What Came First? The Monuments or The Agriculture?

Or, was the Neolithic Revolution, during which agriculture and thus populations exploded, brought about by the need to feed large groups who gathered to build (and later worship and celebrate at) monumental structures? Or was advanced agriculture already taking place which then allowed for the feeding of large groups of builders and later worshipers and celebrants?

This is something that has long puzzled me. It's also been a subject of debate among archaeologists and historians for years. And while this fascinating archaeological dig in Turkey doesn't actually settle the problem it promises of great things to come. For, you see, only about 5% of the entire area has been excavated and it will be many years before everything is uncovered. But what has been uncovered is amazing.

But the location, age and sheer size of Gobekli Tepe have led some to posit a radically different explanation for the change. "The intense cultivation of wild wheat may have first occurred to supply sufficient food to the hunter-gatherers who quarried 7-ton blocks of limestone with flint flakes,"

What is most interesting about the site is that, so far, it looks to have been constructed right smack at the point when the semi-nomads settled into communities. In other words, this site was built by a new breed of men who, unlike everyone before them, began to live in structured communities. This is one of the most important time periods in the history of the human race. Settled communities, brought on by the need to sew, watch over and harvest crops, lead to everything that we think of as civilization: planned cities, organized work forces, writing, mathematics, etc. If not for this radical change the human race might not have even survived!

And, interestingly enough, the sudden change might not have been so sudden and may have taken place for a completely different reason.

For many experts, climate change was behind the transformation. Global temperatures had been warming gradually since the last Ice Age. Between 10,800 and 9,500 b.c., they suddenly plummeted again.

From a pagan perspective I can't help but wonder about the role of early religion within this debate. After all, the ancient monuments weren't just built with simple, pointless partying in mind. Some of them were probably temples dedicated to specific deities and many of them were built to mark solstices, equinoxes and other celestial events. So, what role did that play? Was there a religious revolution which then brought about the agricultural revolution? Did the ancient pagans decide to build big to show veneration for their gods which then brought about the need for more food? After all, if you got several hundred, or even thousands, of people quarrying and transporting huge stones that doesn't leave much time for hunting. If you've got 1000s of man hours devoted to massive earthworks there's not going to be time or energy for the tracking of game.

I guess what it really boils down to is that we may never be certain what brought about the Neolithic Revolution but that, in future decades, the site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey may contain a lot of revelations. Personally, I think the answer probably lies somewhere in between the various theories. Some people wanted to build big and realized they'd need a lot of food to nourish their workforce while others in another region decided to build big simply because they had plenty of well-fed folks with nothing much to do while the plants grew. I'm not discounting the climate change as catalyst for change theory either. If things got colder it would stand to reason that people might come together to tough it out. After all, communities provide more people to cut and gather firewood. More people crammed into the same building means more body heat. But then, more people means more help with the harvest too. So, who knows?

Magnetic Archaeology

Magnetic Archaeology? Yeah, I made a weird face when I read it the first time too. But it's real, I swear. The technical term is: archeomagnetic dating, a process built around two phenomena: when heated, magnetic particles reorient themselves to magnetic north; and over time, magnetic north is, literally, all over the map.

Seems that, as time passes, magnetic north moves on this wibbly wobbly world of ours. This fascinating, and fairly new, technique of using that phenomenon to date artifacts is being used on Pawnee Indian artifacts from a dig in Kansas. Using heat the specimens are slowly, and in progressing stages, demagnetized until only the base magnetism is left. What this means is that objects can be magnetized by "outside" forces like lightning or other magnetic objects around them. The heating process removes these distracting magnetic fields so the objects' true magnetism can be analyzed. It sounds like science fiction doesn't it?

First their magnetic fingerprint is taken, and then they are slightly demagnetized. The process is repeated several times; eventually all that is left is the baseline magnetic signal, she said. If the material is fired to about 500 degrees Celsius or more, the magnetic field will point to where magnetic north was located at the time.

I thought carbon dating was high tech but this beats it I think. And I don't know why I'm surprised to learn that magnetic north changes over time. After all, this planet doesn't act very sober as it swims drunkenly through space. All pagans know a little about this kind of thing already as the irregular movements of the planet make some of our holydays bounce around the calendar by a day or two every year. I just never considered how that affected the science of archaeology. I guess you do learn something new every day.

Healing Blue Stones of Stonehenge

News from England: the blue stones of Stonehenge, which were placed 150 years before the larger, more recognizable stones, were transported 250 miles from Wales most likely because reputedly healing spring waters flowed in the area of their origin. This is fascinating. This theory lends credence to what I've always thought: Stonehenge wasn't (just) a memorial to the dead, it was an active and dynamic site for the living. According to the LA Times article:

Tim Darvill, a professor at the University of Bournemouth, and Geoff Wainwright, president of the Society of Antiquaries of London, have spent the last six years researching Stonehenge and the rocky outcrop Carn Menyn, thought to be the site in the Preseli Hills from which the bluestones were taken.

Darvill and Wainwright, the co-directors of the dig, found the Welsh site to be a center for ceremony and burials, where the springs that flowed below the rocks were regarded by ancients as having medicinal powers.

They hope that by finding evidence to tie the stones from the Preseli Hills to those at Stonehenge, they will have an answer to the age-old question of the site's purpose.

The two men hope to establish a more precise timeline, to within 10 years, for the construction of Stonehenge by using radiocarbon dating to compare samples from the excavation with those taken from the site in Wales.

I find this fascinating! There's even evidence, according to the article, that brain surgery took place there! I can't wait until the results of the radio carbon dating come in. I've always thought of Stonehenge as a center of worship, a ritual circle where the various holydays were celebrated, deities invoked and nature honored. But now it seems it could also have been a center for healing where green witches and shamans of the herbal and midwifery persuasion would perhaps gather and practice their art.

A World of Stonehenges

I thought I'd share this interesting Craig Childs opinion piece regarding new finds at Stonehenge and seeming different versions of the ancient site all over the world, old and modern.

The new discovery, two miles from Stonehenge itself, is an elaborate residential compound now being excavated. It is a site where the builders of Stonehenge may have lived and where pilgrims may have stayed while attending feasts and ceremonies. Fascinating tidbits have been unearthed: a timber version of Stonehenge, evidence of different kinds of occupations in the 4,600-year-old village and a processional "road" leading to the nearby Avon River. These finds add to the picture of an enigmatic Neolithic religion, in which stone-paved roads are aligned with celestial features and great circles frame the rising and setting sun at key times of the year.

These recent discoveries fill out the picture of Stonehenge. I always assumed, as did everyone I guess, that there must be remains of settlements somewhere close by Stonehenge. For all that building to go on there would have to have been people living in permanent homes, similar to the worker settlement near the Giza pyramids in Egypt. That said, the bigger story is the Stonehenge-like structures the world over. There is a Stonehenge-like structure even here in the states.

The Big Horn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, dating back several hundred years, is a complex celestial calendar, its 28 spokes of aligned stones pointing to risings and settings of the sun and various stars. This medicine wheel, in turn, is similar to the Nonakado Stone Circle of Japan, from the 1st millennium BC, where standing stones mark important, calendrical events on the horizon.

Other Neolithic Stonehenge-like structures can be found in Turkey, the Sahara desert in Egypt and New Mexico from the Chaco culture. All these structures, as well as many modern buildings such as governmental buildings in D.C., were built according to the stars or otherwise incorporated sacred geometry. I find this fascinating to say the least. I don't know a thing about architecture in the practical sense. I just find it amazing that ancient, and many modern, buildings were built to align with the cardinal directions or showcase celestial events like solstices, equinoxes or the rising of certain important stars. And while I don't really care about modern government buildings I would definitely want my fantasy Roman home and temples built according to these sacred alignments.

Us and Them and the Colloseum

Just came across this blog post by Jonathan Jones at the Guardian Unlimited; this was posted in Wren's Nest on witchvox. Jones writes:

The first people to denounce the Roman empire were the ancient Romans themselves - and their language of self-criticism lies behind every modern denigration of what they did. It is a mark of our ignorance that we fail to recognize this, and if you do see it, the very idea of Rome becomes more human.

Because we are no longer familiar with Roman authors, we unknowingly leap on fragments of their rhetoric as fact - so Tacitus becomes a source of caricatured images, rather being seen as the sublime product of Roman civilisation that he is.

Rome was the first society to acknowledge that it failed to live up to its own values. Greeks never seem to have worried that much about the decline of their city states, but in Tacitus you find a culture in mourning for its self-betrayal. Rome is our true mirror.

The above blog post started out with a brief mention of how we moderns consider ancient Romans to have been nothing but a decadent, warlike and scandalous people. He discusses how many people generalize ancient Rome because all they know about it they learned from movies (even Gladiator commits serious historical errors) or the Bible. And I think he's right. The ancient Romans had their problems of course and they often owned up to them. They aren't that different from us. They had jobs and families and gossip and bureaucracy and everything else that comes along with "being civilized". And they had their detractors from within and without the Empire. And I find it laugh-out-loud funny when modern Americans, especially the right, criticizes The Roman Empire for its wars; it's an outrageous example of hypocrisy of the highest order. But I would go a step further. I would also say that those who mouth off about the evils of ancient Rome are the same people who think that zillions of early Christians were killed in the Colloseum and that it was therefore some kind of litmus test for the sanctity and legitimacy of Christianity. We've all heard or read that kind of rhetoric: the early Christians were hounded and murdered en masse by the evil Romans and were/are therefore of the highest holy order. And there simply isn't evidence for that. Were some of the early Christians killed by the Romans? Yes, that's almost certain. But that's as far as it goes. The ancient Romans, for the most part, disliked the Christians but didn't go to any great lengths to eradicate them until the time of Diocletian. There's no historical or archaeology evidence to support the idea that countless Christians were specifically targeted and killed in the Flavian Amphitheatre, the original name for the Colloseum. And it wasn't even considered sacred or otherwise special until Pope Pius V and Fioravante Martinelli popularized the idea in the 16th and 17th centuries. In early Christian times the place of death wasn't even all that important; it was the place of internment that was venerated. More than that, up until the 17th century the Collosseum was used for numerous and varied purposes, including a quarry, a fortress, workshops, housing and only later as a Christian shrine. At one time members of a particular Christian order lived in one section of the structure but for no particular religious reason. And just to be anal, Christians were very likely killed in other places, not just the Colloseum, but also the Circus Flaminius, the Gaianum, the Circus of Hadrian, the Ampitheatreum Castrense and the Stadium of Domitian. What's the point of this rant? Just the same point that Jones expresses: take the time to read more than just one ancient Roman's book before you shoot your mouth off about them. You just might learn something, namely, the mirror with ancient Rome on one side and modern western society on the other.