Page 24 - ModernParadiseFLIPBOOKcomplete

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What was driving this? “With the population increases and more reliable food

resources, people began to collaborate and build incredible things together” including
Stonehenge, whose stones were carefully shaped and worked, taking many hours of
hard work. Its purpose is stated as to keep time, via the mid-winter and mid-summer
sunrises, when gatherings were probably held, thus tracking the end of winter and
the return of light, warmth and crops.
This narrative has a major assumption built into it: that this collaborative building
was only possible after the adoption of agriculture, with its “more reliable food
resources” resulting in “population increases”.

This is the familiar narrative of progress; from prehistoric hunter-gathering or
“foraging”, to the discovery of farming, with its villages, fields of crops and herds of
domesticated and selectively bred animals. Then seamlessly villages grow, merge,
and we have towns and cities: from which we get the word “civilisation”.
Specialisation arises, from potters to priests. And armies. And rulers. Here the
narrative takes on a darker tone. Conflict increases. Fields mean frontiers. As

populations grow, so does the need for organisation which implies hierarchies and
leaders. Chieftains, kings and emperors emerge. So does writing. Accounts and
records can be kept. Prehistory becomes history. Before we know it, we are in
ancient Persia, Greece and Rome.

And yet. This still seems to leave Stonehenge somehow marooned in its Bronze Age
magnificence; still an anomaly. As an explanation, ingenious Neolithic cheese makers
doesn’t quite seem to hack it.

Maybe the problem doesn’t lie so much with the evidence about Stonehenge as with
the narrative in which it is embedded. Archaeology relies heavily on such a narrative.
Archaeology is also by definition localised, and Ian Morris calls it a science of “ifs,
buts and maybes.” A handful of finds is often all there is to work from, and new finds
mean constant revision. It is difficult to build a big picture, let alone a settled one.

There are also fashions amongst archaeologists. The classic one is cultural change.
What drives all the perceived changes in things like burial practices, pottery,
earthworks and tool-making. Must new people have arrived bringing new ideas
(migration or invasion)? Or can new ideas themselves travel without significant
movements of people (cultural invasion)? Barry Cunliffe says that early
archaeologists were influenced by the Roman and British Empires; invasion seemed
the obvious way in which “civilisation” was brought to new territories. But
decolonisation from the 1960’s weakened this idea. Most archaeologists opt for a

nuanced view; the debate is a spectrum rather than a pendulum.