Antiquity Imagined: Cultural Values in Archaeological Folklore

Abstract

On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hill-sides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. Like many others in diverse places and times, Dr. Watson is trying to extend meaning into an unknown past, to understand and interpret the cultural remains of people about whom he knows virtually nothing. Dr. Watson's mental exercise has been so frequently repeated because the prehistoric past is evident in landscapes all over the world. The fragmentary remains of stone tools, broken pottery, and bone signal innumerable hunting camps and farming villages. More imposing are earth and stone structures built during many post-Paleolithic cultural periods. Megalithic tombs, hill forts, and barrows dot the European countryside. Massive stone buildings and monuments stand in Africa and Asia. In North America, burial mounds, platform mounds, and pueblos remain as visible links to the past. These remains beg analysis and interpretation. Although professional archaeologists have excavated and studied many such monuments during the past century, there is a much longer history of folk interpretation. This essay focuses on the folklore of prehistoric sites in Great Britain and the rest of Europe and in North America, where monuments which were surely significant for their builders have remained important down to the present day, and not simply in an archaeological sense. For example, large prehistoric stone and earthen structures are often focal points within communities. Grinsell notes that 'quite a number of prehistoric . . sites have served as meeting places for a variety of purposes ranging from inauguration of kings or tribal chiefs to the holding of witches' sabbats.'2 Similarly, Michell discusses the numerous churches built on or near prehistoric monuments in Great Britain.3 No less significant is the modern Easter sunrise service held annually at the western Alabama site of Moundville, a large group of platform and burial mounds dating to approximately A.D. 1300. I have also seen what appeared to be a regularly visited hunting camp adjacent to two burial mounds in southern Mississippi and a Dutch megalithic tomb used as a road rally checkpoint. The concern of this essay is not with modern uses as much as with the countless