first part of this article critically analyses the work of two landscape pioneers: W.G. Hoskins and Raymond Williams. Both these writers focus on historically constituted landscapes. The second part builds on the work ofRaymond Williams, but in the context of the prehistoric landscapes of Stonehenge. Rather than offering a smooth sequence-oriented narrative, the evidence is reworked along a number ofdifferent axes in an attempt to elucidate the many different ways in which people engaged with and experienced their material (and often immaterial) worlds.

Introduction Archaeologists often use the word 'landscape' to categorise subsistence usage, as in 'a Neolithic landscape of woodland and temporary clearance', thereby describ- ing changes wrought on the surface of the land - something done to the land.1 Or they talk of ritual landscapes. Again something is done to the land but now the land is described in terms of interconnected 'ritual' sites. Whether with regard to subsistence or ritual, culture and nature are separated out, and the archaeologist scans the surface of the land.

These approaches are limited and reflect a particular way of seeing and experiencing the land. They fail to recognize that the way in which people understand and engage with their worlds depends upon the specific time and place and historical conditions; it depends upon gender, age, class and religion. At any given moment and place landscapes are multi-vocal. Moreover, these approaches fail to promote a sense of the active presence of landscapes: people engage and re-engage, appropriate and contest them, use them to create and dispute a sense of identity - whether of self, group or nation (Bender, in press a). Thus landscapes are not only created by and creative of specific cultural, social, political and economic configurations, they are also tensioned by the contradictory claims and counterclaims made upon them.

In the context of a contemporary obsession with preserving and commodif- ying the past, it becomes particularly urgent that we take the measure of landscape, both theoretically and in practice. Elsewhere I have discussed contemporary attempts to appropriate and contest the Stonehenge landscape, and the way in which different 'viewpoints' are empowered (Bender in press b). Gener- ally speaking, those involved in the conservation, reservation and mummification

Man (N.S.) 27, 735-755



736 BARBARA BENDER

of the landscape attempt to 'freeze' the past, attempt to make it something that can be excavated, packaged, presented - something over and done with. They create origin myths rather than a sense of ongoing historical process.

In the first part of this article, I want to examine the work of two landscape pioneers, W.G. Hoskins and Raymond Williams, and to show how, on the one hand, Hoskins's writings can be used to legitimate this sort of disembodied, frozen past, while, on the other, Williams provides a politicised theoretical framework that is less open to such abuse and serves to enlarge our understanding of how landscape 'works'. I shall suggest, that Hoskins tums to the past as a respite from the present, that he creates a nostalgia for particular (mythical) pasts, and that in focusing on patterns of land-use he neutralises the politics involved in the creation of these patterns. In contrast, although his writings are filtered through literary materials and engage less directly with the physical world, Wil- liams provides an analytic consciousness which allows us to recognize both the roots and the historical re-working of our own sense of what landscape means. We can then more radically relativise our own and other people's experience and engagement. His theorizing of 'structured feeling' moves backwards and forwards (without positing causality) between people's changing social and economic conditions and their experience and understanding of their world. His approach permits an investigation of how people engage - in thought and action - with the land. There is multi-vocality, and an acknowledgement of differential empowerment. There is also a very strong sense of the past in the present, rather than, as in the writings of Hoskins, the past cut off from the present.

Hoskins is a historian, Williams, a literary critic. Both are writing about Brit- ish, primarily English, landscapes, although Hoskins touches upon prehistory. In the second half of this article I want to move the discussion to a time and place for which there are no literary sources, where the only evidence is the physical remains below and above ground. In contextualising the prehistoric landscapes of Stonehenge, I shall work with the insights offered by Williams, whilst also noting and working through some aspects of landscape that he neglects. I shall try to show, first of all, that the past cannot be frozen, that as Inglis (1977) puts it:

A landscape is the most solid appearance in which a history can declare itself. It is not back- ground, nor is it stage ... There it is, the past in the present, constantly changing and renewing itself as the present rewrites the past.

And secondly, I shall argue that there are ways of conceptualising past landscapes which are not about neutral patterning, nor about legitimating and homogenising myths of origin, but are about tensioned and contradictory processes. Examining these processes at work in the past will, I hope, permit a clearer understanding of a tensioned present.

Theorizing the landscape: W. G. Hoskins and Raymond Williams

I start with W.G. Hoskins who, in the The making of the English landscape, lovingly describes the way in which the countryside has been reworked over and over again (Hoskins 1985 [1955]). He reads off the history of land occupation and land use from the shape of a hedge, the angle of a road, the size of a field, the layout of a village. He has said of the Ordnance Survey map that 'One could write a book about every few square inches of such a canvas. It is like a painting by



BARBARA BENDER 737

Breughel or a major symphony' (Hoskins 1954: 3). The making of the English landscape is evocative, observant and meticulously researched. It is also angst- ridden, conservative (with a small c), anti-modernist, post-Imperial, and Little Englander. I suggest that it risks being subverted by the Heritage industry as part of its effort to commodify and mummify the English countryside.

Several recent books on contemporary Britain have suggested that in a climate of unwanted change, there is a wish to turn back the clock to a mythologised and sanitised past (Hewison 1987; Wright 1985; Nairn 1977). Moreover, in an era of flexi-capital, imaging the past is good business (Bender in press b; Jacobs 1990). There is little doubt that the sort of pasts peddled by the Heritage industry, with their emphasis on the great and the powerful, or on bucolic villages or soft-glow Victorian back-to-backs, would have horrified Hoskins. He would have reiterated the significance of historical context, of daily life, of change and adaptation. And yet there is also little doubt that, if called upon, those in the Heritage trade would claim Hoskins as the intellectual inspiration for their mummification of the countryside.

One reason for this is that he cuts off the past from the present and creates a sense of nostalgia. His last chapter begins:

Since the last years of the nineteenth century ... and especially since the year 1914, every single change in the English landscape has either uglified it or destroyed its meaning, or both.

He continues: It is a distasteful subject but it must be faced for a few seconds.

Bravely, he faces it: England of the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil, murderous with lorries ... Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians: let us tum away and contemplate the past before all is lost to the vandals (Hoskins 1985: 298).

In his horror at the dislocation and changes, he never pauses to note that his palimpsest is also a landscape of dislocation and change.

He invokes a 'golden age' related directly to his own ancestry. Writing long before the debate on text and subjectivity, he does contextualise himself:

My ancestors were men and women of no particular eminence even in local history, farmers nearly all of them, until the collapse of local communities all over England in the early nineteenth century drove them off the land and into the towns and across the water to the Ameri- can continent (Hoskins 1954: xix).

Hoskins's sense of the up-slope and down-slope of history is coloured by their fate. Unlike the Heritage people, he despises the eighteenth-century landed gentry with their great mansions and landscaped gardens, who 'needed (or thought they needed) more square miles of conspicuous waste to set them off (Hoskins 1985: 170). His 'golden age', what he calls the 'flowering of rural England', was earlier, 1570 to 1700: the apogee of prosperity for the yeoman farmer. Transport was improving, markets were expanding, prices for corn and cattle were high. There was a burst of building activity, farmhouses were refur- bished and enlarged. They were unpretentious and solid, used local materials, created regional styles.

Hoskins called it the 'golden age', but it was very selectively golden. Reading on, we find Hoskins remarking upon 'the savagery of the law and the cheapness of human life in the late sixteenth century' (Hoskins 1954: 250). People were



738 BARBARA BENDER

hung, branded, flogged for pick-pocketing or sheep-stealing. In Devon in 1598 every woman who had a bastard child was to be whipped. In the later seventeenth century there was transportation for any infringement of property rights.

The sorts of fears and nostalgias voiced by Hoskins can all too easily be hi- jacked by less scrupulous people. The focus on ancestors and rootedness can be misappropriated so that those who do not happen to have the tight ancestors or the requisite roots are excluded. Only those who 'belong' can truly understand. As Sartre suggested, it is not enough to have been in the woods a few times, 'one must have made notches in the trees in childhood' so that one can go back and find them 'enlarged in old age' (cited in Wright 1985: 85).

Hoskins is open to appropriation because he does not analyse his own position. Moreover, he describes patterns, rather than explaining them. He documents the landscape as the objective by-product of human action, charting the conse- quences of human intercession (Rowntree in press). He takes feudalism, for example, and describes the material effects of the infield-outfield system, land clearance, and so on. But he explains neither the particular social and economic relations involved, nor the cultural subjectivities. He describes the effects of the Industrial Revolution in graphic detail, and in so doing falls, as Raymond Wil- liams puts it, 'for the last protecting illusion of our time: that it is not capitalism which is injuring us, but the more isolable, more evident system of urban indus- trialisation' (Williams 1973: 96). Hoskins's forebears were forced off the land and into the city, but why, how and what were the processes at work, and what effect did these processes have on them, how were they experienced and understood? And what effect did they have on Hoskins? Perhaps it is because he fails to understand his own alienation that his landscapes risk being tumed into pane- gyrics on the past, on permanence and rootedness, and risk being robbed of their historical graininess.

Turning to Raymond Williams, I want to concentrate on one book, The country and the city (1973). It is not directly about landscape. It is about landscape filtered through literature: about changing socio-economic relations and changing cultural perceptions.

Politically a socialist, Williams works and reworks a seam of cultural material- ism, and seems, as Eagleton (1989) points out, to be consistently one jump ahead of mainstream West European Marxism. In the sixties and seventies, the heyday of structural Marxism, he abandoned the base/superstructure dichotomy and insisted on the interlocking and interleaving of cultural understanding and socio- political structures. He focused, too, on 'history active and continuous: the relations not only of ideas and experiences, but of rent and interest, of situation and power; a wider system' (Williams 1973: 7). The fit that he perceives between social relations and cultural perceptions is nuanced and fine-tuned. He under- stands the political colouring that informs a pastoral poem or a novel, its tones of regionality, patronage, and so on.

Take, for example, the writings of the labourer-poet John Clare. Clare lived at Helpston in Cambridgeshire at the end of the eighteenth century. His life, sensi- bility and writings were deeply affected by the enclosures that occurred around his village in 1809:



BARBARA BENDER 739

There once were lanes in nature's freedom dropt There once were paths that every valley wound-

Indosure came, and every path was stopt;

Each tyrant fix'd his sign where paths were found

-Inclosure, tho'rt a curse upon the land,

And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann'd ...

(cited in Williams 1973: 136).

There was in Clare's writings a direct sense of his humiliation within the new order:

When the prosperity of one class was funded on the adversity and distress of the other, the haughty demand by the master to his labourer was 'work for the little I choose to allow you and go to the parish for the rest - or starve' (a letter quoted in Barrell 1972: 194).

There was also the emotive response to the changes wrought on an intimate childhood landscape and the landscape of his maturity. There is a sense of social unease: existing precariously within his village, labouring and writing, Clare despises his untutored fellow villagers, and is in turn despised and feared by them. And then again he takes, perforce, his literary cues from a polite contemporary and earlier pastoral mode of writing, one that embodies notions of landscape 'prospect' and perspective whereby the eye is supposed to sweep to the horizon and then circle back more slowly to the foreground, whereby the overall im- pression, the total design, takes precedence over detail, and whereby landscape becomes a vehicle for meditation. But Clare comes unstuck because his landscape is all detail, his passion is for the small territory that is, as he puts it, 'in his knowledge'. He is untravelled, has little sense of the comparative. He cannot create distance because his instinct is to describe 'what it is like to be in each place'. For a while he is patronised by the London elite, but his publisher is forever trying to edit out the particular and the vernacular, and his patron, Lord Radstock, is disturbed by the political overtones in his poetry - his 'radical slang'.

Williams, and others such as Barrell (1972) working in the same mode, allow Clare's poetry to engage with landscape in a way that teases apart a very specific historical configuration, a particular place within the social spectrum, a particular education, and so on.

I have taken Clare as an example. In general terms Williams is concerned with exposing the nexus between town and country from the sixteenth century to the present. He is concerned with the linkage between mercantile and later forms of capital and changing sensibilities, what he calls 'structured feeling'. He begins by discussing the desire to create a golden age, always in the past, and notes how it is always referenced on country matters and country modes. The countryside is 'timeless' and 'wholesome', the city is dynamic but also sinful and superficial. Williams is concerned to show, in a way that Hoskins never could, that this division serves to disguise the interpenetration of country and city: the changing social relations in the countryside generate much of the wealth underwriting the mercantile ventures in the city. Indeed, often the same people are involved in both places. The enclosure movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which Clare repudiated so fiercely, was part of these changing relations. It permitted a huge aggrandisement of estates, a more effective exploitation of



740 BARBARA BENDER

labour and of land. These 'improvements' were, of course, at the expense of the small landowner, the tenant farmer and the labourer. Unlike Hoskins, Williams is not suggesting that there was ever, for the peasant or smallholder, a 'golden age', but he does suggest that as long as there existed open fields, a system of inherit- ance by subdivision and rights to grazing and collecting on common land, the smallholder retained 'a marginal independence ... a protection against the expo- sure of total hire' (Williams 1973: 99). The enclosures were not new, they had occurred, differentially and piecemeal, across the country from the fifteenth century, but in the eighteenth century the extent and pace accelerated enormously.

Williams documents the way in which, at this time, words change and take on extra baggage: labourers lose substance and become 'hands'. Words like 'prospect', 'elevation' and 'improvement' become ambiguous (Williams 1973: 121). He explores the way in which philosophy, painting and writing move away from earlier notions of a mutual relationship between nature and culture, to one in which culture dominates nature. And more specifically, he shows how this sense of 'control' works in the arena of the perception and creation of landscape: starting in the seventeenth century in paintings, then moving off the canvas into an 'appreciation' of landscape, then to the creation of landscape. The linear, perspectival apprehension of the land employs the same geometry as merchant trading and accounting, as navigation, land surveying, mapping and artillery. As Gold suggests, the world becomes 'male, mercantile and mathematical' (Gold 1984).

Williams's historical analysis permits us to understand the roots of our own engagement with the land - our sense, as I suggested at the beginning of this article, of the land as surface which we encompass within our ego-centred viewpoint. The literature that Williams explores evokes - by and large - the experience and discourse of those with power, those who inscribed their practices most forcibly upon the land. What also comes across in his work is that the dominant viewpoint is never monolithic; even within the gentrified classes there are resistances and differences. For a slightly later, early nineteenth-century period, Daniels has discussed the 'fractioning' within the circumscribed universe of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park: the landscape of an absentee landlord, of the nouveau riche, of a modest country gentleman, and of a woman of limited means. He also shows how their attitudes change. With revolution in the air the more overweening statements of power expressed in the grand formal parks give way to something more modest and less obvious (Daniels & Cosgrove in press).

Moreover, even in the heyday of landscaping and the lord's-eye view, there are 'alternative' ways of experiencing. I have already referred to the tensioned landscape of Clare. There is also Arthur Young, at the end of the eighteenth century, a great agricultural innovator (who wrote on his wife's tomb 'the grand daughter ofJohn Allen Esq ... the first person to use marl'), a passionate believer in enclosure, who wrote 46 volumes of Annals of Agriculture. In every way the opposite ofJohn Clare, Young was a travelling man, a man discomforted by the open field system, who disliked the circulating cattle ways and the paths that petered out in fields, hated the lack of markers and signposts, and yearned for roads that could take the produce out and away and open up the villages (Wil- liams 1973: 66). Putting together his perceptions of the 'old ways' and Clare's,



BARBARA BENDER 741

we get some sense of an alternative, unlettered landscape: an inturned seasonal world. And Young the improver, lingering over a fine crop of waving corn, or a well kept farmyard, highlights the production and labour that the great land- owners in their perambulations, their gardens and their paintings, sought to dismiss. But again, like Clare, Young is caught up in the contemporary aesthetics. He knows that he should admire 'wild' mountain scapes, and there is a fine uneasiness between his modulated response to a mountain scape and his heartfelt enthusiasm for a fertile stretch of upland cultivation. A person's experience of landscape can change, and towards the end of his life Young became sickened by the effects of the enclosures. He began to doubt the benefits of his 'improvements', began indeed to re-view his landscape: 'I had rather all the commons in England were sunk to the sea, than that the poor should in future be treated on enclosing as they have been hitherto' (cited in Williams 1973: 66).

Williams provides us with many alternative understandings of the landscape, although there are ways in which he could have pushed his literary analysis still further and given us more insight into the views of the 'voiceless' people. Writers such as Gramsci (1971) and Le Goff (1980) make us recognize that the reactions, contestations and subversions of those 'without' power dictate, in some measure, the strategies and discourse of those with power.

Williams, as a literary man, is also less good at appreciating the physicality - and spatiality - of landscape. We need to know more about how elements in the landscape play back into human relations, and more about processes of socialisa- tion and empowerment in spatial as well as temporal terms. We need to mesh Williams's notion of 'structured feelings' with Bourdieu's of 'habitus' and Gid- dens's of 'regionalization' to see what routinised social practice is about - how people's (temporal) movements and interactions with other people through place and space create and re-create ways of being, how what is there constrains what can be done, but also permits of negotiation so that life is always a process of 'becoming' (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1985; Soja 1989: ch. 6).

Caveats apart, I would suggest that Raymond Williams's approach to landscape has enormous potential. His 'structured feelings' work at the intersection between peoples' interests, actions and perceptions and historically given structures and institutions. He allows us to understand how relative and changing landscape is; how, at any given moment, landscapes - even as experienced by a single person - are multiple and contradictory; how they may work on different scales; and how they are reconstituted and reappropriated over and over again.

In what follows I have worked with these ideas, but in a context in which there is no written material, in which the exploration of landscape is dependent upon the landforms themselves and the human remains on and below the surface of the land. I would like to achieve a sense of prehistoric landscape that re-creates - in contradistinction to much archaeological and Heritage writing - a radically 'other' set of experiences, one that is always changing and open to contestation.

Prehistoric Stonehenge

Rather arbitrarily, I confine myself to the time during which most of the monuments that are visible in the Stonehenge area today were physically created. Even then it is a period of no less than two thousand years, eighty or more generations



742 BARBARA BENDER

- roughly 3500 to 1500 BC (calibrated). It spans the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.

Rather than proceeding in an orderly - temporal - fashion, I have chosen to comb through the prehistoric sequence several times over, to pick up on different elements of landscape. For those who prefer a more sequence-oriented approach, the summary presented in figure 1 may be useful. Figure 2 is a map of Sto- nehenge and its environs.

In relation to the prehistoric landscape I want to touch on the following themes: (1) the indivisibility of nature and culture; (2) conceptual boundaries within the landscape; (3) the possibility that, on occasion, the act may be more important than the material result; (4) differential experience of the landscape; (5) contested landscapes, and (6) the appropriation, over and over again, of past landscapes.

Indivisibility of nature and culture I noted, at the beginning of this article, that archaeologists tend to focus on the surface of the land, and to talk of things done to the land, of culture dominating nature. In his The earth, the temple and the gods (1962) Scully argues passionately, and repetitively, for an alternative approach. He is concerned to understand, in the context of prehistoric Greece, the depth of the relationship between, on the one hand, the temples and processual ways (movement within a place, movement along a path), and on the other, the surrounding topography - a topography which is anthropomorphised and mythologised:

not only were certain landscapes ... regarded by the Greeks as holy and as expressive of specific gods, or rather as embodiment of their presence, but also ... the temples and the subsidiary

Enclosures 4000 N BC Long Barrows E

0 Cursus L

I ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I Stonehenge ditch T

5 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1 3000 Durrington Walls C: BC

Woodhenge

Stonehenge

2000 B BC R

0 N z E

FiG.-uIUE 1. Calibrated dates.



BARBARA BENDER 743

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FIGuR-E 2. Stonehenge and its environs.



744 BARBARA BENDER

buildings of their sanctuaries were so formed in themselves and so placed in relation to the landscape and to each other as to enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict, the basic meaning that was felt in the land (Scully 1962: 3).

Nature and culture, in this account, are not separated. It is hard for the archaeologist to understand how people might have concep-

tualised their relationship to the land. It is, of course, extremely difficult to understand the 'world views' of 'a people without history' (Wolf 1982). There is evidence, but the interpretation is problematic and the sort of imaginative leap that Scully's thesis demands is alien to the training of most archaeologists. In this section, which is both longer and more tentative than those that follow, I would like to mention briefly some ethnographic and historic conceptualisations that may be pertinent to a consideration of prehistoric Stonehenge.

In the context of Arnhem Land, Australia, Taqon has recendy discussed the way in which not only the topography, but also the substance of the landscape, empowers. He talks about the way in which the aesthetic or symbolic values influencing the manufacture of stone tools relate to ideas of power. These ideas include:

the power of Ancestral Beings that created the landscape, including rocky outcrops used as quarries; the power and properties of stone as a substance, and especially quartz and quartzite; the power of initiated males who made, used and controlled access to certain stone tools.... Some of this power was hamessed during the manufacture and later was heightened through ritual, story-telling and other practices (Ta,on 1991).

This resonates with Jackson's comment, in the quite different context of early church-building, that 'the early church fathers interpreted the quarrying, the shaping and polishing and putting into place of the stones used in building the churches in theological terms' Jackson 1984). There is a further parallel between Tacon's observation, in the Aboriginal context, that objects exhibiting brightness (fat, blood, quartz, quartzite, cross-hatched white pigment) are both aesthetically pleasing and spiritually charged, and Sedlmayr's perception that the stained glass and stone of an early medieval cathedral act on one another to "'shine", "sparkle", "glitter", "dazzle" ... It would be false to say the cathedral denies its stone character. It keeps it throughout, only it idealizes it by giving it a gemlike, transfigured, vibrant, crystalline aspect' (cited inJackson 1984).2

In the conclusion to his article, TaSon notes that in many societies, bone and stone are symbols of persistence and immortality, and that 'the earth is a symbol of fertility and femaleness because of the plant life it nurtures and supports. As a counterpart to earth's more fragile produce, hard stone was perceived as a male phenomenon' (Taqon 1991). Eliade suggests a more complex interplay between male and female substance:

the stone parentage of the first men is a theme that occurs in a large number of myths. Deu- calion threw 'the bones of his mother' behind his back to repopulate the world. These 'bones' of the earth-mother were stones; they represent the Urgrund, indestructible reality, life and holiness, the matrix whence a new mankind was to emerge (Eliade 1962: 43).

Here we find one of those ritual elisions through which processes of social reproduction ( the male 'stone') come to encompass - to make possible - biol- ogical reproduction (female 'earth'). 'In the primitive view of nature, stone is not dead, it is a concentration of power and life. That is why the touching of sacred stones brings fertility' Jackson 1984).



BARBARA BENDER 745

We can ponder a gendered landscape and gendered substances, and be wary of making invariant correlations between particular substances and gender. We should, perhaps, acknowledge that very important gendered components may be less visible in the archaeological record. Things that grow, that are fertile, that are more fragile, may have formed an important counterpoint to hard rock and white chalk.

Bearing these general points in mind, what of prehistoric Stonehenge? I want here to consider briefly the changing relationship of monuments to the land - to forces within or below the surface and above the surface of the land, and to the power of particular 'natural' substances such as chalk, sarsen, bluestone and water. I offer the tentative suggestion that, in the way that 'things' are constructed, there may be a gendering of monuments, artefacts and landscape.

In the Early Neolithic, c. 3500 BC, before the construction of Stonehenge, in a world of temporary settlements, wooden houses, shifting fields and woodland clearances, where wild resources still formed a major part of subsistence, a few durable constructions, long mounds and causewayed enclosures made of earth and chalk, were sited close to each other on higher ground (Bradley 1991; Richards 1990). Barrett has recently suggested that within a long fallow economy with much seasonal movement, these were seasonal and communal 'places' in a landscape of paths (Barrett 1991; in press). But interestingly, it also seems that the long mounds were sited to be viewed from below. As already noted by Stukely in the mid-eighteenth century, seen from the lower ground their tops false-crest the sky-line, they relate to the hills behind them (Piggott 1985: 68).

The dramatic chalk whiteness of the long mound and of the ditches and banks of the causewayed enclosures were reiterated on a larger scale later in the Early Neolithic, around 3100 BC, in the cursus and, later still, around 2800 BC, in the bank and ditch enclosure at Stonehenge. Moreover, the shapes of the earlier constructions - the long mound, the circular enclosure - were repeated and mag- nified in cursus and circle. There was continuity in substance, shape and, perhaps, in orientation: both the long mounds and the initial entrance to the Stonehenge circle may have been aligned on the moon (Burl 1987: 65).

There was another very significant orientation within the landscape, though one that is difficult to interpret. The double chalk-banked Stonehenge cursus ran for nearly 3 km across hill and valley. This line, or what it signified of something above or below the surface, is referenced in other monuments. Sometime after the cursus had been constructed, the white circular bank and ditch at Stonehenge were built directly to the south of the centre point of the cursus. After several more centuries had passed, the Cuckoo Stone was placed on the line of the cursus 900m further to the east. And around 2500 BC Woodhenge was constructed on the same line a quarter of a mile beyond the Cuckoo Stone.

In the later Neolithic, c. 2500 BC, at a time when Stonehenge was more or less abandoned and sky orientations seem to have been less marked, a connexion was established between the huge wood henge at Durrington Walls and the river Avon, and, thirty kilometres to the north, between the stone-girt site of Avebury and the Kennet. At Avebury there is also a dramatic link-up between the Ave- bury circle, the Avenue and Sanctuary, and the great stepped white mound of Silbury. From the Sanctuary the 'hill' takes up the low ground, and picks up the



746 BARBARA BENDER

sky-line between two long hill ranges Jarman, pers. comm.). Moving either down or up the Avenue the hill comes in and out of sight, and it can again be seen from the great encircling bank (perhaps a viewing platform) at Avebury.3 There are, or were, other artificial white hills, one to the east of Avebury in the grounds of what is now Marlborough College, another southward at Marden on the route between Avebury and Stonehenge, and perhaps yet another at Silk Hill, 5 km northeast of Stonehenge.

The white chalk is not only used in monumental constructions but is also carved into small objects such as axes and balls.4 The potential gendering already noted in the reiteration of long mound and round enclosure and, as shown below, in the alternation of tall stones and wide ones at Avebury, is picked up again in the juxtaposition, in the ditch at Stonehenge, of two chalk balls with a horncore, or - this time in flint - in the placement of fine flint axes and balls in the ritual pits south of Durrington Walls.

In this later Neolithic period, c. 2500 BC, it is not just the white chalk that empowers, but also sarsens and bluestones. At first, in the construction of the circle and avenue at Avebury, the sarsens, which come from a neighbouring valley, are not worked, although they may have been selected for shape, with an alternation of long and broad stones. Later, in the Early Bronze Age (c. 2000 BC), while the sarsens in the Avebury circle are left intact, forty great stones from the neighbouring valley are dragged 30 km across the downs to Stonehenge, where they are shaped and smoothed. There is a quite powerful sense of increasing human 'control'. The occasional pecked motif of axe, dagger and, perhaps, anthropomorph on the sarsens suggests that the power of the stones was harnessed to other potent symbols. These symbols may also have been gendered, but not necessarily along the most obvious divide; there are, for example, related carvings at the entrances to the rock-cut chalk tombs in the Paris Basin, only marginally earlier than this phase of Stonehenge, of a female with breasts and a necklace, with an axe slung around her waist.

Early Bronze Age Stonehenge incorporated not just the sarsens but also smaller bluestones which had been transported by river and across land either from the Preseli mountains over 200 miles away in southern Wales or from a dismantled monument en route. They too were worked and reworked. That the Preseli bluestone is highly valued and very powerful is suggested by its use for two groups of stone axes, and by the placement of bluestone chips in graves and below mounds in the Stonehenge area.

In this Early Bronze Age remodelling of Stonehenge, the avenue was rea- ligned, so that people standing inside the stone setting could see the sun rise over the Heel stone at the Summer Solstice. The great sarsen trilithon may also have been set up so that at the Winter solstice the sun set between the two uprights G. Richards 1991: 128). Later in the Early Bronze Age, the avenue was lengthened, and while the first, older part aligns to the summer solstice, the extension is made to curl around over the King Barrow Ridge and down to the river Avon. This was probably the route along which some of the stones were dragged. It may also have been a way of connecting two very powerful elements, the stones and the water. It was also at this time that the one hundred foot deep Wilsford Down shaft was dug, and offerings were thrown down into the water.



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In this Early Bronze Age period there was a further, extraordinary, reworking of the chalk. Where the old long mounds had false-crested the hilltops, the linear cemeteries of small mounds constructed in the Early Bronze Age often sil- houetted the sky-line surrounding Stonehenge. When the great gales of 1990 upended the beech trees that capped the mounds along the King Barrow Ridge, the tops of the mounds were ripped off. Looking down into the mounds it was possible to see that some had been capped and recapped with chalk, but others were built entirely of turf. These are very large mounds, and the surrounding soils are very thin. The removal of the turf to create the mounds would have exposed a great sheet of white bedrock. The white chalk has retained its symbolic potency, but with these Bronze Age developments there seems to be a stronger - more aggressive - human intercession in the landscape than before.

Conceptual boundaries within the landscape In their contemporary National Trust/English Heritage setting, the prehistoric monuments are grassed over, roped off, set apart. Although we know little about the Neolithic settlement, because so much of it was fluid and impermanent, it is clear that the monuments were not segregated off within the landscape. In the Earlier Neolithic the major area of settlement was probably along the King Barrow Ridge to the East of Stonehenge, and the long barrows and the causewayed enclosure were on the edge of more sparsely occupied territory (Harding 1991; J. Richards 1991: 21). Even so, the long mounds, causewayed enclosures, cursus and the first bank and ditch at Stonehenge, were all contained within the area of settlement and everyday land use G. Richards 1984; 1991: 78). Clearance, flint working, planting and grazing washed up to the very edges of the monuments.

Because settlements were so impermanent, we cannot get a sense of the ritual of everyday coming and going, but the evidence from the causewayed enclosures again suggests that things we hold apart, they combined. The enclosures were used for exchanges, for feasting and for burial. For some people, at least, the funerary process was long drawn out: after primary inhumation (perhaps in mortuary enclosures, like the one at Normanton Down), their skeletons were disarticulated and some of the bones, often the skulls and long-bones, were placed in the ditches of the enclosure, others eventually came to rest in mortuary houses below the long mounds. Equally, the bones of animals used in ritual contexts, particularly oxen in the earlier Neolithic, were placed sometimes in the ditches, sometimes - specifically the skulls - in the mortuary houses or, a litde later, within the circle at Stonehenge (Thorpe 1984; Burl 1987). Seemingly, the rituals of life and death were not anchored in one particular context; they moved between contexts.

In the later Neolithic, there seems to be the beginning of a drawing apart of the public and the domestic, and of the rituals of life and death, going hand in hand, as we shall see below, with greater social differentiation. At Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, artefacts are absent from the area directly around the sites, even though the sites lie within a general area of quite intensive occupation (Harding 1991). Within the wood henges there is evidence of intensive



748 BARBARA BENDER

exchanges, feastings and depositions, but, unlike the earlier enclosures, there are almost no human bones (C. Richards & Thomas 1984).

This separating out within the landscape is still more pronounced in the Early Bronze Age. At the time when Stonehenge is re-modelled in stone, the surrounding area is left empty, or perhaps is used only for grazing. The hamlets hold their distance. Though the small fields, more permanent and bounded, and the droveways and corrals, date mainly to the later Bronze Age, this more bounded landscape was probably first established in the Early Bronze Age (Richards 1990: 263). Certainly the Early Bronze Age burial mound cemeteries are bounded, and they too, hold their distance. There are at least ten cemeteries within a four mile radius of Stonehenge (and more than a hundred isolated mounds), yet very few are within a mile of the stone circle.

The act and the material result It may often have been the case, and there are good ethnographic analogies for this, that it was the process of working the landscape - the act itself - rather than the creation of an enduring material product, that was significant (Kuchler in press). Precisely because such acts do not leave a mark on the land, they are not easy for the archaeologist to discover. A couple of examples can nevertheless be adduced. During the Earlier Neolithic, when the long cursus was being constructed close to Stonehenge, another smaller one was built to the northeast. It was built in two stages. In the second stage, the ditches were dug, the chalk flung up onto the banks, offerings were placed in the ditches - and then the banks were shovelled back G. Richards 1991: 83). Later, at a time when Stonehenge was more or less abandoned, and settlement and ritual had moved further East, a series of large holes were dug hugging the inside perimeter of the Stonehenge bank. But they were filled up almost immediately, sometimes with a cremation placed in the back-fill.

Alternative landscapes At the beginning of the Neolithic, the long mounds were relatively small, and they housed a number of disarticulated inhumations, female and male, old and young. It may be that, in the context of a landscape that was still extensively rather than intensively cultivated, where the boundaries were fluid, and where there was much seasonal movement with pastoral herds or in pursuit of wild resources, these mounds and their disarticulated contents represented claims to communal ownership of the land via the ancestors. They were, perhaps, 'directed towards establishing a fixed place and an architectural context for the execution of ancestral rites' (Barrett in press).

Several hundred years later, towards the end of the fourth millennium, long mounds were still being built. They were larger, but they only covered a single, usually male and articulated inhumation, or no burial at all. There would seem to have been both a greater acknowledgement of the individual and an exclusion of many 'categories' of people, most obviously of women.

Already in the form and construction of the long mounds and causewayed enclosures, and more so with the cursus and early bank and ditch at Stonehenge, there is the potential for social differentiation: who goes where, who does what,



BARBARA BENDER 749

who sees what - the spaces and the entrances work to define and differentiate peoples' respective places in the world (Barrett in press; Thomas 1991; Thomas & Tilley in press).

In the Later Neolithic, there is evidence of increasing communal labour (the southem circle at Durrington Walls would have required 11,000 work hours, the ditch at Durrington Walls 500,000 hours, while it has been estimated that it would have taken 35 million basket loads of chalk and soil, or 18 million work hours, to build Silbury Hill [Startin & Bradley 1981; Burl 1979: 133]). But the monuments created by this labour served to exclude most of the labourers. The form of the great and small henges constructed on the high ground to the east of Stonehenge suggests increasingly formal social divisions: insider/outsider; actor/audience.

The great henge at Durrington Walls has a massive external bank, then a great ditch, and then small tight circular settings of post-holes. Within the henge there is 'an area of rigidly defined setdement activity, constructed and used in a manner embodying equally rigid ideological codes' (Richards 1990: 269). There are also tight concentric timber settings at the neighbouring smaller Woodhenge & Co- neybury; and Avebury, to the north, is similar to Durrington Walls, except that the circular settings are made of stone. At all these henges there is a suggestion of intense, circumscribed activity, and of a division between those outside on the great bank, and those half hidden within the tight inner circles (C. Richards & Thomas 1984). As Burl puts it: 'One could look, but one could not see' (Burl 1979). Barrett has begun to explore in detail the way in which movement and orientation, down an avenue, within a circle, in front of, or behind a stone, is part of the way in which authority - or lack of authority - can be defined, refined, sometimes perhaps even contested: 'At certain places, in front of certain backdrops and behind certain screens, words are spoken and others left unsaid, creating the discourse of a social practice' (Barrett in press). He also points out that through time, from the early Stonehenge bank and ditch, through the steady embellishment and the increased density of the concentric timber structures at Durrington Walls, and back to the rebuilding in stone of Stonehenge, movement, operation and observation are increasingly restricted.

Today we see Stonehenge as a 'fixed' and bounded landscape. We should perhaps envisage it as a landscape that concertinas inwards and outwards, depend- ing on who you are, and when you live. Certainly the 'world view' for some people in the later Neolithic concertinas outwards. At the earlier causeway camps there had been exotic pottery and stone axes, mainly from southwest England, suggesting that some people had knowledge of distant places. By the time of Durrington Walls these stone axe exchanges were on a considerable scale and from further afield; some people must have known, even if at fourth or fifth hand, of Cornwall, Wales and the Lake District. Many of the ritual deposits of fine grooved ware, or the occasional engraved chalk plaques, have motifs - lozenges, spirals, meanders, dots and lines - almost identical to those used in the Boyne valley in Ireland and Skara Brae in Scotland (Burl 1987: 93). And again, for some people, there was not just the knowledge of a larger world 'out there', but also more intensive contacts, ceremonial meetings, with people in the Ave- bury area, 30 km to the north.



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By 2100 BC some of the farming communities were beginning to use copper and bronze, and some of the people, within some of the communities, were meshed into an extensive west European exchange network deploying fine drinking vessels and warrior equipment. These objects were part of a prestige system in which, it seems, there is a move towards a more individualistic warrior ethos. There is less masking of status: important individuals - in the first instance mainly male, but later both male and female - were buried separately, with their funerary paraphernalia, in flat graves or below round mounds. As Thomas points out, in the Early Neolithic the monument was the dominant element in the symbolic order and human bodies were secondary materials which could be broken down into constituent bones to be redeployed and rearranged (Thomas 1991). Now, instead of the protracted, communal, series of rites associated with the long mounds, there is a single funerary ceremony tightly focused on the individual, and, in the careful placement of mounds or secondary internments, on the individual's place within a descent line (Barrett in press). The increasing variability in mound morphology and the increasingly formalised and differentiated grave assemblages through the Early Bronze Age suggest subde distinctions between people during life, or after death. It is quite likely that these tighter statements about people's affiliations and descent go hand in hand with tighter control of the land, more land-intensive subsistence practices and increasingly physical boundedness within the landscape (Barrett 1991).

In this Early Bronze Age period the sense of exclusion at the reconstructed Stonehenge is palpable. Already in 1655, Inigo Jones suggested that the henge was a barrier 'into which it was unlawful for any profane Person to enter', while outside, 'the promiscuous common Multitude' attended 'the ceremonies of their solemn though superstitious Sacrifices' (cited in Burl 1987: 209). Burl has pointed out how the carved axes are only visible to the elite 'actors' moving up the avenue towards the stones, while the dagger, other axes and the (disputed) anthropomorph are in the most obscure part of the inner ring (Burl 1987: 205).

Thus by the Early Bronze Age, peoples' experience of place and space was increasingly differentiated. For the elite there would be many comparative landscapes. Even for the less than elite, landscapes were enlarged. The stones for Stonehenge had to be brought from distant places; and Stonehenge was a ritual centre of much more than local renown - the large number of burial mounds (over four hundred) indicate that funerary corteges of important people came from distant places.

Contested landscapes

Human agency is often discussed in terms of 'negotiation'. Negotiation is a word much used in the context of labour relations, that neutralises the element of confrontation, contestation, resistance, subversion. These too are contemporary words which may seem inappropriate to societies that lack the heterogeneity, alienation, secularity and restlessness of our own. Nonetheless in any society, because people are differently located, have different conceptualisations and make different demands, there is always the potential for tension and contestation. Some of the more obvious prehistoric contestations are quite dramatically port- rayed in the changing spatial dynamics of the Stonehenge landscape.



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The virtual abandonment of the area around Stonehenge in the later Neolithic - the silted bank and ditches, the neglected cursus - as well as the blocking up of the long mounds and the physical movement of the settlement and ritual arena to the easterly ridges and the river beyond, signal an antagonism, and a rejection of at least some part of an internalised, as well as an external landscape. Nonethe- less, though neglected, Stonehenge still retained some sanctity, for cremations (associated with long bone pins) were placed within the abandoned ditch and bank and in the Aubrey holes.

Later again, in the Early Bronze Age, ridge and river are abandoned, and the action moves back to Stonehenge.5 There follows an extraordinary period in which, as part of the active constitution and reconstitution of a more restless and competitive society, the stone settings at Stonehenge are shuffled and re-shuffled like a pack of cards.

Appropriating the past Contestation will often go hand in hand with appropriating the past. This can be done in ways that mask change by stressing continuity, or by a more brutal appropriation. Thus in the Early Neolithic, the radical shift from communal disarticulated burials towards individual, articulated burials is disguised by the retention of the long mound. The re-cutting and recleaning of the ditches of the causewayed camps, and the addition of new circuits of ditches, make a claim on earlier labour and construction (Edmonds in press; Bradley 1984). Equally, the building of the great cursus was perhaps 'legitimised' by the construction of a very large, but empty, long mound at the east end.

Compare this to the Early Bronze Age, where there is an aggressive, piecemeal appropriation. The wood henges are abandoned, but the wood-working construction techniques are carried over to the ancient site of Stonehenge. Some of the bluestones may have been taken from another ritual site.6 The powerful stones from the Avebury region are appropriated - though, interestingly, the stones are not taken from the henge but from the neighbouring valley where they outcrop naturally. At Avebury the stones had been used in their natural state, at the new Stonehenge, the stone itself is worked (i.e. controlled) - using the old wood-working techniques. The carving of motifs on the stones goes back to an earlier tradition usually associated with megalithic tombs, and the repertoire of axes, dagger(s) and, perhaps, female anthropomorphs, spans the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.7 The sky orientation of the old Stonehenge - unused for at least five hundred years - is resuscitated, and elaborated. The Early Bronze Age cemeteries often seed themselves around long mounds, the last of which had probably been constructed a thousand years earlier. In this Early Bronze Age a ragbag of 'invented tradition' is pulled in from two thousand years of earlier landscapes (Hobsbawm 1983).

The appropriation trails into the later Bronze Age when Wessex is no longer so centrally placed: the bluestone circles are re-jigged but then abandoned before completion; the avenue is lengthened; small mounds with cremations are added to the earlier cemeteries; and bounded field-systems incorporate earlier round barrows.



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Finally, in the later Bronze Age, through the Iron Age and the Roman period, the Stonehenge area seems to have been more or less abandoned, or perhaps avoided. The monuments have lost their official power - they are no longer an arena in which power is legitimated by being linked with the ancestors or the gods. But perhaps the stark abandonment speaks to an unofficial, unofficiated, power. When the record re-opens we find that the Anglo-Saxons, who rarely bothered to rename natural landscape features, have laid claim to the Celtic Choir Gaur, it has become Stan Hencg.

The material record for a preliterate period is inevitably coarse-grained and incomplete. Nonetheless it is - sometimes - a more democratic record than one based purely upon written sources. It is the material imprint of what Bourdieu calls habitus, the normal, banal, habitual but nonetheless socially and culturally specific environment in which, and through which, people negotiate their lives. It is also the imprint of more consciously created realms of social knowledge and control. Of course the record remains weighted in favour of those with power: they produce the more distinctive, more durable remains. To some degree, the world of the less powerful has to be reconstructed from absences in the record, for example the lack of permanent burials. The world of the less powerful is also imaged in the 'discourse' of the powerful: spaces are constructed to keep 'them' at a distance, to prevent them from 'seeing' even though their labour created those spaces.

Conclusion Discussing Raymond Williams's work in the first part of this article, I provided a short historical account in order to contextualise the way in which our notions of landscape derive from a very specific cultural and socioeconomic configuration. In the second part, I have tried to move beyond the taken-for-granteds of our experience and engagement with the land to explore elements of a changing prehistoric landscape. This section was written across the grain of historical narrative in an attempt to move towards a more multi-faceted analysis of the ways in which people's experience of the land is shaped and changed, and the way in which the land engages with experience rather than simply reflecting it. Though I do not mind forgoing a sense of lineal change, I am concerned that, in holding the facets apart, I risk losing their interrelationships. There is a danger, which I hope the reader will have circumvented, that 'feeling' (as in the section on the indivisibility of nature and culture) and 'structure' (as in the more politically and socially oriented sections) have been pulled too far apart. On the one hand, to talk about 'appropriation' or 'contestation' only begins to make sense if we have some small understanding of the symbolic universe that is being appropriated. On the other, the empowering of the stones, or other elements in nature, is dependent upon the particularities of the social, economic and political relations, and is part of the process through which people are both created by, and creators of, the world in which they live.

NOTES

I would like to thank Richard Bradley for inviting me to give an early version of this paper at Reading, and both him and his students for encouraging comments. I would also like to thank



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the Archaeological Society, Chris Tilley and Julian Thomas at Lampeter, again for inviting me to speak and for helpful feedback. Most particularly I want to thank Julian Richards for walking around the Stonehenge area with me and for sharing his profound knowledge of the region.

l Note also the way the archaeologist registers a site from above as a series of snapshots. In contrast, the visitor experiences it on the ground as a series of encounters. 'The temporal element of the visitors' encounter is replaced by the landscape view available to the external observer. The site is seen as if at one moment, and the history of the site is represented as a sequence of such moments. A view established from a point outside the material conditions under study, creates the image of an "objective record"' (Barrett in press).

2 I would like to thank the editor of Man for bringing to my attention an article by Howard Morphy (1989) which explores in fine detail, in the context of the Yolngu of northern Australia, the brightness of a cross-hatched picture, of fat, blood, red ochre and feathers, the lightness and joy these engender, the way they interdigitate with song and ritual, and how, as part of the sacred law of the ancestors, they empower both ownership of the land and those that take part in the ritual.

3 Ucko et al. (1991: 262) suggest that the avenue may not have been the routeway. People may have moved along the outside of the avenue, the space between 'might have been preserved for spirits while mere mortals trod a humbler route'.

4 In a very interesting paper on the Breton Neolithic, Thomas & Tilley (in press) suggest symbolic linkages between different material expressions, from megalithic structure to axe and pottery. Many of these, including a strong link between long mound, menhir and stone axe, may hold for the Stonehenge area.

S A series of very early Bronze Age large bowl barrows follow the King Barrow Ridge close to Durrington Walls. There were no later additions of more fancy barrows. The lack of continuity suggests that the area was more or less abandoned as the action moved westwards (Richards 1990).

6 There is evidence of tenons that have been battered away, and of mortice holes, suggesting that originally the bluestones were part of a lintelled construction (Richards, pers. comm.).

7 The closest parallels for the carved 'anthropomorph' - if such it be - come from the Breton megalithic tombs. Such tombs, though they date to the Middle Neolithic, were frequently re- used for Early Bronze Age Bell Beaker burials, and there were certainly strong connexions between Brittany and Wessex. The dagger and axes are similar to those that were in circulation as part of the prestige exchange network of the Early Bronze Age.

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Theoriser les paysages: les paysages prehistoriques de Stonehenge.

Resume Vu l'obsession britannique actuelle pour la preservation du patrimoine et du passe culturel, il est important de comprendre la faqon dont les paysages ont et construits et appropries. La premi6re partie de cet article offre un examen critique des travaux de deux pionniers de l'6tude des paysages: W. G. Hoskins et R. Williams. Ces deux auteurs se sont surtout interesses a la constitution historique de paysages. S'appuyant sur les th6ses de R. Williams, qu'elle developpe en les appliquant aux paysages prehistoriques de Stonehenge, la deuxi6me partie de I'article presente les faits archeolo- giques, sans chercher a en offlir une narration sequentielle, polie et ordonnee. Au contraire, 1'evidence est repensee a partir d'un certain nombre d'axes mettant A jour les diftTrentes manieres dont les gens ont pu s'investir dans leurs mondes materiels (et immateriels), et en faire 1'experience.

Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London WClE 6BT, U.K.



Theorising Landscapes, And the Prehistoric Landscapes of Stonehenge

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