Standing with Stones

Further to my post a few days ago about our experiences with Long Barrows and burials of one sort or another while making the film, below is an extract from a much more thoughtful and properly researched piece by Archaeosophia about the Long Barrows of Northern Europe. You can read the complete article here.

Monumental earthen long barrows, or long mounds, lie scattered across the European landscape from Poland to Ireland and represent one of the most tangible and enduring confirmations of Neolithic peoples’ funerary practices. Their elongated forms hug the land, nestling, like the ancestors inside them, against the body of the earth. Though no two are conspicuously alike, their shapes generally conform to similar constructional characteristics, but have been noted to include oval, rectangular, trapezoidal and triangular layouts. This brief investigation will attempt to account for their various guises and locations by identifying whether a parity or difference can be signified in their aspects between the northern and the western barrows and whether this constitutes a continuum or transference of building practices and monumental traditions, or whether they should be seen as separate entities, with distinct and specific identities, which may allow us to glimpse facets of long-departed communities and their inherent weltanschauung.

Primarily, we can identify motivations and changing methodologies, which Neolithic peoples underwent, as a pan-European phenomenon in the middle of the fifth millennium BC in their domestic and ritual activities; and which can be seen as factors for the cosmological shift away from previous burial traditions favouring individual persons in individual graves in the early Neolithic phases, with places such as Kruśźa Zamkowa, Kujavia, (Midgley citing Bednarczyk et al, 1980) Oslonki, (Bogucki, 2003), Elsoo (Modderman, 1970) and where cemeteries of individuals attest to this practise over many generations and appear to show signs of social hierarchies, gender difference and age distinction as evidenced through spatial analyses in association with grave goods and comparatively small amount of radio carbon dated skeletal material. Though this evidence has been shown previously to be problematic (Bonning, 2007), we can extemporise that there was at least some acknowledgment of these individuals interred in these cemeteries as non-representative of true social demarcations as the numbers of remains represent a fraction of the population extant at the time and are therefore to be considered exceptional in their communities for reasons we may never fully understand. The emergence of the Funnel-necked Beaker or Trichtebecherkultur (TRB) Culture out of Poland, country of origin for the long barrow phenomenon, is now dated to c.4500BC, superseding the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture, though the recent RCD’ing of evidence from this area seems to present a terminus post quem 4400BC (calibrated) for the monumental constructions at Sarnowo (after Midgley, 1997b: 681) coupled with the ‘complex fusion of socio-cultural elements of local hunter-gatherers and Central European (”Danubian”) farmers’ (Midgley, 1997a) has been suggested as necessary, though by no means exclusive or solely sufficient yet may represent a diffusion of cultural ideas and objectives in relation to ‘materials, places and landscapes’ (Scarre, 2007: 244) .

Read much more …