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6 Images and forms before Plato: the carved stone balls of Northeast Scotland Andrew Meirion Jones Graeco-Roman thinkers cast a long shadow over contemporary approaches to art and representation. In the Republic, written around 375 BCE, Plato imagined humankind as prisoners in a cave able to determine the existence of reality only from the shadowy representations of that reality cast on cave walls. Shadows also figure in another origin story related by the Roman historian Pliny in his Natural History, written between 77 and 79 CE. In a two-part explanation
became almost intrinsic to rock art studies. Bradley championed the first systematic inter-regional approach to Atlantic Art, focusing particularly on the similarities of the tradition between northern England and north-west Iberia (1997). This chapter will address results of a recent project building on Bradley’s work. It summarises the findings of a systematic investigation on Atlantic Rock Art, focusing on two particular cases studies (see Fig. 7.1) – the Machars Peninsula (Dumfries and Galloway, south-west Scotland) and Iveragh Peninsula (Co. Kerry, south
known Mesolithic practices can be demonstrated. Because of the extreme rarity of Late Mesolithic human remains, this evidence is very localised. It is essentially confined to a small region of western Scotland, but in that region, it offers the best route to understanding the kind of relational embodied narratives I discussed in Chapter 4. I will consider these sites in detail here to demonstrate how caves, dead bodies and living people acted together to develop one particular kind of Early Neolithic cave burial rite. In the rest of Britain, the relationship of the
Lingfield and Crowhurst, Sussex. In 1836 he was presented by his brother to the living of Chalvington. He died on 22 August 1849 at Leamington Spa, and was buried in Lingfield church. He married Maria Ursula, daughter of Sir Robert Sheffield, and had several children (one of whom succeeded him as Rector of Chalvington). Straton’s mummy (A.UC.70C), coffin (A.UC.70 +A.UC.70A) and mummy board (A.UC.70B) are now in the National Museum of Scotland (Manley and Dodson 2010: 41–6, nos. 10–11; Niwinski 1988, 138, no. 182). The coffin is a typical late 21st Dynasty yellow
, wealth, and labour – epitomised in The Wealth of Nations, a foundational text on political economy by Scottish economist Adam Smith ( 1776 ; Tarlow 2007 : 22). In his book, Madness and Civilisation , Michel Foucault goes further to situate the change in thinking about lunacy within a more general ‘Great Confinement’: the separation and institutionalisation of those who could not contribute to the new industrialising economy ( 2006 : 43). The scale of the new state-sponsored institutions and their aesthetic gravitas and monumentality supports Foucault
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
expectations and expressions of gender identity (Reay, 1998 ). Modern Australian, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, English or American societies all have subtly, and not so subtly, different approaches to the body, family, marriage, childbirth, social class, gender and age or education, based on wider cultural contexts like history, religion or law. Most importantly there is not in fact a single approach to these ideas in any of the places described. Indeed, your own attitude to family, for example, might depend on your past, your background and, importantly, the regional or class
1989 : 191) and also Büstorf, where three complete vessels were staked down with large timbers (van der Sanden 1996 : 175, fig. 242). In contrast, there does not seem to be a ceramic tradition of bog offerings in either northern England, Scotland or Ireland, but wooden containers are found. The lid and base of a wooden vessel from Lemanaghan bog in Ireland, missing its central body, suggests not all containers had to be placed whole in the bog (O’Carroll 2001 : 15). Fragments of a similar tall tub or jar were found at Corlea bog (Raftery 1994 , fig. 66) and
Tut‘ankhamūn, ˙ ˙ I (London: Egypt Exploration Society). Maragioglio, V. and Rinaldi, C. A. (1970), L’architettura delle Piramidi Menfite, VII (Rapallo: Officine Grafische Canessa). Mathieson, I. (2000), ‘The National Museums of Scotland Saqqara Survey Project’, in M. Barta and J. Krejči (eds.), Abusir and Saqqara in the Year 2000 (Prague: Czech Institute of Archaeology), 33–42. Mathieson, I., Bettles, E., Clarke, J., Duhig, C, Ikram, S., Maguire, L., Quie, S. and Tavares, A. (1997), ‘The National Museums of Scotland Saqqara Survey Project 1993–95’, Journal of
Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and Scotland, with Ireland notable for its resistance to religious change. This Protestant faith officially removed belief in purgatory. Such a radical shift in eschatology took time to percolate, or rather, to be reluctantly and sometimes violently implemented, at the level of the parish – let alone within the confines of a household dealing with the dying (Duffy 2005 ; Watkins 2013 ). While purgatory existed, a corpse that failed to decay or a ghostly apparition that haunted the living could be explained as a being