Description
Stone rows differ from a prehistoric avenue, in that the stones are always in a broadly straight line rather than following a more curving route. Stone rows can be few metres or several kilometres in length and made from stones that can be as tall as 2m, although 1m high stones are more common. The terminals of many rows have the largest stones and other megalithic features are sometimes sited at the ends, especially burial cairns. The stones are placed at intervals and may vary in height along the sequence, to provide a gradated appearance, though it is not known whether this was done deliberately. Stone rows were erected by the later Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples in the British Isles, parts of Scandinavia and northern France.
The most famous example is the Carnac stones, a complex of stone rows around Carnac in Brittany. There are a number of examples on Dartmoor including the row at Stall Down and three rows at Drizzlecombe and the Hill O Many Stanes in Caithness. In Britain they are exclusively found in isolated moorland areas. The term alignment is sometimes taken to imply that the rows were placed purposely in relation to other factors such as other monuments or topographical or astronomical features. Archaeologists treat stone rows as discrete features however and alignment refers to the stones being lined up with one another rather than anything else. Their purpose is thought to be religious or ceremonial perhaps marking a processual route. Another theory is that each generation would erect a new stone to contribute to a sequence that demonstrated a people's continual presence.
Read more about this topic: Stone Row
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)