stone replaces wood

— walking on two feet is the only means of mobility.

— virgin land difficult to traverse heavily forrested  rivers and sea major means of communication forests natural barriers

— tracks established by migrating animals open up the higher ground become important trackways

— being in a place travelling through a terrain located through trees, rocks, water ways, shape of land take on mythic status

— menhirs – first monumental markers – as nodes in the landscape for orientation and ritual- way pointers thresholds from one territory to another

— menhirs preceeded by rock art? laid out on ground as markers way points

ground as such – the earth ‘staked out’

— rock art in the form of cup marks, spirals and concentric circles made on grounders overlooking [a standing point for observation] not visible, ‘hidden’ secret locations known by an associated network of users added and elaborated over time at seasonal territorial migrations?

— certain types of earth found in graves carries symbolic meaning

— charcoal, burnt bones as a sacred ground

— ancestors and death ritualised

— burning and cremation as acts of transition- deliberately burnt house become long barrows

— burying things as act of passing ritualising loss death and re birth

— house ritualised as burial place

— transferring symbolic value of places through materiality sea pebbles, quartz, bones, metals, pottery

— materials transfer places  stone taken from preseli mountains transport that place and its symbolic value to the site of stonehenge [in 1923 the petrologist herbert henry thomas identified that bluestone from the hills corresponded to that used to build the inner circle of stonehenge]

— tools as artefacts of transformation hold symbolic value and are exchanged and ‘traded’

— tool artefacts as a means of exchange – socially and politically

— natural stone features understood as ancestral gifts

— natural stone elements incorporated into monuments as a maker of their ritual-ancestral significance

— monuments all important relationship with water as giver of life

— placed in relation to sea [anglesea, cornwall] or rivers or river sources

— tors with water basins suspected of having ritual importance – a place of the ancestors usually highly significant land markers

— situated close to stone monuments and seen their precursors in both form and ritual use [particularly in penwith tilly]

— early travel via rivers sea plains and embed their life creating potential

— gifts given up to rivers and seas

— seasons as measure of time passing moon and sun death and birth

— sun moon as direction and orientation

— ritualised in ceremonial monuments – [newgrange, stonehenge, callanish]

— local monuments oriented towards the seasons sun paths

— sun setting over water set the location of monuments

— change carried by cultural constructions as well as material transformations in subsistence.

— technology and myth [tradition] as generators and drivers of change

— change of subsistence bring about change of being

— being as part of nature – mesolithic/ early neolithic – nomadic hunter gatherer mobile

— being increasingly separated from nature – neolithic cattle herding and domestication increasingly sedentary, bronze age  farmer stable, contained

— rock art mimetic indexical symbolic naturalistic mixed

— re-in-acting and mimicking the form of something as way of holding on to or transferring significance to build new content and meaning

— longhouse to long barrow until the form is establish and the ‘house’ [temple] symbolic

— tor to dolman [quoit] – mimetic transformations through form, shape and material

— distant thing brought close by similitude – form and shape transfers the content and signification through symbolic representation

— abstracted form and representational form are but differential ways of holding symbolic content

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