a range of symbolically charged materials

• +..post-hardcore


• +..hazy, melancholic memories.


• +.. looping loops

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Rituals are often a way of telling a story. They may re-enact important narratives concerned with how the world came into being, and sometimes they tell how the human population is related to the past and the supernatural. Those rituals are often orchestrated by the use of powerful symbols. Perhaps the successive deposits found in the Wessex henges may have acted in rather the same way. They illustrated some of the stages in a narrative that was important in the rituals that were conducted there. Each of the deposits described in this chapter could have had wider connotations. The distinction between wild and domestic animals must have been fundamental to Neolithic identity, but the contrast between cattle and pigs could have had just as many implications for the history of the society that made these offerings. Pigs were domesticated from the wild, whilst domesticated cattle had to be introduced from the Continent. Axes are associated with the clearance of the natural forest, which was originally inhabited by red deer. At Woodhenge, there was a sequence leading from the wild to the domestic; at Maumbury Rings it led from the skulls of red deer to those of human beings; and at Wyke Down the sequence extended from carved chalk objects to flint artefacts and then to decorated pottery. Only the latter group was associated with human remains. The details are less important than the general pattern, for it is unwise to insist on a single reading of such a sequence of deposits. It is much more important to establish what kind of phenomenon we are investigating. I suggest that it is a narrative concerned with history, with origins and with the place of people in the world.
Bradley, Richard