stonehenge - English Heritage

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Illustration 17
De-romancing
Stonehenge: confronting
the socio-political functions
of the site in
a post-modernist age.
[Illustration by David
Bromley from The Guardian,
15 June 1992. Reproduced
courtesy of Guardian
Newspaper Group.]
and people and places. We need to understand that things
and places are not just created by people, but creative of
people, and that time, space, things, people work off each
other, and are always in process.
We construct a very particular type of past – and present
– based on other taken-for-granted divisions: nature ::
culture, mind :: body, life :: death, male :: female. These
need to be questioned.
Space, like time, is polysemic and polyvalent. Depending
on who you are, and when and where, your sense of place
will vary. Some people’s sense of place will be valorized,
others’ marginalized.
Places, like sites, are never autonomous. They work
within larger landscapes. These landscapes – familiar,
unfamiliar, landscapes of voyaging, of exile, of hearsay and
myth – are interconnected and unstable. A familiar
landscape may become unfamiliar.
People’s engagement with the world around them is
sensory as well as cerebral. People’s engagement with the
material world is created through action, and creative of
action. Using all their senses, people are socialized into
and negotiate their place within the landscape, learning
and questioning what is possible, where to go, what and
how to see. Landscapes of movement, entrance, exit,
procession, escape.
Because people’s engagement with the world around
them is variable and in process, and because knowledge of
‘how to go on’ is differentially experienced and valued, the
use of past or of place is always open to contestation. Past
and place are political (Illustration 17).
THREATS, PRESERVATION,
AND SURVIVAL
The decay of standing monuments in the Stonehenge
Landscape has been a matter of comment and concern for
several centuries. William Stukeley lamented the ploughingup
of the downs and the decay of monuments in the 1720s
when he was working in the area, and he shows ploughing
on the Stonehenge Avenue in one of his illustrations
(Stukeley 1720, 1 and 52). But even in Stukeley’s day the
prehistoric monuments of the Stonehenge Landscape were
far from pristine. Each successive generation has contributed
to the diminution of what already existed. Indeed, it seems
likely that some if not all of the later prehistoric and
Romano-British fieldsystems in the area had a major impact
on earlier funerary monuments. The most severe damage in
more recent times came through the construction of military
camps in the first half of the twentieth century and the
dismantling of the camps, levelling of earthworks, and
conversion of the land to arable in the mid twentieth century.
Surveys of the preservation and survival of monuments
mainly date to the later twentieth century. Land-use and
ownership are major contributory factors for the long-term
conservation and management of archaeological remains
and they conspire to create two broad zones of preservation
within the Stonehenge Landscape. North of the Packway the
land is mainly in military ownership. Here earthwork survival
is generally good, with much land in pasture (McOmish et
al. 2002). South of the Packway earthwork survival is
generally poor except where woodland or some other
feature has limited the impact of destructive activities; landuse
here has been predominantly arable cultivation
(Richards 1990), although this is changing as the National
Trust negotiates new leases and agreements. The RCHM
survey of the Stonehenge Environs in the mid 1970s
documented the decay of archaeological sites within their
study area parish by parish and by reference to the main
types of upstanding monuments (RCHM 1979, xiv–xix). It all
makes dismal reading and emphasizes the dramatic losses
over the last 300 years.
During the final fieldwork season of the Stonehenge
Environs Project (1983–4) a systematic check was carried
out on all recorded monuments within the study area, but
the results do not appear to have been analysed beyond
their primary use in the development of site management
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