Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Who built Avebury and Stonehenge? Why and when were more than 600 stone circles, and thousands of barrows and cairns, erected in prehistoric Britain? What were they used for and what do they tell us about the beliefs and culture of their builders? Riddles in Stone is a history of the extraordinary variety of answers that have been given to these questions, by amateurs and professionals, archaeologists and astronomers, mystics and systems theorists.
While modern excavation and radiocarbon dating has undoubtedly advanced our knowledge of the sequence and date of the monuments, their purpose and meaning is still hotly debated. Indeed no previous century has changed its mind so often as the twentieth - or provided such a welter of differing opinions. Each theory has as much to say about its own time as it has about prehistory. The stones have been used to enhance the authority of the Bible, to endorse the civilizing mission of the British Empire - and to argue that the Ancient Britons could work a computer. In a reaction to modern industrial society, they have been credited with spiritual powers and natural energies. Even the views of modern archaeologists often seem to reflect the latest academic fad, rather than a lasting solution. Riddles in Stone is an entertaining and instructive account of a debate on a subject of endless fascination.Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781852855666 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
Publication date: | 01/15/2007 |
Pages: | 332 |
Product dimensions: | 6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.73(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
IllustrationsIllustration AcknowledgementsPreface1 Monuments in the Landscape2 Pagan Traditions3 The Church and the Devil4 In Medieval Literature5 The Wonder of Britain6 John Aubrey and Friends7 William Stukeley8 William Borlase9 Romantic Druids and the Picturesque10 Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington11 The Barrow Diggers12 Stone Age Circles and Stone Age Man13 Diffusionism14 Megalith Builders15 Beaker Folk16 Stonehenge and the Wessex Culture17 The Sun and the Stars18 Sir Norman Lockyer and his Followers19 Stonehenge Decoded20 Pi and Pythagorean Thoughts21 Alfred Watkins and the Old Straight Track22 John Michell and The View over Atlantis23 Mysterious Britain24 Earth Mysteries25 Radiocarbon and other Revolutions26 Sex and the Dead27 Landscape, Culture, Society28 EpilogueGazetteerNotesBibliographyIndex