A question about monuments and alignments.

Mountainsandh

This is really bugging me.

I love the archeo-astronomy theories, and I've often read that standing stones may have been used as markers, and that "lithic" monuments would have helped populations get their bearings in the landscape...

... but how, if Ireland was covered in forests ?

Ok, some monuments are on mountain tops, possibly more barren even then, and some are in bogs or marshy areas, which despite some oak and other odd trees might still have been barren enough for a stone to be seen.
Cairns and forts may have been visible despite some trees, and some clearing may have helped. Any monument on an elevation may have been visible, with clearing or not.

But what about all the others ? There is a stone at the back of where I live (see picture thread), this is not a marshy area, it is flat enough where the stone is, there must have been forest there. That stone would only have been seen as you approached it walking through the forest. Even with some clearing, while standing at a higher elevation on the mountain, it is not very likely that one would have spotted a clearing, unless it was a field size clearing. If there were trees around, whatever landscape feature the stone may have pointed at would not have been visible (there is a smallish hill nearby, this may just have been barely visible over tree tops, provided the trees were at a distance from the stone, see second pic for perspective http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=95942864&postcount=122).

Stone circles and alignments ! Many are now in forestry, and sure enough, cannot be seen from outside the forestry. Even with possibly shorter bushy trees such as hazel, or with sparse enough oak, since they're not always on promontories, I seems to me that a lot of them may not have been visible from afar.

Was clearing so extensive even then that monuments were consistently cleared ? Was the perimeter of clearing such that sunrise and sunsets would indeed shine through openings ? What about stars ? Wouldn't 10 to 20 degrees elevation on the horizon be obscured by forests ?

Or is the connection with light, visibility, and the stars, not really an essential feature of such monuments ?

Mountainsandh

Right.
Since I'm not getting much response here, I try and search a little bit online everyday, but it's hard to find the right keywords.

So to extrapolate on my own question, I think it's a case of : "who's wrong" ?

Either the theory that megaliths are somewhat related to astronomy is pretty much unfounded, because in a lot of cases the environment would have not been favourable for sky observation, alignments...

... or the well repeated mantra that "Ireland was covered in forests" is in fact inaccurate, and men had cleared enough by the time they built these monuments, for them to take into account the sky in their placement. Maybe they cleared with a purpose when planning the monument.

So with that in mind, I found this nice little page with a very succinct depiction of neolithic times.
http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/past/pre_norman_history/neolithic_age.html

And it is said :

They would generally have confined themselves to the higher lands of Ireland, by clearing the upland forests wither by axe or by burning it. Field boundaries were created by laying out stone walls. Later in the Neolithic period, this land had begun to acidify and turn into the peat bogs that occupt these areas today. For this reason, some Neolithic farmers had to begin clearing forests in the lowlands.

The Neolithic settlers set about clearing upland forest (which was thinner and easier to clear than lowland forest) with stone axes, or by burning it, in order to build their permanent farms. ... The newly-cleared upland was used for agriculture, but erosion and overgrazing was soon to cause it to stagnate, acidify and eventually evolve into peat bogs. Thus most of Ireland's upland peat bogs (although not the lower ones) are actually artificial features inadvertently created by Neolithic farmers.

So ... I think that could be my answer there : by the time neolithic people made themselves at home, Ireland was not really covered in forests, in fact, they had cleared enough that their monuments were visible, and had on site visibility for possible astronomical use.


Does that make sense ? Any opinions ? I don't know how reliable this little page is.

I had heard of neolithic people clearing land for agriculture, but it always seemed to be implied that clearing was very targeted, and limited.

Now it looks to me like they really are the ones who changed the landscape of Ireland, before the later farmers, before the English even ... (I am French, so it's all the same to me, but to several of my Irish friends, the lack of forests nowadays is due to the English clearing it all).

Any bit of info to corroborate or refute very very welcome.

bawn79

I asked the same question a few years ago.

Unfortunately I don't think its that simple and I've never been able to find any maps showing the extent of forests in Ireland at various periods. In Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland by John Waddell on pg 28 there is a graph showing the decline in tree pollens around a lake in Coonemara (Lough Sheenauns) and I think they have done the same in other areas around Ireland and they all point to deforestation in the Neolithic period. If you want I can forward you on that section of the book (I have it on pdf) if you want to have a look over it. PM if you do.
Regarding single standing stones and alignments - personally I wouldn't regard them as being significant. A single stone to me doesn't seem to really point to a specific direction the way a stone row, passage of a passage tomb, or the recumbent stone of a stone circle does.

Mountainsandh

Thanks for the reply Bawn79, I'll take your word for it. That reminds me that I have a great little book somewhere by a lady about pollen analysis and Ireland through the ages, it was really good but I can't remember the name at all. There might be something about forests in it. There definitely was a lot of information about bogs.

edit : found the name of the book and author : The Making of Ireland's Landscape: Since the Ice Age – 10 Apr 2011 by Valerie Hall.
Now to locate the book in my house will be a challenge !

I guess it would be really hard to attempt to guess percentages of surface covered by forestry through the ages.

Interestingly, it seems that a lot of the single stones I'm reading about (in my area) are oriented (sort of pointing maybe, not sure) South West. Maybe it's just a false perception on my part though.

Forgot to mention a pdf I was reading yesterday : IRISH FORESTS – A BRIEF HISTORY by the dept of agriculture
https://www.agriculture.gov.ie/media/migration/forestry/forestservicegeneralinformation/abouttheforestservice/IrishForestryAbriefhistory200810.pdf

It is a bit vague and unclear in places.

tac foley

This is a very interesting thread and one that bears a lot of study - if I get the time. As you all know, mainland GB has been mostly deforested since around the Neolithic period, giving rise to broad expanses of heathland and rolling countryside where nothing gets in the way of the possibility of the idea of lithic astronomical alignment. One rarely, if ever, encounter stone circles/possible alignments in what are now forested areas of any of the three countries making up the mainland of UK.

@Mountainsand - what is the present wisdom on the use of single-stone alignments in astronomical observations? Lacking all the useful books on the subject, can you point me at some examples? Bawn, above, is unconvinced, and TTTT, so am I. Two uprights can 'point' to a spot location - it's a whole lot harder to ascribe such a property to a singleton alone on a hillside.

TIA

tac

Mountainsandh

Tac, i don't know, That's why i was raising the questions! Not at home right now, but I did come across some relevant thoughts in Frank Mitchell 's Reading The Irish Landscape. I will post them here later.

tac foley wrote: »

This is a very interesting thread and one that bears a lot of study - if I get the time. As you all know, mainland GB has been mostly deforested since around the Neolithic period, giving rise to broad expanses of heathland and rolling countryside where nothing gets in the way of the possibility of the idea of lithic astronomical alignment. One rarely, if ever, encounter stone circles/possible alignments in what are now forested areas of any of the three countries making up the mainland of UK.

@Mountainsand - what is the present wisdom on the use of single-stone alignments in astronomical observations? Lacking all the useful books on the subject, can you point me at some examples? Bawn, above, is unconvinced, and TTTT, so am I. Two uprights can 'point' to a spot location - it's a whole lot harder to ascribe such a property to a singleton alone on a hillside.

TIA

tac

bawn79

Regarding the trees and whether they were cleared during the Neolithic this a short overview. http://www.woodlandsofireland.com/sites/default/files/Woodland_Management_History.pdf

I've never read Frank Mitchells book so look forward to hearing them.

Archaeoliz

My penniworth... standing stones and megalithic monuments of all kinds have been part of the landscape for such a long time that in order to evaluate their location it would be important first to ensure that the stones as they stand today are in the location they were originally placed. Given that solitary stones have formed parts of boundaries (parish, townland and whatever landscape division or markers were significant in the past before our more modern divisions and concepts of ownership) it is not impossible that some of these individual monuments have been moved over time.

The social context of the Neolithic as a transitional period from hunter/gather subsistence strategies into a more sedentary lifestyle and development of agriculture is very significant. (Go proper old school and take a look at V. G. Childe and the Neolithic Revolution). There is currently no known occupation of the Ireland prior to approx 8000BC (Mesolithic) and this, as far as my current comprehension of the archaeological record goes, was very sparse indeed. There is an 'explosion' of megalithic monuments in the Neolithic of a similar style and structure to much of the western Atlantic seaboard of Europe which would imply a cultural continuity (certainly seen in some of the other material culture) and a mass immigration. In that backdrop then placing your mark on the landscape with monumental architecture as you clear and make sense of it to delineate something (astronomical, field boundary, cursus style to direct people through the landscape) who knows, and probably there would be a variety of overlapping uses of these features. In the cultural context they certainly make sense but each individual monument would need to be examined with reference to the archaeological landscape around it, especially any settlement evidence and archaeo-astronomy to see if anything ties in. Then the hypothesis would need tested - and ain't that the problem with archaeology. Preservation is certainly a combination of chance and environmental factors...


Sources (other than the 1920s V.G. Childe stuff - which is rather out of date, but an interesting read) : Magda Midgely and Alistair Whittle.

This topic formed part of my MA, coming on for 15yrs ago so my opinions may be out of date too.

Mountainsandh

Archeoliz, thanks.
I had forgotten the the thread, and how I meant to post some extract from "Reading the Irish landscape", Frank Mitchell & Michael Ryan.

The passage I find most relevant is below, but there is a lot of information about forest clearance, all of it interesting.

Chapter 5 : The First Farmers

Forest clearance and society (p. 163 in my edition)

The earliest farming was probably a communal venture of a number of nuclear families acting together. Circumstances would have encouraged the population to be segmented into small groups and in time they would almost certainly have developed distinct identities. Settlement was indeed dispersed and the houses of the farming families tended to occur singly in the landscape adjacent to the fields being cultivated and within a manageable distance of the resources of the forest, waterways or seashore. Such an organisation of society may have had many consequences which are not visible archaeologically _ one of these is linguistic. [...]

In time, with increasing population and enlarged herds of grazing animals, clearings coalesced and wider tracts of land began to open up. How did this affect social organisation ? The opening of the landscape would have tended to even out differences between small social groups as communication between them improved. Within a few hundred years of the arrival of the first farmers, Ireland had seen the emergence of increasingly sophisticated megalithic architecture, the appearance and in places re-clearance of second growth forest and, it seems also, the growth of a substantial population managing arable as well as extensive pasture land in organised fenced fields. The evidence also allows us to assume that complex and regionally-varied social systems had emerged, some of which may have wielded an authority of some kind over wide areas. Monuments once built in an intimate landscape might have become visible for longer and longer distances. The preoccupation of some megalithic tomb builders with commanding views and high visibility would have been pointless if the hills on which they were sited were clad in dense forest and the clearings below hedged about with tall stands of timber obscuring these cairns. The very purpose of rituals and ceremonial architecture may have been reordered to reflect the aspirations of emergent regional polities.
We can see clearly that some of the monuments of the Neolithic period were invested with a deep significance which transcended any purely utilitarian purposes _ they were intended to make a mark on the minds of contemporaries but also no doubt on those of all succeeding generations. Humans occupy a real landscape but they also invest it with abstract ideas which are often obscure to us and which occasionally foster a behaviour which we might not regard as strictly practical. ...

He doesn't really provide answers, but validates my question I guess anyway...

He goes on to discuss how obscure the motives of ceremonial sites still is to us, but points out that burial and ceremonial sites were often located very close to settlements, with relation to food and workforce being more available, and also that these megalithic structures obviously reinforced land appropriation. Once the bones of your ancestors were on site, I suppose you had a strong argument for claiming and retaining a stretch of land.

The very purpose of rituals and ceremonial architecture may have been reordered to reflect the aspirations of emergent regional polities.

With this sentence he seems to suggest too that the original purpose of some megalithic monuments may have been altered as the landscape evolved. What I take from it is that maybe a simple marker stone, or a little stone row or circle in a forest for "private"/"family" rituals may have become a more important site, and possibly even physically altered (?!) to accommodate larger communities.
I don't know if there is any record of megalithic monuments showing signs of starting off small to be later enlarged ? I know little :P

Pinkycharm

I was always told they mapped the seasons are territories- that's from a history teacher that was nearly as old as the bloody standing stones themselves. Wouldn't ya love to go back to that time and observe for the day!

Cianmcliam

Mountainsandh wrote: »

With this sentence he seems to suggest too that the original purpose of some megalithic monuments may have been altered as the landscape evolved. What I take from it is that maybe a simple marker stone, or a little stone row or circle in a forest for "private"/"family" rituals may have become a more important site, and possibly even physically altered (?!) to accommodate larger communities.
I don't know if there is any record of megalithic monuments showing signs of starting off small to be later enlarged ? I know little :P

Yes, there's plenty of monuments that have been enlarged or built on smaller monuments. For example the court tomb at Ballymacaldrack or the passage tombs at Fourknocks that started off as cremation pits with wooden structures that were then replaced or incorporated into stone monuments. The huge main passage tomb at Knowth was built over a much smaller tomb, Newgrange was built on top of a smaller turf mound. Likewise, the huge sarsen stones at Stonehenge were a later addition that towered over the original much smaller bluestones.

Towards the end of prehistory the reverse seemed to happen, many of the later Bronze Age monuments seemed to shrink, wedge tombs are often low and inconspicuous and it would be pretty hard to build smaller stone circles than the little five stone circles in Cork and Kerry or the circles in the Sperrins built with stones you could almost pick up and walk away with.

I doubt peat bog could grow in forested land so the spread of blanket bogs during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age does seem to show very large areas were lacking tree cover.

slowburner

The question of what lies beneath many of our monuments particularly in the middle to later Neolithic, is an intriguing one and underlines so many unknowns concerning cultural aspects of continuity, change, who were the 'distinguished dead', who belonged, and who had a right to burial in these special places? The central post-hole identified in Hartnett's (1950) excavation of Fourknocks I may be more than simply a central support for a roof. Gabriel Cooney suggests that it could have been a monument in itself - akin to totem poles or the Mesolithic post monuments of Starr Carr, and that this may have been the very reason for the situation of the passage tomb.

Mountainsandh

Cianmcliam wrote: »

I doubt peat bog could grow in forested land so the spread of blanket bogs during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age does seem to show very large areas were lacking tree cover.

According to F Mitchell, the clearing of land by humans is responsible for a large part of/the extent of blanket bogs. Clearing land modified regrowth, giving the advantage to certain weeds or tree variants, like bracken surpassing heather in terms of regrowth, hazel and birch in the stead of oak and elm, etc... these changes occurred repeatedly, as the same land could be cleared and experience regrowth several times. The new types of regrowth, modifications in water absorption or run off, and depletion of soil, were favourable to bog formation, as men simply moved on to a fresh spot. Of course some clearing had natural causes, like elm disease, or spontaneous fire, and some bogs were already established.