Week 2: The Megalith

The reading was from Tilley "The Materiality of Stone"

Questions:


 * What do these things mean?
 * Sign of fertility?
 * Delineation -> Could these be territory markers?
 * The objects are very obvious in the landscape
 * Marking water sources (site specificity, an exchange between object and environment)
 * Part of a death cult?
 * How were they made?
 * How did society live with/relate to these things?

Shaped menheirs
Not simply erected, actually shaped

Looking a Kerloas menheir we see that a path has been worn around the stone demonstrating the ways in which human beings are interacting with it. Also, there is no "heavy" vegetation around the base of the stone -> demonstrates the way it was made/erected.

Material vs. Monumentality

demonstrates the transportation/importation of unique substances into a landscape.

e.g. Quartz menhir (Morbihan)

Social Geography
menhirs act as a social history -> material ancestry.

Men Marz -> incorporated into Christian lore from it's status as pre-existing (the menhirs became empty signifiers)

Aligned Menhir
At kerflad, three aligned going into a wooded area.

Kercaven:

Pont Labe

Figure & Ground ->

the subject (focus) of the photograph contrasted with the background.

the points of contrast are critical to successful use of photography.

Le Croazou Chapel -> demonstration of how the menhir is still situated in contemporary (or at least later) life

The menhir must be studied in detail, because their erection necessitated their engagement with detail by the workers who built them.

The menhir is at the frontier (transition) between the organic and the artificial. They are the ordering of nature, the manipulation of nature (or is this a post-industrial revolution paradigm bias)

=Friday 9/19=

By Next Week, pick an object.

Visit professor during Office Hours. -- 4:30 - 5:30 M/W --

Or Tom, the TA. -- 11:00 - 1:00 F --

Phemnology
"Persons make things and things make persons."


 * The mutual constitution of humanity and objects.

Maltese Temple:


 * Alignment
 * To the sea.
 * To the winter solstice
 * To the summer solstice

at Mnajdra 3600 - 2500 BC


 * Oriented towards an island off the shore.
 * Raise Thresholds (Doors had high embankments)
 * Emphasized discrete boundaries between spaces (divided them)
 * Part of age = access,
 * With age one becomes bigger, taller -> able to surmont the threshold with (more) ease
 * Threshold also prevented (or at least challenged) the entry of animals.

Shape of the Temple:


 * Reflects the mother goddess worshiped there.
 * Also divides communal space and more cloistered spaces.

Temple as theater


 * The spectacle of the structure
 * Ritual as performative

Social Line


 * As Priestess' once controlled access into a temple
 * Now archeologists do the same thing -> control of access

Entrance/Interior


 * Entryway small, narrow, uni-directional
 * Inner chamber almost always opens, is made bigger/grander
 * Reflects the birth metaphor (birth channel -> world)
 * Also demonstrates a throttling, an architectural articulation of dogma
 * "Only through this narrow passage can you gain access to the truth"

When we talk about these temples, we're talking about walls and floors -> there are no "things" left

So we have to imagine our own spaces as shells -> non-complete space, but is it enough to approach/understand the spaces.

Heidegger


 * Zuhandenheit
 * Vorhandendheit

Think about the traces you leave upon your environment:
 * This is why megastructures, megaliths are focused upon by the archeological community

Kivik Cairn


 * Biggest barrow in all of Scandinavia
 * Probably built in 1700 BCE (beginning of Bronze Age)
 * 8 Slabs with Rock Carving
 * The theory is that this space was an important trading culture that engaged with the Mycaneans and the Anatolians.
 * Therefore the remenants seem to dialog with traditions of those other cultures.

Phemonology


 * Emphasis on the body
 * And how the body experiences the world
 * The body is a nexus of mediation between human and the world
 * Therefore, archeology uses the body as an analog because it is taken as a scale, commonality with which to start to understand a space, a place, and object