Turning to Stone

Abstract

The starting point for this chapter is a work by the German artist Joseph Beuys. ‘7000 oaks’ is an installation which he inaugurated at Kassel, a city that had been damaged during the Second World War (Scholz 1986). Each tree was paired with a basalt stele which was quarried locally. In Beuys’s conception, the installation would change its character over time. For the first few years the standing stones would be the dominant feature, but they would become less conspicuous as the oaks grew to maturity. After that, there might be two very different outcomes. Either new trees would be planted as the old ones died— that was the artist’s plan—or a setting of monoliths would be all that remained with the stones themselves marking the positions of oaks that had disappeared. Beuys was concerned with regeneration in a way that was entirely appropriate in a war-damaged city where the oak trees would gradually replace a setting of rocks. His work was informed by his interest in ecology and played on a contrast between wood and stone which is equally relevant to archaeology. They are very different materials from one another, but both were used in prehistoric structures and employed in distinctive ways. Wood is an organic substance and eventually decays. Stone, on the other hand, is inorganic and for that reason it lasts a long time. The distinction is important in considering ancient architecture (Parker Pearson and Ramilsonina 1998). Of course, there were places in which only one of these materials was available, but there were others where the distinctive ways in which stone and wood were used are especially informative. Two examples illustrate the point. Neolithic houses in Northern Europe were timber constructions, but most of the tombs that accompanied them were made of local stone. In this case, the choice of building material suggests that these dwellings were thought to have a finite lifespan, whilst the tombs of their occupants would have a longer history. Similarly, the Neolithic longhouse at La Haute Mée in north-west France was built of wood but was accompanied by a granite menhir (Cassen et al. 1998).