I read an article [1] that gave me pause; a tale of ambiguity, confusion past and present, and so I returned, to look with new eyes, to walk and stand and dream, through half-closed lids seeing structure, poles, movement, one time upon another, then and now, almost feeling, almost hearing sounds, feet, dogs, voices, before the bus from Birmingham drove up and the archaeology students disembarked to be shown the site, doing Avebury today.
The article's story was of a diary and post-holes - those now marked by round blocks, in the concrete lay-out for tourist and student alike, today. Were they separate, or cross-cutting, for one time or many? Briefly, the article sketches a story of multiple interpretation, and the author's own recent excavation which showed even more ambiguity - post-holes multi-stepped for several fills, blurring boundaries and edges, from which he made a new suggestions - that nobody was 'right', that what the site showed was not clearly one phase or several, but multiple, continuous use. We focus on constructions, says the author (in my reading, in my paraphrasing), but this site may well be one of construction - process, ongoing.
So with new eyes, I saw, and waited in the mist, imagining another time, as one year succeeded, and over and over they came - maybe down the avenue, or beside it, moving in and out of these tall stones, maybe by another way, bearing timbers, each to have its place to mark a time, a season, a death, a life, living and change. Not creating, but doing, the dance and not its image, movement in memoriam.
For a year? For a life? The whole complex, they say, those who are said to know, the archaeologists, is focused on death and dying: and life, I add; renewal, turnings, change, decay and new beginnings, which may be why I have come here to exorcise a past, to reconstruct meaning, re-make my own creation, self re-invented, established within these new constructed relationships that I forge with each meeting, each word to friend or stranger, even each application that says 'this is...' self in performatively, agentic creations erected in words, electrons, virtual images in conscious imaginal re-constitutions, being in becoming re-creation.
(Enough digression, let's get back to that article!)
The author could not speculate beyond a reasonable conjecture, a suggestion of process, replacement, based on post-hole fills. I , as an underemployed, soon to be unemployed anthropologist, am under no such restriction. For a death, therefore. Each time the timbers borne, carried heavily or joyfully, perhaps with families holding placements: some only, each time, brought there by the inheritors, and for the shaman, all, for s/he was kin to all... And so positioned, dancing moving stamping, the body central, or the bones. To touch the bones, and dance, and dream, and move on into a new generation, renewal of the promise, the blessing of this so-white earth.
Reference:
'Return to the Sanctuary', Mike Pitts, British Archaeology, February 2000, http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba51/ba51feat.html#pitts
(And yes, there was another BA article about dancing with bones... I'll look it up, and get back to you...)
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