Passage and Landscape

When we looked at the prehistoric monuments in Ireland, a couple of themes kept recurring that supply a correction to our usual picture of what their construction was all about. First, the monuments were not standalone or independent. They were part of the landscape, and oriented not only to the sun's solstices and equinoxes (which has been a new understanding in our lifetimes itself), but to each other and to the surrounding hills and rivers. They were often part of an entire network of monuments, sometimes visible to each other, but occasionally aligned to things out of sight.

We have learned this in the last few decades about Stonehenge, Avebury, and other sites in England, where we now know that the Cursus and Stonehenge Avenue were integral parts of the site because of its processions, and that disputably, Durrington Walls was a s well. Similar things are proving out in Ireland at Newgrange and Knowth, probably Dowth (though it is unexcavated and little known for certain), at Carrowmere and Knocknarea. 

You might have noticed that Passage Grave is a phrase often mentioned at the links in connection with these. The burial areas are not, or not only, placed under a great deal of earth or stone in order to build an impressive mound and discourage looters. The passages were used after the burials, and as many show signs of further burials of related individuals, it is likely that families revisited the bones of their ancestors many times after. The passages are difficult but not impossible to navigate and would usually be entirely darkened. The exceptions to this are interesting. Though the kurgan tradition was originally a closed tumulus right from the outset, by the time it reached Ireland and probably Jutland, there are examples where the passage was open to the sky at first and enclosed later. This certainly reinforces the idea that the passage itself, the journey from one place to another, was part of the monument's importance. These were likely liminal areas, between the living and the dead, the earth and the heavens.

Light also penetrated at significant anstronomical times, usually a solstice or an equinox. There is some evidence that megaliths especially also record lunar cycles of 19 years, but this is less certain.