Eternal Idol - Silbury Hill Solved?Here's the latest offering from Dennis Price at Eternal Idol, in which he addresses the vexed question if why Silbury Hill was built and to what purpose it was put once construction had been completed; this is in light of a recent documentary shown on BBC 4, which according to DP, omitted a fair amount of information about some of its constituent parts. I haven't seen the documentary so I can't comment upon it in any meaningful way.
But one of the points that is being made in the linked article is the way in which both Silbury Hill and Stonehenge are currently being interpreted by people considered experts in the field - and whether these interpretations have any basis in reality. Here are the opening paragraphs...
Anyway, it’s all nice, comforting stuff and better still, it’s vouched for by a plethora of experts. As we’re soon to discover from a BBC Timewatch programme, Stonehenge wasn’t a nasty place of death, sacrifice, ghosts and barbaric, lethal rituals, but a healing place, a hospital or some other form of therapeutic sanctuary, to which our ancestors hobbled from miles around and became cured of their various ills. In fact, the last time I went there, I could’ve sworn I heard the plaintive cry “Penny for an ex-leper?” melting on the wind, but perhaps it was my imagination.
As for Silbury Hill, it too was quite a nice place where the unique architecture was a complete irrelevance, because we learn from this article in The Guardian that whatever mystery there may once have been at Silbury Hill has now been as good as solved. As you can see for yourselves, there’s quite a lot of detail in Maev Kennedy’s piece, so I won’t bother repeating it here, but I have it on good authority that the experts have collated a fascinating array of times, dates, phases of construction and so on, and this scenario is currently doing the rounds by being formally presented to the Royal Society of Antiquaries and other such worthy bodies. Jolly good show.
And later in the same essay...And then I think of how Stonehenge is being mysteriously transformed into a nice, cheerful, restful, healing, curative shrine, or a latter-day Lourdes, when all the evidence I’ve seen clearly points towards it being a place of repeated violent death, dark gods, grim funerary rites, looming shadows, primaeval rituals and stars reeling in their courses as the builders fervently strove to commune with entities not of this earth. And it makes me wonder.
Ah well, the media and the various thrilling archaeological forums are perfectly free to adopt and perpetuate these new, sanitized views of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, so I wish the very best of luck and contentment to everyone concerned. If there’s one single thing we try to do here at Eternal Idol, it’s to do our level best to see these monuments through the eyes of the astonishing people who originally built them, our flesh and blood ancestors who doubtless experienced hope, yearning, sorrow and loss every bit as keenly as we do and whose imagination, ingenuity and sheer bloody-minded persistence leaves ours at the starting post. With all this in mind, I could be studying completely different monuments to the ones being discussed, so we’ll look more closely at this matter of perception in the next post.
Reference is made to the recent article in the Guardian, of which the following is an excerpt..."We assume the building to be a process towards the final form or function, but this is a very modern and western way of looking at monuments. Instead I suggest that the act of construction was the ceremony, and the final form was the by-product."
In the 20th century, backed up by a major excavation broadcast live on the BBC - by means, one of the original engineers revealed this week, of a cable running from Silbury all the way to the studios in Bristol - it was believed there were three phases of Silbury, each enlarging the hill using tons of chalk dug from encircling ditches. Instead Leary now believes there were scores of Silburies, some left for long periods, others worked on continuously.
The idea that the construction of such monuments was much more important than the end result doesn't strike me as very convincing, especially given the expertise of the builders and the intricacies they included. And the idea that there were 'scores of Silburies', in my unqualified opinion, simply cannot be substantiated because no other similar monuments have ever been found.
Although there may well have been great importance attached to the design and building of Silbury, Stonehenge and other monuments of the era, I think there must have been a specific set of uses to which they were put, once construction had been completed - it's hard to imagine how people would have been motivated had they thought they were putting in all that effort to make something that would simply be abandoned once the building phase had come to an end.
Archaeologists have over the years vociferously and frequently denounced those they accuse of peddling pseudo-archaeology, i.e. people who interpret various aspects of the past and draw conclusions which cannot be confirmed due to a conspicuous lack of supporting evidence - I would suggest that until any sign whatsoever of similar constructions dotting the landscape is found, the idea of multiple Silbury Hills falls neatly into that category.
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