Flatpack furniture’s debt to Stonehenge
The key to understanding Stonehenge turns out to be a piece of rope. Having listened to landscape archeologist Tony Johnson’s talk at Hay, I think I got this right. He’s a “stuff the theories, show me the evidence” man, and the evidence points to rope and geometry the kind of string theory we can all understand.
More precisely, it seeks to explain the creation of Stonehenge, not in terms of the why, but the how. Johnson looks at the tangibles, what has been written and drawn, and, above all, at the evidence on and in the ground.
So, at Hay he sidestepped talk of astronomy, religious purpose, a stone mega-calendar or any of the many abundant theories of the past 800 years or so - since Geoffrey of Monmouth hitched Stonehenge to a Britishness debate at the expense of Norman and earlier invaders. “I’m not a philosopher and I’m not an engineer,” he explains.
What Johnson has done is spend much of the past few years, plus a lifetime’s experience, going through the old records, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Victorian photographers, and examining the site.
That ancient Britons of 3,000 BC could hardly be totally isolated from the high contemporary civilisation of the fertile crescent of Iraq: that ideas travel. What they acquired from abroad and developed empirically was geometry. Hence the length of rope, used to devise hexagons, polygons, squares, arcs and, of course, circles, which computer technology can easily demonstrate.
In other words, they worked from a drawing board design - it can also be detected in jewellery of the period - to create a geometrical model, which could be prefabricated like an IKEA item and built on site as a monumental piece of architecture.
To sustain his case, the maths must work precisely and does work, thanks to Wood’s map which shows how not all the stones are quite where they were in 1740. People have been mucking about with them for assorted reasons, like anti-paganism and road stone, for millennia.
Oh yes, another thing, the horseshoe stones suggest a preoccupation with the winter solstice, not the less important summer one, he says. That sounds like fighting talk in some Druidic quarters, but Johnson’s combative style suggests he is used to looking after himself.
Where did the stones come from and how were they moved? He politely discusses theories offered by his audience and quotes a contemporary of Henry VIII, another British nationalist, writing about Stonehenge. “Bigger stones than this have been moved if a prince is the paymaster.” Quite so. Think Millennium Dome.
Tags: ancient britons, arc, arcs, bro, civilisation, computer technology, drawing, drawing board, evidence points, fabric, fertile crescent, furniture, geoffrey of monmouth, geometrical model, geometry, ikea, maths, millennia, monumental piece, paganism, philosopher, photo, prince, religious purpose, rope, stonehenge, string theory, tangibles, urn, wh, work thanksRelated posts
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