WITNESS  STANDING STONES‘ ROLE IN MAINTAINING THE COSMIC ORDER
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-09-28

This paper wlll included a short review on some of the interpretations on standing stones known to date. We know that as a group standing stones, regardless of form, have continually had the same two associations and/or relationships across Scotland and elsewhere in the British Isles: the dead (often cremated) and astronomical phenomena. In this paper it is argued in more detail than previously, that standing stones were considered as living witnesses to the cosmic order, gaining their local power and supernatural

associations from the dead (inserted into the holes containing the megaliths themselves, or at the foot of or near the standing stone). Speculatively, it is suggested that through this juxtaposition, the stones were given the power to see what the living could, and perhaps it was believed that through the stones the entombed or buried dead could see this as well. The stones, then, clearly have individual agency, and are participating in events themselves. They have become individual members of the community and, in this final sense, their anthropomorphic identities assured. In this way, this paper supports Taçon’s notion that standing stones were ‘such a widely used monumental form because of (their) anthropomorphic connotations’ (1994 in Cooney 2000: 131).


Author(s): Higginbottom, Gail (Australian National University)