Space, Place and Religious Landscapes

Living Mountains

Darrelyn Gunzburg, Bernadette Brady, Darrelyn Gunzburg, Bernadette Brady

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350186422
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350079908
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities.

This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity.

In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

Part One

Prehistoric conversations

1

The archaeology of height – cultural meaning in the relativity of Irish megalithic tomb siting

Frank Prendergast

Introduction

Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865–1953) was a renowned Irish field botanist, ecologist, and conservationist. In his lifetime, he traversed Ireland ‘from end to end, and from sea to sea’ to ‘appraise the many monuments of man’s industry and faith’. He encountered the numerous prehistoric hilltop cairns, the unusual nature of the island’s topography, and wrote how ‘ancient crumplings of the earth’s crust’ resulted in the formation of mountainous landscapes in the coastal perimeter and a ‘broad low plain in the centre’. His acute eye observed how the different landscapes would have affected patterns of human settlement in the prehistoric past, ‘tending to push pre-existing cultures not into an inaccessible centre, as in most islands, but into the mountain-fringe’. His journeys were described in The Way That I Went, first published in 1937.¹ Between 2004 and 2007 I followed in the footsteps of Praeger. My journeys were to reappraise the island’s much-studied Neolithic passage tombs, similarly distributed from ‘end to end’ and ‘from sea to sea’. As a surveyor, cultural astronomer and archaeologist, I had many and different questions to ask and answer using methodological advances undreamt of by Praeger almost a century ago. My approaches, referencing a developed body of archaeological literature, used field astronomy, geographical information science tools, statistical modelling, and network analysis of recorded intervisibility between the prehistoric tombs. These methodologies were integrated into a phenomenological approach drawing on my field walking to nearly three hundred sites dispersed across the island.

A brief portrait of a landscape and people

The story of Ireland’s mythical mountains cannot be isolated from the natural processes that created and moulded the landscape of this island. Formation of the oldest rocks, formed about two billion years ago in the Precambrian Era, began the complex processes of mountain building that continued until the end of the Palaeozoic Era.² The legacy of those geological events is the igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks collectively termed ‘bedrock’. Earlier humans exploited these lithic resources to construct their stone monuments. Geodiversity as a term and concept best describes such relationships, how people culturally engaged with the physical elements of their landscape.

The earliest that human inhabitants could have arrived on these shores must post-date the ending of the last ice age. Recent studies of the glacial geomorphology of the last ice sheet, analysis of high-resolution satellite digital elevation models of the land and seabed surrounding Britain and Ireland, and ground-based geological investigations support this claim.³ The results show that in c.20000 bce, and while much of southern Britain was free of glaciation, an ice sheet of variable thickness to approximately 900 metres still blanketed the whole of Ireland. It extended offshore beyond the present coastline onto the continental shelf – less to the west and more significantly to the south. There was ice-free terrain (nunataks) here during the last glacial maximum but this was limited in extent and encountered only at very high elevations.⁴ Such evidence demonstrates the hostility of the environment for human settlement here prior to the ending of the last cold stage in c.12000 bce.

A gradual warming of the climate in the later Palaeolithic induced the northwards retreat of the ice sheet and, with it, a marked change in the physical landscape of Ireland and northern Europe generally. Temperate woodland and a diverse range of flora and fauna gradually replaced more barren open tundra and steppes. For humans who had already migrated north-westwards to these shores, this beneficial environmental change propelled a transition from a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence, first evident during the Late Palaeolithic c.9000 bce–8000 bce, to nomadic pastoralism and, eventually, settlement and an economy based on farming.⁵ Thus began the appropriation, cultivation, and spiritual imbuement of landscapes from the Early Neolithic (4000 bce–3600 bce) onwards.

The processes of human settlement would have evolved in a horizontal and vertical sense. The horizontal socialization of landscapes at mostly lower elevations would have created clearly defined communal areas that offered security, greater potential for tillage, and delineated spaces for communal gatherings. As will be shown, observed distribution patterns of passage tombs suggest a preference for burials belonging to that tradition in upland and mountainous topographies. Relevantly, Jason Toohey stated, ‘Mountain peaks and other high points on the landscape hold special places in the ritual and political landscapes of many ancient and contemporary cultures.’⁶

The Neolithic in Ireland had begun by c.4000 bce and is defined by Gabriel Cooney as typified by ‘economic criteria, material culture and monumental parameters’.⁷ If the period could be described in one paragraph, then palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data show that its beginning in Ireland after c.4000 bce was characterized by woodland clearance, extensive settlement, farming, and a distinctive rectangular timber house horizon (traces of 110 have been discovered to date).⁸ The domestication of animals, cereal planting, fabrication of distinctive pottery styles, and the trading of prestige polished stone and flint axe-heads and mace-heads are just some of the indicative material cultural markers for this period of Ireland’s prehistoric past. Significantly, the ensuing centuries also witnessed the construction of megalithic tomb building. Three different traditions encompassed the majority erected in the Neolithic: court, portal, and passage types. Each exhibited distinct design styles and differing spatial distribution patterns. However, the topographical ‘canvas’ which the tomb builders encountered and appropriated needs to now be explored.

Hill or mountain? Beyond etymology

Geographers and cartographers use a variety of quantitative and non-quantitative definitions to distinguish a mountain from a non-mountain environment with resulting widespread disparity in perceptions of what constitutes a mountain. Ordnance Survey Ireland does not have a convention to differentiate a hill from a mountain. Instead, it allows local place names to dictate their classification. This conundrum has now been resolved in the first global-scale assessment of mountain ecosystems by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). It classifies 27 per cent of the Earth’s land surface as mountainous and uses six defined categories based on elevation and gradient to do so. The lowest has a vertical range of 300–1,000 metres and, importantly, for this chapter’s discussion, UNEP adopts the 300-metre contour as the defining boundary to distinguish a hill from a mountain.⁹ The latest cartographic representation of the broad-scale physical landscape of Ireland in the form of a physiographic map follows the UNEP convention.¹⁰

Ireland has an area of approximately 88,000 square kilometres with an extensive central lowland of predominantly sedimentary limestone bedrock (the largest such continuum in Europe). A mostly continuous coastal perimeter of uplands, hills and mountains surrounds the interior. Three-quarters of the landmass lies below the 150-metre contour with only 5 per cent above the 300-metre contour.¹¹ Much of the variation in topographical relief is attributable to the variable resistance of the different rock types to erosion rather than to any uplift caused by past tectonic events. The analysis shown here of Irish summit elevations provided by Stuart Simon reveals the exponential-like decrease in the number of peaks relative to an increase in elevation above mean sea level (Table 1.1).¹²

Table 1.1 Height classification of Irish summits

Elevation in metres	Number of hills and mountains
≥200	1,400
≥300	1,158
≥400	954
≥500	570
≥600	288
≥700	115
≥800	41
≥900	14
≥1,000	3

These maximum elevations in Table 1.1 may seem small compared to those encountered globally, but this belies the perception of their visual impact on the viewer. To illustrate the phenomenological point, Slieve na Calliagh (or Loughcrew Hills) in Co. Meath rise abruptly out of the central lowland. This is an archaeological and cultural landscape of international renown with thirty-two prehistoric monuments comprising Neolithic passage tombs, cairns, and unclassified megalithic struct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Maps
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One Prehistoric conversations
• Part Two Medieval conversations
• Part Three Animistic conversations
• Part Four Storied conversations
• Part Five Contemporary conversations
• Index
• Copyright Page