hearts and stones
This touched my mountain-made, agrarian heart in an oddly profound way - it seems silly in translation - as I was riding the iron horse from one city to another this afternoon. Again from the DAAD Letter: (as always, my translation)
Between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago, people in Brittany cut and fashioned giant stones - megaliths - and raised them into imposing figures. "They were huge family gravestones. Remains of as many as seventy people have been found in some places," says Reena Perschke, a researcher who specializes in ancient and early history. Perschke is fascinated with these monuments, called dolmens*, and at the same time surprised that they have thus far been the subject of so little serious research. "Many archaeologists and mystical-religion enthusiasts just focus on certain groups of stones and extrapolate theories about the overall culture from there," the 32-year-old historian complains.
As a result, Perschke travelled to France with a DAAD grant, where she would survey all of the dolmens in the area around Carnac and the Gulf of Morbihan - an area of roughly 480 square kilometers. "I want to ascertain the stones' exact condition," Perschke says, since many stones are completely overgrown, fallen, and scarcely recognizable. They have one thing in common, though. "Each of the dolmens lies on a hill. They marked the land for individual families. People understood the place where their ancestors were buried as their land. They used the megaliths to distinguish their land from that belonging to their neighbors."
Reena Perschke wants her study not just to lay a foundation for future research, but also to do away with some myths. "The megaliths don’t lie along a [former] coastline, and they don’t perform any astronomical function." The coastline 7,000 years ago was several kilometers from its present banks. The abundant farmland was flooded over the intervening centuries, and it was not until the modern age that some of the monuments stood at the sea’s edge. ...
* The gorgeous-as-usual photo in the magazine was actually of a rainbow-kissed menhir, not a dolmen. Just sayin'.
(My own visit to Carnac was years before digital cameras, so we'll have to make do w/ someone else's photo.)
Between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago, people in Brittany cut and fashioned giant stones - megaliths - and raised them into imposing figures. "They were huge family gravestones. Remains of as many as seventy people have been found in some places," says Reena Perschke, a researcher who specializes in ancient and early history. Perschke is fascinated with these monuments, called dolmens*, and at the same time surprised that they have thus far been the subject of so little serious research. "Many archaeologists and mystical-religion enthusiasts just focus on certain groups of stones and extrapolate theories about the overall culture from there," the 32-year-old historian complains.
As a result, Perschke travelled to France with a DAAD grant, where she would survey all of the dolmens in the area around Carnac and the Gulf of Morbihan - an area of roughly 480 square kilometers. "I want to ascertain the stones' exact condition," Perschke says, since many stones are completely overgrown, fallen, and scarcely recognizable. They have one thing in common, though. "Each of the dolmens lies on a hill. They marked the land for individual families. People understood the place where their ancestors were buried as their land. They used the megaliths to distinguish their land from that belonging to their neighbors."
Reena Perschke wants her study not just to lay a foundation for future research, but also to do away with some myths. "The megaliths don’t lie along a [former] coastline, and they don’t perform any astronomical function." The coastline 7,000 years ago was several kilometers from its present banks. The abundant farmland was flooded over the intervening centuries, and it was not until the modern age that some of the monuments stood at the sea’s edge. ...
* The gorgeous-as-usual photo in the magazine was actually of a rainbow-kissed menhir, not a dolmen. Just sayin'.
(My own visit to Carnac was years before digital cameras, so we'll have to make do w/ someone else's photo.)