Stonehenge has been in the news twice recently. Both a new view and a new interpretation of the monument have been announced.
The new view is a tiny medieval drawing, only a couple of inches across, noticed in a scala mundi or “world ladder”, a chart of universal chronology from the Creation onwards. The document was in the municipal library of Douai, in northern France, probably taken there from England by Catholic refugees in the 16th century; Professor Christian Heck catalogued it there six years ago without at that stage thinking more about its importance.
The document dates from the 1440s, not the oldest depiction of the monument — which dates from around 1342 and is on a similar scala mundi at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge — but one of very few known. “Medieval representations of Stonehenge are extremely rare,” Professor Heck says, and this one is “the first known design to represent Stonehenge not just as a symbolic image, but with precise observations on its form and construction techniques. It bridges perfectly the worlds of medieval myth and Renaissance observation.”
The drawing shows four of Stonehenge’s trilithons, with two small squares on top of each lintel representing the carved tenons on the uprights poking through. “In reality the tenons are not that long, but they also struck the first modern artists — they are shown on the 16th century illustration by Lucas de Heere,” Professor Heck says in the current issue of British Archaeology.
The drawing is in the part of the chronology dealing with post-Roman England, and is connected with the legend of Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon invaders, their ally Vortigern, the usurping British ruler, and his exiled rival Aurelius Ambrosius, set in AD480-85.
After Aurelius’s defeat of Vortigern, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth around AD1136, Stonehenge was Merlin’s suggestion of a memorial to the British lords treacherously slain by the Saxons at a feast in nearby Amesbury. Merlin magically transported a stone circle, the chorea gigantum, from Ireland, and eventually Aurelius and his brother Uther Pendragon — King Arthur’s father — were buried there.
Although the great sarsens with which Stonehenge’s main structure was built are of local origin, within lies a smaller circle of “bluestones”, exotics which in 1921 were traced to the Presceli mountains in Pembrokeshire, some 150 miles to the west. They have been at Stonehenge since between 2,400 and 2,100BC.
Recently, Dr Geoff Wainwright, formerly English Heritage’s chief archaeologist, and Professor Tim Darvill, of Bournemouth University, have been working at Presceli, where there are springs with a therapeutic reputation, and associated prehistoric tombs and rock art. The water emerges from the same bluestone outcrops used for the Stonehenge monoliths.
Dr Wainwright and Professor Darvill regard Presceli as “a centre for ceremonial and burial comparable to the Stonehenge area”. Medieval folklore claimed that the Stonehenge rocks “possessed healing powers when used in conjunction with water”, they say, and “as recently as the 18th century, people went to Stonehenge to break off bits of rock as health talismans”.
They speculate further that the historian Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BC, in speaking of a noted round temple dedicated to Apollo, the god of healing and prophecy, in the land of the Hyperboreans — usually identified as Britain — may have recorded a garbled version of the Stonehenge story that had reached the Mediterranean.
Mayanists react to Gibson’s Apocalypto
Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, his Maya slash-and-sacrifice movie set in Pre-Columbian Yucatán, opens here this weekend. It has been showing in America for a month, and Maya specialists there have been responding in reviews and blogs with mixed feelings. The extreme violence, including excoriation, decapitation and other forms of ritualised bloodletting, has occasioned some remarks, but Mayanists have long been aware that human sacrifice was an integral part of ancient Maya ritual.
They have been more concerned that evidence has been faked, as with the introduction of a scene of heart-excision into the noted Bonampak murals where none in fact exists. This might be seen by those not immersed in the subject as permissible latitude, given that both carved and painted scenes at sites such as Piedras Negras and Chichén Itzá show priests removing captives’ hearts, but the hecatomb of corpses in another scene is more Aztec than Maya.
In fact, one of the Mayanists’ major objections is that the florescence of classic Maya civilisation, which ended around AD900, has been dragged six centuries forward in time to the sixteenth century, so that the Spanish conquistadors’ arrival in Yucatán (which took place over a period between 1517 and 1542) is seen as coincident with and perhaps consequent from the noted Maya Collapse.
A slightly more complex objection has been that by portraying the Maya as savages whose culture deserved to die, Gibson is reinforcing attitudes to the modern Maya which have in recent decades resulted in oppression in Mexico and the Zapatista rising in Chiapas, and in Guatemala in the genocidal massacres by successive military regimes in the name of anti-communism.
American support over nearly four decades, from the ousting of the elected Arbenz Government by the CIA in 1954 until the early 1990s, left many Americans ashamed, notably when the Maya Rigoberta Mench won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Maya archaeologists and anthropologists are now worried that the distorted vision of Apocalypto will encourage revanchist views.
“Stereotypes of bloodthirsty savagery and moral degeneracy have been used to vilify indigenous people for 500 years,” Mary Weismantel and Cynthia Robin of Northwestern University, Illinois, say in a widely circulated review. “The mass genocide of Maya peoples is not a thing of the past . . . Don’t feed the hate”.
