Seeing straight
Peter Thonemann
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
L
ook around the room you are sitting in now. How many right angles can you
see? Book-spines, the ceiling, picture frames, door panels, the capital T
and L at the bottom of this page, this page itself. Now spare a thought for
a young domestic servant working at a Christian mission in Malawi in the
late nineteenth century, whose experience was recorded by Robert Laws in
Women’s
Work at Livingstonia (1886):
“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.