Aubrey Burl (1926–2020)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-brief-history-of-stonehenge-by-aubrey-burl/

I’ve long been fascinated by megalithic monuments in general, and Stonehenge is a very special case, one of the most elaborate stone circles of northwestern Europe. We visited in 2016; it’s pretty crowded these days.

Aubrey Burl was the doyen of British megalithic studies, publishing his first book on stone circles in the 1970s and inspiring many other enthusiasts. This was his last book, published in 2007 when he was already 81 (he died in the early weeks of the 2020 pandemic, aged 93).

It’s a generally lucid explanation of the archaeological sequence of the development of Stonehenge, which (as you possibly know) went through several evolutions over a period of 1500 years from 3100 to 1600 BC, the massive trilithons coming in around 2500 BC, though built on a smaller but much older alignment of stones from maybe 8000 BC. These are barely imaginable timelines on a human scale. There are a couple of churches across the Dijle valley from here which have been in use since the eleventh century, and the oldest church in Belgium claims to have been founded in 823 AD. Across the border, the Protestant church in Trier was built as the emperor’s throne room in 1700, and the Roman gate of the city still stands. But these are individual buildings, rather than an entire sacred landscape. Burl is very good at giving us a sense of how Stonehenge and its setting would have seemed to the people who built it, and rebuilt it.

He also starts well, with a review of how Stonehenge came to popular attention 300 years ago, and often refers back to earlier writers. There’s one chapter, unfortunately, where the prose becomes rambling and disjointed, and it’s the most controversial chapter, in which Burl insists that the older standing stones (the ‘bluestones’) were not transported to Wiltshire from Wales by prehistoric humans, but by Ice Age glaciers long before. This is not well supported by the known evidence of known glaciation, even according to Burl’s own account.

Another curious lapse is his attempt to demonstrate that there is a prehistoric substratum of words in Welsh, Breton and Cornish which are unrelated to other neighbouring languages. He seems to be completely unaware of two centuries of research into Indo-European, which has demonstrated that quite a lot of the Celtic words that he sees as independent are in fact related to similar words in English and Latin: for example Welsh rhew and Cornish rew, meaning ‘ice’, come from the same root as English ‘freeze’ and Latin pruina, meaning ‘frost’; and more crucially for his argument, Welsh haul and Breton heol, meaning ‘sun’, are definitely related to Latin sol. It’s an odd lacuna on Burl’s part.

Apart from that, I found it a fascinating read.… (plus d'informations)

Prehistoric Astronomy and Ritual is full of information about the uses to which stone circles were put. Even if you don't care about the science, if you just like looking at photos of prehistoric tombs, stone circles or their remains, or old illustrations of such matters, this book is full of them. Almost every page has a photo or two, most of them in color. The areas covered are Brittany, Cornwall, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, not to mention nearby islands. Really, I had no idea there were so many such prehistoric structures in Great Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.… (plus d'informations)