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A taste of the unexpected: subverting mentalités
through the motifs and settings of Irish
passage tombs.
© Andrew Cochrane 2005 - Page 2
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In following Thomas’s (1993) desire to create narratives that
address more humanised interactions with the environment and associated
material cultures, Fraser (1998) discussed the physical stresses involved
in ascending the Loughcrew summits and the additional difficulties that
would be incurred by leading animals, carrying objects or maybe people in
a ‘state of crisis’ (Foucault 2002, 232), such as adolescents, the
elderly, menstruating or pregnant women, the sick, or perhaps the dead.
Scaling these slopes might also have impacted upon notions of time and
space. The act of climbing might have incorporated different senses of
time than were generally used within the daily round. Bloch (1977) has
commented that more than one sense of time can often exist in the same
society. It is suggested that routine activities may be influenced by the
seasons, such as knowing the right times of year to conduct certain
events, whereas ‘special’ activities may involve notions of time that
are distinct from or distort the seasons (Bloch 1977). For instance, the
summit tops at Loughcrew are generally cooler in temperature than the
surrounding lowland areas and can be covered in snow when low-lying areas
are not.
This climatic feature might deliver the impression that the
passing of seasons is respectively progressed or delayed as one rises up
the slopes, with the developmental stages and annual cycles of fauna and
flora being different to the lowland ones (Watson 2004, 60). Experiencing
the Loughcrew Hills with differing climatic conditions and visibility
distorted by atmospherics (Watson 2004, 60), may have lead to concrete
testaments to the specialness of the summits.
Such features may confirm a worldview, at some level, in which the
Loughcrew Hills are regarded as part of a cosmological axis mundi, a ‘Sacred
Mountain’, ‘Cosmic Mountain’ or ‘navel of the earth’, where
heaven and earth meet (Eliade 1964, 268). Hill and mountain tops are
often regarded by some Tewa people from the American South-west, as an
‘earth navel’ an inverted hole into the worlds below that allow
spirits access from one realm to another (see discussions in Tilley 1994,
65-66), exposing themselves as ‘hierophanies’, that is something that
reveals itself to be special (Eliade 1964, 32). Foucault (2002, 231-33)
describes these sites as ‘heterotopias’, that is a counter-site which
can simultaneously juxtapose in a single place several places.
These
zones also contest and invert a place while being outside all places,
even though one can locate them in a physical reality. These summit tops
or island settings may have subverted daily life (see also Bradley 2000,
27). At the Loughcrew summits, at particular times, some members of
society may therefore have inverted their normal networks of relations
and disrupted how they thought about themselves, others and the world in
general. How these themes interact with the passage tombs and associated
visual imagery will be discussed in more detail below.
Appetites for construction and disruption
There is currently a lack of direct datable evidence for the Loughcrew
complex and estimated dates generally range from c. 4000 – 2800
BC (McMann 1994, 526). Lithic evidence from the area does, however,
demonstrate Mesolithic (some time after 7000 cal BC) and extensive
Neolithic activity (Cooney 1987; Dillon 1990, cited in Cooney and Grogan
1994, 13; Kimball 2000, 31). This situation has led Cooney (2000a,
158-163) to propose a speculative three phase sequential model for the
Loughcrew complex, based on Sheridan’s (1985/6) developmental scheme.
Cooney (2000a, 159) believes that such an approach allows one to further
appreciate how the complex evolved through the actions of some Neolithic
people (see also Thomas 1990; 1992; Fraser 1998).
What this scheme
highlights is that as with the Boyne Valley passage tombs, the larger
Loughcrew passage tombs seem to be built after most of the smaller ones
(contra Herity 1974, 84-7), with the smaller passage being built in the
first two phases. The passage tombs were not all built at the same time,
rather there were repetitions, episodes and punctuated performances over
time. The settings of the tombs in the final stages draw the spectator’s
attention to the more level areas at Loughcrew, creating ‘stage’
settings. It is noteworthy that as soon as one creates a stage, there is
gaze and distance, performance and otherness, although particular
interactions can subvert or abolish these dimensions (Baudrillard 2003, 27).
Of the 31 cairns now visible at Loughcrew today (Cooney 1990, 743),
seven have intact ground features, while 21 have remaining interior
fragments and 17 have partial or complete kerbs (McMann 1994, 526). Many
of the visual motifs are deteriorating (15 cairns still have motifs today)
and many more have been lost in the last hundred years as a result of
weather conditions, erosion, modern afforestation and even by flourishing
nettles (Conwell 1866, 365).
The surviving images on do not present the
same ‘mature’ plastic style that was observed at the Boyne Valley
passage tombs, and appear more as a collection of random images that are
‘…crowded onto surfaces in a busy and seemingly unfocused manner…’
(O’Sullivan 1993, 30). Following O’Sullivan’s (1996, 87) typological
sequence, none of the motifs progress beyond the Step 1 standard Irish
image designs, with the plastic aspects of the stones rarely explored. Due
to restrictions of space here and these preservation issues, I will focus
on select cairns and their visual motifs to further understand some of the
contradictions, past actions and dramas that may have been played out at
these sites. Before engaging in the specifics of the archaeological data,
I will briefly introduce the concept of the carnivalesque.
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