Andrew

It has always struck me that, in terms of archaeology, place is understood poorly. One comes to a site, like Newgrange in Ireland, and one wonders--what is it that this building is, and does? On the winter solstice, the sun shines through the window box above the door, walks its way up the corridor, and fills the chamber at the end with light.

Is this a solar calendar? That is an answer devoid of meaning. Yes, in empty space, its sole remaining function is to tick away the time until that hour, now three minutes or so after dawn because the Earth has moved, once a year, when vacant space is enlivened by one vestigial element of ceremony. Can we understand it absent of the bodies, the movements, the event for which that ghostly light, tracking its way up the dust, which embedded it in the world from which it comes?

And yet again, even that would be unfair to the monument. When the Celts came to Ireland, they called this mound Brugh na Boyne--the fortress on the river Boyne, and they made it the palace of Oengus Macc Occ, the eternally young, the sun god--indeed the "Boyne" river itself is named after the goddess Boand, Oengus' mother. Many rivers in Ireland, as elsewhere, have their goddesses.

But Newgrange dates to 3000 BCE, some five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. At least 2000 years---maybe more--before the Celts arrived in Ireland. Who knows, it is wortwhile to ask, whether Oengus' story was made for this mysterious place, which captures the sun on its shortest day, or whether it found a home here, for a community of wanderes who had done so themselves.

Then again, flanking Newgrange are the two mounds of Dowth and Knowth, which have their own alignments with the sun, each one somewhat different. What this recalls, naturally, is meaning--can we imagine that it was the complex that stood here, these three sites within a few kilometers of each other, which held that essential element of ritual, that purpose, jointly? Can we imagine otherwise?

And so, naturally, it is impossible to imagine that to deliver the ceremony from dull theorizing, to give it life, we must imagine the real complex. Not just the sites, but also the bodies, their movements on those days--their preparation for those days, their imagination as to what those days meant. And we do not prioritize this to one instance for, after all, the Celts made something of it too, something which may or may not have had to do with what was already a two millenium history of observance and belief around the same mound. If each built in this physical space a spiritual edifice, and wrote a anatomical text of meaning--and how can we imagine otherwise--then the silence of Newgrange is because it has been bodiless.

Then, also, the steady strem of tourists who come each year to see it, the raffle they hold each year to pick the lucky few who get to stand in the tiny chamber, before dawn, waiting for the arrival of the footsteps of the sun god, to return to his palace after a long, cold winter--as, somewhere else, the ancestors of the Greeks waited, breathless for rosy-fingered Aurora, as Marduk, or Ba'al, or Ra, struggled their way up from a dark and dangerous underworld pasage--the stones once again gather meaning and a voice, in a new birth, in a new world, in what is no doubt an almost ceaseless history of change in which meaning itself is of a moment, not forever, and brought by those who come.