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Journal ArticleDOI

Monuments as landscape: Creating the centre of the world in late Neolithic Orkney

Colin H. Richards
- 01 Oct 1996 - 
- Vol. 28, Iss: 2, pp 190-208
TLDR
In this article, a group of spectacular Neolithic monuments, including henges, passage graves and standing stones, in Orkney is examined, and it is shown how the development of the monuments occurs and how they draw on the visual imagery of the natural world in their architectural representation.
Abstract
In Britain and Ireland there is a tendency for late Neolithic monuments to be clustered in groups and located at similar topographic positions. In this paper a group of spectacular monuments, including henges, passage graves and standing stones, in Orkney is examined. It is shown how the development of the monuments occurs and how they draw on the visual imagery of the natural world in their architectural representation. As each monument embodies a different role and purpose so its architecture and appearance vary. Through a sequence of construction a single area of Mainland, Orkney, becomes transformed as new ‘landscapes’ are created and manipulated. Ultimately, this particular place comes to embody the totality of the Neolithic Orcadian world and acts as an axis mundi for cosmological belief.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

An Archaeology of Landscapes: Perspectives and Directions

TL;DR: In this paper, a review called for the definition of a landscape approach in archaeology and suggested that archaeology is particularly well suited among the social sciences for defining and applying a landscape-based approach.
Book

The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland

TL;DR: In this article, the authors survey the entire archaeological sequence over a 5,000 year period, from the last hunter-gatherers and the adoption of agriculture in the Neolithic period, to the discovery of Britain and Ireland by travellers from the Mediterranean during the later pre-Roman Iron Age.
Book

Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice

TL;DR: A history of ceramics in Neolithic Orkney can be found in this paper, with a focus on making people and things in the Neolithic: pots, food and history.
BookDOI

A companion to social archaeology

TL;DR: Hodder et al. as mentioned in this paper discuss the relationship between social archaeology and Marxist social thought, and discuss the social relation between women and men in the context of household production and social relations.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression.

TL;DR: In this article, Imagines Mundi: Narrative, Ritual, and Architectural Exemplars of Cosmogony is used to describe the relationship between house, family, and tomb.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Outline of a Theory of Practice

TL;DR: Bourdieu as mentioned in this paper develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood.
Journal ArticleDOI

Outline of a Theory of Practice.

Book

Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture

Ian Hodder
TL;DR: In this article, the nature of material cultures in Baringo is discussed and a state of symbiosis and conflict is found in the Lozi region of the Nuba Mountains, Sudan.
Book

Fragments from Antiquity: An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900-1200 BC

TL;DR: The Beaker complex is an archeological text an end to remembrance time and place -the formation of the agricultural landscape making history as mentioned in this paper, the archeology of the living and of the dead.
Book

Rethinking the Neolithic

TL;DR: An archaeology of difference more than an economic system reading monuments pits, pots and dirt: a genealogy of depositional pratices portable artefacts -the case of pottery mortuary practice regional sequences of change as mentioned in this paper.