Leskernick Project

TOWARDS AN INTERPRETATION

While it might be claimed that every stone and clitter mass on Leskernick was significant to the prehistoric inhabitants this perspective leads us nowhere archaeologically. Some stones were clearly more important than others and the interpretative problem today is deciding which ones. This is particularly difficult in the case of large unmodified and unenhanced stones not incorporated in any cultural structures. In the case of these stones our criteria for identification can only be subjective: we have a hunch or feeling that they were important because of their size, shape and location along pathways. Our perception of the stones on the hill has become wider and finer, longer, richer and fuller as we have explored the hill. It is born out of our own practice and engagement with the stones leading to a growing awareness of their surfaces, angles, layouts, shapes, textures and, increasingly, our own knowledges, expectations and memories of working on the hill. Our perception of a significant stone involves all these facets of our embodied phenomenological experience of them. Perhaps this contemporary experience of the stones meshes with the way the stones were experienced in the Bronze Age. We would not want to make this claim. All that our study can hope to be is one that re-works and re-presents the stones of the past in the present.

Why did people modify the clitter and construct circles within the mass of stones? Irrespective of whether any of the stones discussed in the three examples above have been placed, moved, wedged or propped up by human agency they still form a striking pattern, both recognizable to us and the Bronze age population of the hill. The identification of circularity is perhaps not surprising given the emphasis on circular forms at Leskernick: post holes and hearths in the houses are circular, the houses are circular, they built stone circles, the cairns are circular, Leskernick hill itself appears to be circular, the hill is ringed with a circle of cairns on the top of other hills surrounding it in the landscape. The circle must have been a basic cosmological template for the ordering of the world and situating humanity within it. The prehistoric architecture and its relationship to landscape is circles within circles within circles. And these circles encompassed relationships between the living and the ancestral dead, the people on Leskernick hill and those living elsewhere on Bodmin Moor. Building circles was a representation and materialization of cosmological ideas.

These people lived in a world of stone and massively modified the stones on their hill and gave these stones meaning and significance. There is clearly a continuum of relationships between people and the stones from the most obviously artifical and cultural of forms to the 'natural': (i) there are the houses, cairns, walls and monuments. All these require the selection, movement and placement of stones for shorter or longer distances. (ii) There are the ambiguous clitter structures: architecture amidst unmodified stone clutter. These simply required selecting particular stones and then changing the angle at which stones rested on the ground rather than physically moving them from one place to another. (iii) There are powerful and significant large stones on the hill which unlike cases (i) and (ii) were neither moved or altered in terms of their angle of rest. Such stones could be a) incorporated in houses or walls or b) have smaller stones heaped around or moved away from them or c) remain unincorporated in architectural structures with the immediate area surrounding them not being enhanced or modified in any way. All the stones on the hill have then differing degrees of artificiality. They are not more or less cultural or natural according to whether they were moved or not moved, used to build houses or walls or left alone on the hill. It is cultural meaning and belief that gives stones social significance which is simultaneously cultural, natural and supernatural.

In the most general sense, building circles for living in and building circles in the clitter are two facets of the same process which, to borrow a term from Appadurai (1996), we refer to as the spatial production of locality. The arrangements of stones on the hill are part of a spatiotemporal technology of localization involving sentiment and feeling, local knowledge and local subjects. Building houses and building clitter structures both objectified local knowledges and formed a fundamental element in the production and reproduction of local subjects i.e. skilled and knowledgeable agents. The material structures and spaces they created were skilled social accomplishments which acted recursively in the production and reproduction of persons in the production of meaning and value. A sense of locality was being imagined, produced and maintained through moving stones and moving past stones on the hill and through ritual acts in and around them. Through engaging with the stones people made themselves, physically and emotionally creating an attachment to place. An understanding of stones was both integral to their cosmological beliefs and to an understanding of themselves.

Up to this point in the paper we have been rather carefully attempting to distinguish between the 'cultural' and the 'natural'. Obviously this seems to be crucial if we want to obtain a detailed understanding of the hill but, paradoxically, it may simultaneously block or inhibit our understanding of the clitter structures that we have identified in the life-worlds of the Bronze Age peoples. When we first saw these structures we worried whether we were seeing that which did not exist. In many cases these clitter structures appear today as rather ambiguous forms, in some way half-way between 'nature' and 'culture'. They can only be seen on the ground. What is there, or appears to be there, is often difficult to precisely describe in words. Their presence cannot be adequately represented by a photographic image whether taken from the air or on the ground. Every photograph of the clitter tends to look the same. To an untrained eye the representation just appears to be of a cluttered mass of stones. The same is true of all conventional archaeological plans drawn from a bird's eye perspective. Because neither really differentiates one stone from another they fail to represent what is there. These structures have to be revealed through being transformed and highlighted first. The way we have attempted to show that these clitter structures are there, that they actually exist, is by covering the stones with cling film and painting them as in the first of the four examples discussed above (see Fig. 5).

We think that these structures were very simple constructions insofar as to make them would simply require levering up some stones in a natural clitter mass to emphasize them and simultaneously serve to differentiate them from others. It seems unlikely that these stones were moved any distance from their original positions, say, from one part of the hill to another, or from one clitter mass to another. They were formed, then, by (i) choosing stones of suitable shapes and dimensions; (ii) altering the original angle of rest of these stones (iii) enhancing naturally occurring arc-like or circular patterns in the clitter by adding or removing a block here or there. In some cases it is the case that we are simply recognizing and granting significance to a pre-existing pattern of entirely geological origin.

We can adduce two main reasons to explain the often extreme ambiguity of these structures: (i) they defy a conventional distinction between nature and culture which blocks our understanding of them; (ii) the ambiguity was intended, it was part of the original cultural meaning of these places. We will discuss each of these in turn.