Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Religion, Prehistoric / Europe"

Maria Gimbutas devoted three fundamental monographs to the study of the religion of prehistoric Europe and the Goddess who, in her opinion, reigned in the sacred space of the population of Neolithic Europe. She believed that modern European civilization has its origins in the early agricultural societies of the Neolithic period from the 7th to the 3rd millennia BC, which corresponds to the term “Old Europe”. According to the researcher, the Great Triune Goddess, associated with the cycle of “birth, nurturing, growth, death, and regeneration”, played a dominant and all-encompassing role in the religion of Old Europe, the “goddess religion”. The analysis of the pictorial tradition of the Cucuteni–Trypillia cultural complex allows us to assert that, in addition to female characters, probably goddesses, the symbolism of the Moon, lunar cycles and sacred images related to the semantic field of the Moon were of particular importance during near 2000 years.

Lineal Megalithic Rock Scripts have been found by us: 1) associated to megaliths in Southern Iberia Dolmens at Alcalar Dolmen (Portimao, Portugal), Cumbres Mayores Dolmens (Huelva, Spain) and in a fallen menhir at Zalamea la Real (Huelva, Spain); 2) not associated to megaliths in rocks or stones sizing from a fist in size to 110 cm or more at Zalamea la Real (Huelva, Spain) and other Malaga coastal sites; 3) in widespread rocks and stones in all main Canary Islands; and 4) in an Algerian Sahara shelter (Ti-m Missaou, Ahaggar Mountains area). These lineal megalithic rock scripts are sometimes identical to those of Iberian-Tartessian signary or are admixed with them on rocks. Other authors have also found them in several parts of southern Europe and also in Canary Islands. Some of the signs are repeated and have for us a funeral and religious meaning on the basis of Mother Goddess neolithic/paleolithic religion and Basque Iberian correspondence. It is postulated that these scripts may be the origin of Iberian-Tartessian signary and/or that these widespread stones/rocks were written by people who were learning to write, in contrast to, for example, the defined Iberian scripts found both at Lanzarote and Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), sometimes admixed with them. In the present paper, we describe Lineal Megalithic Script on rock/stones at a pass (between a chain of volcans or “degollada”) on the way from Tefía to Tetir, close to Fuerteventura capital, Puerto del Rosario. These Lineal Megalithic Scirpts are postulated to be precursors of lineal writing of Berber, Iberian-Tartessian, Etruscan, Old Italian Languages, Minoan, Latin, Greek, and others like Runes, Grandeshnitsa and Vinca scripts.

Designed to be comprehensive in its scope, this set covers major religious events from remote prehistory (ca. 60,000 BC) to the highly contemporaneous (AD 2014). Taken together, the editors have done an admirable job in choosing topics to cover and in compiling a highly readable, informative, and thought-provoking compilation. The first volume covers the period of prehistory to AD 600 and includes entries for topics as diverse as the first burials that indicate a belief in an afterlife found in Shanidar Cave, Iraq (ca. 60,000 BC), the discovery of the oldest human-made place of worship at Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey (tenth millennium BC), the ritual use of alcohol (ca. third millennium BC), the founding of Buddhism (sixth to fourth centuries BC), the Roman conquest of Judaea in 63 BC, the conversion of Saul (Saint Paul) in AD 34, the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, and the papacy of Gregory the Great (reigned AD 590–604). Volume 2 covers from AD 600 to 1450, thus encompassing the Middle Ages in the West, the rise of Islam in the Middle East, the growth of Christian monasticism, the crusades, the development of the first universities in Europe, and the lives of Joan of Arc and Jan Hus. The final volume covers from 1450 to the present, starting with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks and ending with the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) in 2014.

The article presents a study into the implementation of environmental and spiritual ideas of alternative communitarian movements during the establishing of quickly spreading nature-based spirituality communities and their settlements in the East-Central European region. It focuses on the Anastasia “spiritual” movement, classifiable as New Age, which emerged in Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since has spread to East-Central Europe and beyond. It considers the process of indigenization via assembled nature-based spiritualities and traditionalistic ideas in the movement. It will discuss how the Anastasian process of sacralization of natural space, together with the romantic mode of a narrativization of the archaic past, serve as a source for the formation of images of “indigenousness” in the movement. During the process of “indigenization,” a negotiation, interpretation and presentation of nationalistic and traditionalistic ideas serve as a basis for an imagination of (trans)local prehistoric and local national pasts— including a golden age myth, a “back to nature” worldview with attempts to reconstruct variously perceived traditions, as well as a development of utopian visions of a prospective heaven on earth—intended to widely spread future social projects. The findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork in 2005–2015, including participant observation and interviews with respondents in the Baltic countries and Russia.

The Danes and the Origin of the Danish KingdomOn the Research Programme “From Tribe to State in Denmark”Since the 1970’s, the ethnogenesis of the Danes and the origin of the Danish kingdom have attracted increased interest among Danish archaeologists. Marked changes over time observed in a growing source material form a new basis of interpretation. In written sources, the Danish realm does not appear until the Viking Age. The formation of the kingdom is traditionally placed as late as the 10th century (Jelling and all that). But prehistorians have raised the question whether the formation of the kingdom was not a much longer course. Some scholars believe that we have to study the periods preceding the Viking Age to be able to understand the development, at least from the 3rd century. In Scandinavia, this covers the Late Roman Iron Age, the Migration and Merovingian periods, as well as the early Viking Age. In a Continental perspective, it parallels the Late Antiquity (3rd-6th centuries) and the Early Middle Ages (6th-10th centuries).In 1984, the Danish Research Council launched the research programme “From Tribe to State in Denmark” which aimed to understand the formation of the Danish kingdom by studying the interaction between economic, social, and political circumstances from the Roman Period to the Viking Age. This paper presents a short synthesis of my work in the programme.Two themes have been brought into focus:1) The ethnogenesis of the Nordic peoples: the formation of the tribes that appear in the few and problematic written sources of the first millennium AD, in casu the Danes;2) The making of the Nordic kingdoms: in this case Denmark.A problem with this kind of long-term research is the inherent teleological perspective, revealed in the programme title. It is essential for me to emphasise that the early Danish kingdom was not a self-evident formation but the result of a series of concrete historical circumstances. There have been alternative possibilities at several occasions.In Scandinavia, the period is prehistoric. However, in South Scandinavia it deserves to be labelled protohistoric. Scandinavian archaeologists often forget or ignore the fact that in large parts of Europe, the first millennium AD is a historical period. The Scandinavian development is too often evaluated in isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of the fact that the material culture demonstrates that interaction with continental as well as insular powers was continuously influencing Scandinavia. Necessarily, a relevant approach to Scandinavian late prehistory includes a historical dimension and a European perspective. South Scandinavian societies were over time linked to different realms in Europe. The Danish development was certainly part of a common west European trajectory.The best possibility of interpreting the archaeological record of South Scandinavia is by analogy with historians’ interpretations of other more or less contemporary Germanic peoples, based on descriptions in the written sources. Long-term studies of Scandinavian societies in the first millennium AD has laid new ground on which scholars have to build their image of the making of a Danish kingdom. The paper briefly describes some of the results and focuses on changes in the material that I find significant.Rural settlement: Great progress in the study of Iron Age and Early Mediaeval farming suggests economic growth, a development from subsistence economy to a production of a surplus, from collective forms of farming to individually run farmsteads, from small family farmsteads to large farms and manors. It is the surplus created by this expansion that could carry the late Viking and high medieval Danish kingdom with its administration, military power, church, towns, etc.Trade and exchange: Prestige-goods exchange dominated in the beginning of the period. Goods came from various parts of Europe. The connections to central and east Europe were broken in the sixth century, not to be reopened until the Viking Age. This explains the dominating position held by West European material culture in the development of South Scandinavia. Thus, South Scandinavia became part of the commercial zone of West Europe, certainly an important element in the making of the Danish kingdom. In the Viking Age, the rapid urbanisation demonstrates that Denmark gained great profit from its key position in the North Sea-Baltic trade network.Central places and early towns: Complex settlements appeared already in the Late Roman Iron Age, e.g. Gudme/Lundeborg, Funen. Further central sites appeared, and the number of central places grew rapidly. By the year 700, they are found in virtually every settlement area of South Scandinavia. The sites were not simple trading stations, as most were labelled a few years ago, but many also fulfilled important political, social, and religious functions; some were also manorial residences. The resident elite based their power on the mobilisation of the rural surplus; at the same time, one can say that the stimulus to produce a rural surplus was probably caused by an increasing demand from the elite at the centres.In the Viking Age, urbanisation began, which meant that the old central places lost their position and were replaced by towns like Hedeby, Ribe, and Århus. Excavations show that urbanisation started in the 8th century, a little later than the famous emporia Quentovic, Dorestad, Hamwic, and Ipswic.So today, it must be concluded that at the threshold to the Viking Age, South Scandinavian societies had a more advanced economic system and a more complex social organisation than believed only 20 years ago.Warfare: The dated indications of war cluster in two periods, the 3rd to 5th centuries, and the 10th to 11th centuries. The early period could be characterised as one of tribal warfare, in which many polities were forced to join larger confederations through the pressure of endemic warfare and conquests. In the archaeological record, indicators of war seem to disappear after AD 500, not to reappear in large numbers until the Viking Age. Was this period a Pax Danorum? Indeed, the silent archaeological record could indicate that the Danes had won hegemony in South Scandinavia. This phase can be understood as a period of consolidation between an early phase of tribal warfare and a later phase in which the territorial defence of a Danish kingdom becomes visible in the record.Wars with the Carolingian empire in the 9th century are the first wars in Denmark to be mentioned in the written record. However, archaeology demonstrates the presence of serious military threats in the centuries before, e.g. the first dykes at Danevirke. The strategic localisation of the period’s defence works reveals that threats were met with both navy and army. According to the texts, the 9th century wars are clearly national wars, either wars of conquest on a large scale between kingdoms, or civil wars, which for a large part seem to be triggered by an aggressive Frankish diplomacy.The two phases of warfare mirror two different military political situations: in the Late Roman and Migration Periods they are tribal wars and conflicts over resource control; in the Late Merovingian Period and the Viking Age they concern a Danish kingdom’s territorial defence.Religious changes: The conversion is often considered a major turning point in Scandinavian history; and in a way it was, of course. But the importance of Christianisation is heavily overestimated. The conversion was simply a step in a process that started long before. The paganism of the Scandinavians must not mislead us into believing that they were barbarians.A great change in cult practice took place around AD 500 when the use of bogs and lakes for offerings rapidly decreased. Instead, religious objects are found hoarded in settlement contexts, sometimes in the great halls of the magnates. This indicates that the elite had taken control of religion in a new way. The close link between cult and elite continued uninterrupted after Christianisation; churches were built by the magnates and on their ground. Therefore, we have a kind of cult-site continuity. From the Migration Period, the archaeological material demonstrates a close link between cult and magnates. This is certainly one important element in the formation of a Danish kingdom.Political development: Analyses of material culture reveal that South Scandinavia in the Early Iron Age consisted of many small regions, and based on sources like Tacitus and Ptolemy, one can guess that they correspond to tribal areas. In the Late Roman Iron Age and the Migration Period, the formation of a South Scandinavian super-region can be discerned, but still subdivided into a small number of distinguishable culture zones, and, again, on the basis of written sources (Jordanes and Procopius), one can guess that small tribes had joined into larger confederations precisely as on the Continent. In my opinion, a Danish kingdom appeared not later than the sixth century. Based on the well-studied material culture of the early Merovingian Period, one can assume that it had its core area in Central Denmark - South Jutland, Funen, and Zealand – with a close periphery of North Jutland, South Halland, Scania, Blekinge, and Bornholm. Probably more loosely attached to the Danish hegemony was a more distant periphery in South Sweden.So the Danish kingdom already had a history when it first appeared in the Frankish sources at the end of the 8th century. Danish involvement in European politics is first clearly observable in 777 and again in 782. Obviously, the Danish kingdom was a political and military actor on the North European scene long before the Viking Age.In the light of all these arguments, three phases can be described:– Roman Iron Age: Tribal societies with chieftains or small kings.– Late Roman Iron Age, Migration Period, and early Merovingian Period: A process of amalgamation started and warfare characterises the period. The result is the formation of tribal confederations. Written sources speak in favour of the Danes as the people who eventually won hegemony over South Scandinavia.– Late Merovingian Period and Viking Age: A process began in which royal agents replaced local chieftains. The last area to be integrated under direct Danish royal rule, in the reign of Sven Forkbeard, was probably Scania. Thus Medieval Denmark appeared.Final remarks: As a result of archaeological achievements in the last decades, a number of traditional views about Scandinavian late prehistory appear less likely, or rather erroneous. It is an underestimation that the pagans were unable of organisation and that a formation of a Danish kingdom is unthinkable before the late Viking Age. Unfortunately, the ethnogenesis of the Danes is beyond the reach of study, but a rough hypothesis may be formulated. The Danes were once one of several tribes somewhere in South Scandinavia. Events outside the Scandinavian scene were of fundamental importance for the possibility of the Danish gens to grow in power in the Late Roman and Migration Periods. Already before the Merovingian Period, the Danes won hegemony between the Baltic and the North Sea. A Danish kingdom could probably be based on this key position. Its survival was by no means a matter of course. In their continued efforts to secure the Danish position, capable kings established the borders of high medieval Denmark in the course of the Viking Age.Ulf NäsmanInstitutionen för humaniora och ­samhällsvetenskap Högskolan i Kalmar

This article is not yet a real research; it is more as a deep reflection. But those deep reflections are worth to be researched thoroughly by experts from many fields of study integratingly. Thinking of people in land-continent with many countries as Europe is different then thinking of people in one country as Indonesia, a maritime-continent. In land-continents thinking, sea is to separte, in maritime-continent Indonesia with its islands, sea is to unite, wawasan Nusantara as old as prehistory. Each countryin a land-continent are eager to differentiate and defend to other countries by ethnic, language, religion, ideology, while in Indonsia as a maritime-continent, we is one country, several parts are slightly different but we are “one”: “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika”. In land-continent countries, a city with walls fortification, a country with great walls fortification are usual. While it is not so in Maritime-continent Indonesia, as is Trowulan the capital of the great empire Majapahit. Our school books says that the population of Indonesia comes from Asia, 5000 BC and 2000BC, while it is known that the migration of homosapiens has reach West Nusantara about 60 – 80.000 BC, and experienced the ancient Toba Mountain great explosion and the three great floods.The west theory said that Indonesia is a country between two continents and two aceans, where culture, etnic, nation, religion, etc, criss cross ofer it. So Indonesia ’has nothing’. No local genius. Nusantara people cruises the Pacific and Indian ocean before Christ, the Atlantic in the first century. What about ”Atlantis” and ”Eden in the East” situated in Sundaland, that alter the world culture, history & development? Has all this a connection with the mistery of Gunung Padang? Keywords: Land-continent thinking, Maritime-continent thinking, Wawasan Nusantara, BhinnekaTunggal Ika, Gunung Padang.

Unlike the Sephardim, who accepted the concept of taqiyya and the practice of marranism to cope with forced conversions under Islam, the Ashkenazim, especially the Jewish communities of Germanophone Central Europe, developed an uncompromising rejection of Christian baptism. Instead of marranism and deception under Islam, the Ashkenazim, in the persecutions of the Crusades and after, developed a strong sense of martyrdom and detested baptism, whether forced or voluntary, as ritual and spiritual defilement and pollution. The small number of Jewish converts to Christianity were not so much sinners but apostates (meshummadim or the vertilgten). Given this Ashkenazi tradition, it is not surprising that converts were marginalized in Jewish historiography and scholarship. Nevertheless, as Carlebach argues persuasively in this book, they played a significant role in Jewish–Christian relations in early modern Germany; and given the fact that conversions rose rapidly in the late eighteenth century, it is all the more important to understand the prehistory of Jewish conversion and integration in Germany after Emancipation.

More than 100 years have elapsed since the discovery of the Japod necropolises in the Una valley, south of Bihać. The Jezerine and Ribić necropolises were excavated in the late 19th century (K. Kovačević, P. Mirković 1890: 330-337; V. Radimsky 1892: 301-310) and another, smaller necropolis in Golubić was systematically excavated in the 1960s (I. Čremošnik 1956: 126-138; B. Raunig 1968: 81-98). The third necropolis is not dealt with here, since the amber artifacts are identical to those from Jezerine. A total of 553 graves were excavated in Jezerine, of which 228 contained skeletons, 298 cinerary urns, 28 cremated remains without urns, and two containing cinerary urns in which the skull of the deceased was laid over the lid. The pre-Roman and early Roman necropolis in Ribić had only six graves with skeletons, 296 containing cinerary urns, and one containing crematedremains with no urn. V. Radimski (V. Radimsky 1982:301-310; 1893: 37-92; 237-308; 369-466; 575-623) and V. Ćurčić (V.Ćurčić 1898: 625-656) have written about the findings of the excavations of the Japod necropolises in the Una valley, and many archaeologists have been engaged in analyzing the archaeological material. The fullest scientific treatment is that of Z. Marić,dating from the 1960s, (Z. Marić 1968: 5-79) while more recently the issue has been seriously addressed by B. Raunig (B. Raunig 2004), while B. Tessmann deals with the Jezerine burial ground as part of her doctoral thesis with new absolute chronological.There is no doubt that Z. Marić has produced the most complete chronological and cultural definition to date of the archaeological material from these necropolises while, in so doing, stressing that the chronology of the Japod region is a problem not easily solved, given the great many specific features of local significance. Quite simply, Japod material does not readily fit into the formative cultural circles of neighbouring regions, and is characterized by a very pronouncedconservatism, as a result of which some forms survive for a decade or more, or even as much as a century. Despite these remarks by Z. Marić, in this paper we adhere to his relative chronology, while taking a more relaxed position in regard to the absolute chronology, as the author recommends. We have not given a detailed overview of all the archaeological artifactsmade of amber, but have selected those that are typical of certain stages of the burials in the necropolises; these artifacts also vividly illustrate the aesthetic needs and economic strength of the Japod population of the Una valley. By analyzing and tracing these artifacts, century by century, from the distant past right up to the arrival of the Romans in this part of the world, wehave obtained a clear picture of the distinctiveness of the culture, art and religion of the prehistoric world in the Una valley. Japod art is highly diverse in both content and expression, though it belongs almost solely to the applied arts, with the majority of its products consisting of jewellery or associated with clothing (B. Raunig 2004). An overall consideration of the jewelleryin the graves reveals that these are heavy, solid artifacts, even in the case of fine material such as amber: amber beads in necklaces, or combined with bronze in fibulae, have a diameter of 4-5 cm or even more. It can fairly be said that one of the principal features of Japod jewellery is the abundance and diversity of the application of amber. Amber beads, usually leftrough or very simply finished, were used mainly for necklaces and fibulae, but also for bracelets, earrings and pendants. Fibulae were the most common and, for Japod costumes, the most important decorativecum- utilitarian artifacts. This type of jewellery was favoured by the Japods in the Una valley more than anywhere else, and thus came in a wide range of designs;the Japods wore them as part of their folk costume right up to the time they lost their independence, and even in the first century CE, under Roman rule (R. Drechsler-Bižić 1987). The general characteristics of the amber grave offeringsin the Una valley can be reduced to a few basic observations. In the second stage, it was very unusual to find an amber bead or two in cinerary graves, whereas they were quite common in skeletal graves, usually by the head or around the neck, as worn inlife. Since there are other differences between these two basic types of burial, Z. Marić hypothesizes that the skeletal graves belonged to the female members of the local population and the cinerary graves to the male incomers from Pannonia. In stage three, amber features in greater quantities in cinerary graves as well, although skeletal graves still contain much morenumerous and richer artifacts; only in stage four does the ratio of such artifacts become equal between the two types of burials. During stage five, the number of amber artifacts in cinerary graves increases sharply, and it is from this very period, as already noted, that the two most richly equipped graves date, with the remains of incineration and numerous amber artifacts:grave 278 from Jezerine and grave 10 from Ribić (Z.Marić 1968:5-79; B. Raunig 2004). We can only guess at the routes by which amber reached the Japods in the Una valley (N. Negroni- Catacchio 1972: 1-18). The highly decorative dark reddishamber of outstanding quality used to make many of the artifacts found in the graves of the Una valley distinguishes these necropolises from all others of the same period in Europe as a whole. The number of artifacts and, it is fair to say, the coarse workmanship on the amber, suggest that one of the amber routes from the Baltic to the south ran along the Una valley,and that the Japods were intermediaries in the amber trade as well as using these goods. In the 7th century BC this route could have been of major importance, since this was one of the periods of severe cold that rendered the Po valley unsuitable for trade with the distant Baltic region in the north, passing as it did over the Alps, which were impassable, even over thelower passes, during periods of extreme cold. During the 4th century BC the Japods in the Una valley came into direct contact with the Celts, who already dominated the cultural stage in much of Europe. There is no doubt that there was considerable trade between these peoples over a long period, and it would be normal for the Celts to control the amber routes, so thatthis material reached local Japod workshops by way of exchange, in unworked form (A. Palavestra 1988: 205-217; A. Palavestra, V. Krstić 2006). Another type of amber, of poorer quality, translucent and light yellow in colour, from which the triangularand trapezoid beads from the later periods of the necropolises in the Una valley were made, undoubtedly came from a different source from the dark red amber. This type of bead is found in considerable quantities in these necropolises in the 1st century BC, at a time when trade from Hellenistic centres was already widespread. The major centres for the amber trade were then in the northern Black Sea regions (B. Srebrodolski 1984). It is interesting to note that forms of triangular amber beads were known as early as the late Mesolithic in the northern regions of Russia (M. Gimbutas 1985). This form was perhaps dictated bythe actual quality of the raw material from various sites in north-eastern Europe (B. Srebrodolski 1984; A. Palavestra 1993). Finally, it can be said that to confirm, at least in part, these observations on the routes by which amber was imported to the Una valley, a serious and wideranging study of the contemporary cultures would be needed, going well beyond their relationships with their immediate neighbours, along with some more detailed observations of historical facts. Espacially interesting is their relatios with the Celts and Veneto, which for now remains unclear, which directly affects to the different oppinions about ethnic identity Japodes.

The Prehistory of the Mind: A search for the origins of art, religion and science. "The Prehistory of the Mind, e "The Archaeology of Ethnìcity" são cronologicamente frutos de uma arqueologia inglesa "pós-pós-processualista", já que ambos os autores obtiveram suas formações acadêmicas no final da década de 80 e início dos anos 90, nomento em que as idéias de lan Hodder, Michael Shanks e Christopher Tìlley alcançaram grande influência na arqueologia britânica e mundial. Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies. Multiple Ways of Knowing The Past A coletânea "Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies" representa o espírito e a alma da arqueologia anglo-americana dos anos 90. Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire. Transe et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées. A experiência de Jean Clottes com a arte paleolítica européia, aliada aos resultados das pesquisas que vêm sendo desenvolvidas por Lewis-Williams entre os San, no sul da África, possibilitou o surgimento de um livro extremanente interessante e provocativo sobre otema da relação entre a arte rupestre, os estados alterados de consciência e o xamanismo'inspirados pela experiência africana e, segundo eles, "com a prudência indispensável" procuram ao longo do livro, encontrar os "xamãs da Pré-História. Peintures Préhistoriques du Brésil. L'Art Rupestre du Piauí. Através de um livro esteticamente bem elaboraclo, a autora nos proporciona uma idéia da riqueza e diversidade da arte rupestre produzida pelas diferentes populaçoes pré-históricas que viveram nesta região do nordeste brasileiro. Pré-Hislória do Nordeste do Brasil Há quase três décadas, Gabriela Martin, uma arqueóloga clássica espanhola com diversas publicações originais sobre a cerâmica romana, tem se dedicado ao estudo da Pré-História do Nordeste do Brasi Artesãos e Artefatos Pré-históricos do Vale do Rio Pardo Embora centrado em uma temática regional, o livro de Hoeltz traz contribuições interessantes para a pesquisa arqueológica brasileira como um todo, especialmente se considerado sob dois aspectos: a necessidade de reavaliação crítica das pesquisas arqueológicas realizadas nos últimos trinta anos no país e a demanda por métodos analíticos condicentes às problemáticas volladas à compreensão dos contextos ctuturais pré-históricos. Guarani: Organização Social e Arqueologia. André Luis R. Soares é bacharel e licenciado em História pela UFRGS e , desde 1991, vem realizando estudos sobre os Guarani. Faz parte da geração de jovens mestres fornados nesta década no Curso de Pós-Graduação em História, Área de Concentração em Arqueologia, da PUCRS. Eléments d'Archéozoologle Esta obra, bastante ilustrada com figuras, fotos e gráflcos, considera sobretudo as Pesquisas desenvolvidas no continente europeu.

RESUMENNuestro conocimiento sobre las religiones protohistóricas se encuentra prejuiciado por categorías de pensamiento presentistas y el recurso a fuentes posteriores. Para lograr una caracterización mínima de la fenomenología de tales manifestaciones se propone una aproximación a partir de los materiales de la Edad del Hierro, con atención a los problemas y metodologías de la arqueología, que privilegie el estudio de casos particulares frente a la generalización céltica. A través del ejemplo de la cultura castreña, se examinará qué elementos constituyeron objeto de atención ritual y sobredimensión simbólica para una sociedad de la Edad del Hierro.PALABRAS CLAVE: Cultura Castreña, Edad del Hierro, protohistoria, ritual, arqueologíaABSTRACTOur knowledge of protohistoric religions is prejudiced by presentist ways of thinking and recourse to later sources. To achieve a minimum characterization of the phenomenology of such manifestations, I propose an approach based on Iron Age materials, being careful of the archaeological problems and methodologies, and favouring particular case studies rather than Celtic generalizations. Through the example of Castreño culture, I will examine which elements might have been the object of ritual attention and symbolic oversizing in an Iron Age society.KEY WORDS: Castro culture, Iron Age, Protohistory, ritual, archaeologyBIBLIOGRAFÍAAlmeida, C. A. F. (1980) “Dois Capacetes e tres copos, em Bronze, de Castelo de Neiva”, Gallaecia, 6, 245-257.Alonso Burgos, F. (2014): Estructura social y paisaje simbólico: las comunidades astures y el imperio romano. Tesis doctoral inédita, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.Angelbeck, B. y Grier, C. 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CairnsIn Denmark, the term stenkast (a ‘stone throw’) is used for cairns – stone heaps that have accumulated in places where it was the tradition to throw a stone. A kast (a ‘throw’) would actually be a more correct term, as sometimes the heaps consist of sticks, branches, heather, or peat, rather than stones – in short, whichever was at hand at that particular place. A kast could also consist of both sticks and stones.The majority of the known Danish cairns were presented by August F. Schmidt in 1929. Since then, numerous new ones have been discovered, and we now know of around 80 cairns, cf. the list on page 264 and map Fig. 3. It appears from the descriptions that the majority – a total of 65 – are actual cairns, 14 are heaps of branches, whereas two are described as either peat or heather heaps.Geographically, the majority – a total of 53 – are found in Jutland, with most in North and Central Jutland (Fig. 3). Fifteen are known from Zealand, four from Lolland, four from Funen, and five from Bornholm.Topographically, they are found – naturally – where people would normally be passing: next to roads and in connection with sacred springs, chapels, and places of execution. However, they also occur in less busy places, in woods, along the coast, on moors, and on small islands.A few cairns have been preserved because they are still “active” as reminiscences of customs and habits of past times. This is the case of the cairn called Røsen (“røse” being another Danish term for a cairn) on Trøstrup Moor (no. 45, Fig. 1-2), of Heksens Grav (“The Witch’s Grave”) (no. 27, Fig. 4), and of the branch heap in the wood of Slotved Skov (no. 14, Fig. 5), which was recently revived after having been almost forgotten. Other cairns are maintained as prehistoric relics, as is the case of the branch heap by the name of Stikhoben (“The Stick Heap;” no. 10, Fig. 6) and Kjelds Grav (“Kjeld’s Grave,” no. 59, Fig. 7). Although heaps of stones and branches are included in the Danish Protection of Nature Act as relics of the past worthy of protection, so far merely the two latter have been listed.Whereas the remaining ’throws’ of organic material have probably disintegrated, it is still possible under favourable conditions to retrieve those made from more enduring materials – unless they have been demolished – even if they have practically sunk into oblivion (Figs. 8-10).The oldest known cairn is almost 500 years old. It was situated by the ford Præstbjerg Vad in Vinding parish near the Holstebro-Ribe highroad. Tradition says that the stone heap came into existence as a memorial of a priest in Hanbjerg, who died in the first half of the 16th century following a fall with his horse.Such legends of origin are connected with most of the Danish cairns. They usually tell of some unhappy or alarming happening supposed to have occurred at the place in question. However, they are often so vague and stereotype that they can only rarely be dated or put into a historical context. Indeed, on closer examination several of them turn out to be travelling legends. Apart from the legend of the murdered tradesman, they comprise the legend of the exorcised farmhand and that of the three sisters, who were murdered by three robbers, who turned out to be their own brothers. The latter legend, which is also known from a folksong, is connected to the so-called Varper on the high moor in Pedersker parish on Bornholm (no. 7). Until the early 20th century, it was the custom to maintain these cairns by putting back stones that had fallen down and adorn them with green sprigs. Early folklorists interpreted this as a tradition going back to an old sacrificial ritual, although the custom also seems to have had a pure practical purpose, as these stone heaps were originally cairns marking the road across inland Bornholm.A special group of the Danish cairns are connected with the tradition that someone is buried underneath them, such as a body washed ashore, a murdered child from a clandestine childbirth, a murdered person, several persons killed in a fight, an exorcised farmhand, a suicide, a murderer buried on his scene of crime, or witches and murderers buried at the place of execution. In all these cases, the throwing of a stone was supposed to protect the passers-by against the dead, who was buried in unconsecrated grounds and thus, according to public belief, haunted the spot. Another far less frequent explanation was that the stone was thrown in order to achieve a good journey or luck at the market. In some places, the traveller would throw the stone while shouting a naughty word or in other ways showing his disgust with the dead witch, criminal, or infanticide buried in that particular place. In rather a lot of the cases, as explained by the context, the cairn was merely a memorial to some unhappy occurrence, and the stone was thrown in memory of the deceased.In an article on Norwegian cairns written by the folklorist Svale Solheim, the author attached importance to achieving a clear picture of the position of the cairns (kastrøysarne) in the landscape. A closer examination showed that almost all were situated by the side of old roads – between farms and settlements, through forests, or across mountains – in short, where people would often walk. “The cairns follow the road as the shadow follows the man,” Solheim writes and gives an example of an old road, which had been relocated, and where the cairns had been moved to the new road. Furthermore, the position of the cairns along the roads turned out to not be accidental; they were always found at places that were in one way or other interesting to the travellers. This is why Solheim thought that the stone heaps mostly had the character of cairns or road stones thrown together at certain places for a pure practical purpose. “For instance,” he writes, “we find stone heaps at places along the roads where there is access to fine drinking water. These would also be natural places for a rest, and numerous stone heaps are situated by old resting places. And so it came natural to mark these places by piling up a stone heap, and of course it would be in every traveller’s interest to maintain the heaps.”The older folklore saw the tradition as a relic of pagan rituals and conceptions. As a reaction to this, Solheim and others took a tradition-functionalistic view, according to which most folklore, as seen in the light of the cultural conditions, was considered rational and the rest could be explained as pseudo beliefs, for instance educational fiction and tomfoolery.However, if we turn to our other neighbouring country, Sweden, it becomes more difficult to explain away that we are dealing with sacrificial rites, as here, the most used dialectal term for the stone and branch piles were offerhög, offervål, or offerbål (“offer” is the Swedish word for sacrifice), and when someone threw stones, sticks, or money on the pile, it was called “sacrificing.” An article from 1929 by the anthropologist Sigurd Erixon is especially interesting. Here, he documents how – apart from the cairns with a death motive (largely corresponding to the Danish cases mentioned above), Sweden had both good luck and misfortune averting sacrificial stone throwing (Fig. 13).Whereas the sacrificial cairns connected to deaths were evenly distributed across the whole country, Erixon found that the “good luck cairns” occurred mainly in environments associated with mountain pasture farming or fishing. Based on this observation and desultory comparative studies, Erixon formed the hypothesis that the “good luck cairns” represented an older and more primitive culture than the cairns associated with sacrifices to the dead. “The first,” he writes, “belong rather more to the work area of hunting, fishing, and animal husbandry, roads, and environments, whereas the death sacrificial cairns seem to be closer related to the culture of agriculture.”The problem with the folkloristic material is that most of it is based on reminiscences. In order to study the living tradition, one must turn elsewhere. However, as demonstrated by James Frazer in “The Golden Bough,” this is no problem, as the custom of throwing stones in a pile is known from all over the world, from Africa, Europe, and Asia to Australia and America (Fig. 14).Customs last, their meanings perish – the explanation why, for instance, one must throw a stone onto a stone pile, may be forgotten, or reinterpreted, or get a completely new explanation. The custom probably goes back further than any known religion. However, these have all tried to tally the stone throwing with their “theology.” In Ancient Greece, the stone piles by the roadsides were furnished with statues of Hermes (in the shape of a post with a head and sometimes a phallus). As an escort for the dead, Hermes became the god of the travellers, and just as the gods had thrown stones after Hermes when he was accused of murdering Argus, people could now do the same.With the introduction of Christianity, the throwing of stones was denounced as superstition, and a standard question for the penitents in the so-called books of penance was: “Have you carried stones to a heap?” All across Europe, crosses were planted in the stone heaps – which must have caused problems as it was considered a deadly sin to throw stones after a cross. In the culture connected with pilgrimage, the cairns got a new meaning as markers of important places. For instance, enormous stone piles outside Santiago de Compostela mark the location where pilgrims first spotted the towers of the city’s cathedral (Fig. 15). At many places, the cairns were consecrated to saints, so that now people would carry stones to them as a sacrifice or a penance. The jews also adopted the custom. The Old Testament mentions stone heaps gathered over murdered persons or placed around a larger stone, as the “witness dolmen” built by Jacob and his people to commemmorate his pact with Laban, his father-in-law. However, there is no mention of throwing new stones onto these heaps. However, the latter occurs in the still practiced Jewish custom of placing stones on the gravestones when Jews visit the graves of their dead (Fig. 16).Stone throwing in a Muslim context is illustrated by Edward Westermarck’s large investigation of rituals and popular belief with the Berbers and the Arabs in Marocco in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, it only comprises cairns connected to Muslim saints, but even with this limitation, the investigation gives an idea of the variety of applications. If the stone heap is situated near the grave of a saint, it may mark the demarcation of the sacred area, or it may have come into existence because the wayfaring have a habit of throwing a stone when they pass the grave of a saint, which they do not have time to visit. If the heap is situated on a ridge, it is usually an indication of the spot on a certain pilgrim route where the sacred places become visible for the first time. Other stone heaps mark the places where a holy man or woman is supposed to have been buried, or rested, or camped some time. By a large crossroads outside Andira, Westermark was shown a stone heap, which indicated that this place was the gathering place for saints, who met there at nighttime. The sacred cairns in Marocco are often easily recognized by the fact that they are chalked white at intervals. At some places, the cairns may also be marked with a pole with a white flag symbolising the sacred character of the place.Even Buddhism struggled against the stone heaps, especially in the form of the oboo cult, which was repeatedly reformered and reinterpreted by Buddhist missionaries. And in early 17th-century South America, the converted aristocratic Inca, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, made sarcastic remarks about Indians, who “even now” had preserved the bad habit of [sacrificing to] stone heaps (apachitas).”Historically, the Danish cairns can be documented from the 16th century, but the tradition may well be older. Seen in a larger, comparative context, heaps of stones and branches represent an ancient tradition rooted in the deepest cultural layers of mankind. Thus, as cultural relics, they are certainly worthy of preservation, and we ought to put a lot of effort into preserving the few still existing.Whereas it will probably be difficult to establish possible prehistoric stone heaps using archaeology, the possibilities of documenting hitherto unknown stone piles from historical times is considerably higher, if special topographic conditions are taken into consideration. In connection with small mounds on tidal meadows or stone heaps along stretches of old roads and by fords, old places of execution, springs, and grave mounds used secondarily for gallows, one should pay attention to such structures, which may well prove to be covering a grave.In a folklore context, the Danish stone heaps must be characterized as mainly “death sacrifice throws,” whereas only few were “good luck throws.” Due to the limited size of the country, and early farming, cairns and other road marks have not played the same role as a help for travellers and traffic as it did in our neighbouring countries with their huge waste areas.If the stone piles are considered part of a thousands of years old chain of traditions, they belong to the oldest human “monuments.” The global distribution of the phenomenon endows it with a mystery, which, during a travel in Mongolia, Haslund-Christensen caught with a stroke of genius: “We stood before an oboo, one of the largest I have ever seen...one of those mysterious places of sacrifice which are still secretly preserved, built of stone cast upon stone through many generations; a home of mystery which has its roots in the origin of the people itself, and whose religious significance goes much further back in time than any of the religions in the modern world.”Gustav HenningsenDansk Folkemindesamling Jesper LaursenMoesgård Museum Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

El objeto de este trabajo es el estudio del simbolismo de las aves en el ámbito tartésico y fenicio-púnico en la península ibérica durante el Bronce Final y el Hierro I. Se han recogido y analizado aquellas piezas con representaciones de aves, así como los restos orgánicos de éstas, si bien esto último no ha dado muchos frutos debido a las dificultades que existen tanto para su conservación como para la posterior identificación de especies. En total se han podido determinar ánades, gallos, palomas, flamencos, cisnes, lechuzas y halcones, todas ellas representadas en el Mediterráneo oriental y cuya iconografía se vincula al mundo funerario, al tránsito al Más Allá y a las divinidades. Gran parte de esa iconografía llegó a la península de mano de los fenicios, si bien su acogida y aceptación entre la población local fue variable. Palabras clave: aves, simbolismo, tartesios, fenicios, púnicosTopónimos: península ibéricaPeriodo: Hierro I. ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to study the symbolism of birds in Tartessian and Phoenician-Punic cultures within the Iberian Peninsula during the late Bronze and early Iron Age. To this end, items with any sort of symbolism connected with birds have been analysed. Organic remains have also been examined, although the latter did not make a relevant contribution to the study due to problems of conservation of the organic remains and subsequent identification of species. I have identified ducks, roosters, pigeons, flamingos, swans, owls and hawks, all located around the East Mediterranean basin and related to funerary contexts, the journey to the hereafter and deities. Most of this iconography reached the Iberian Peninsula via Phoenician culture, albeit its acceptance among the local population varied. Keywords: birds, symbolism, Tartesian, Phoenicians, PunicPlace names: Iberian PeninsulaPeriod: Iron Age REFERENCIASAlmagro Gorbea, M. J. 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RESUMENEste trabajo presenta los resultados de la última documentación y estudio de los grabados existentes en el Pozo de la Cruz, que forman parte de las estructuras visibles en el yacimiento arqueológico de San Marcial de Rubicón (Yaiza, Lanzarote, España). Gracias al uso combinado de la fotografía nocturna y de la fotogrametría 3D, y a partir del análisis detallado de dos de sus grabados más singulares, se propone una nueva hipótesis de trabajo que apoya en gran medida la teoría inicial lanzada por sus descubridores a finales de la década de 1980. El objetivo es arrojar luz sobre uno de los hallazgos más polémicos de la arqueología canaria, sobre el que se han construido y apoyado varias teorías hasta la fecha. Palabras clave: grabados, pozos, fotogrametría, podomorfos, marcas de cantero Topónimos: islas Canarias, Lanzarote Período: Edad Media ABSTRACTThis paper presents the results of the latest documents and studies on the existing engravings in Pozo de la Cruz, which are part of the visible structures in the archaeological site of San Marcial de Rubicón (Yaiza, Lanzarote, Spain). Thanks to the use of 3D photogrammetry and from the detailed analysis of two of its most unique engravings, a new working hypothesis is proposed supporting the initial theory launched by its discoverers in the late 1980s. The aim is to shed light on one of the most fascinating archaeological findings in the Canary Islands, on which several theories have been built and supported to date. Keywords: engravings, wells, photogrammetry, footprints, stonemason marks Place names: Canary Islands, Lanzarote Period: Middle Ages REFERENCIASAlarcón, F. J. 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The practice of child burials underneath house floors in the Late Prehistory has been considered a characteristic trait of the Iberian religion. However, this custom has also been documented in different archaeological sites both in the Mediterranean and Central Europe as well as Celtic areas of the Iberian Peninsula, so we can explain this funerary practice by an Indo-European origin. We report the archeotanatological and osteoarcheological study of 10 subadults found in the Iron Age site of Monte Bernorio oppidum, the first archeological site in the western and central Cantabrian region with this funerary rite documented. It is the confirmation of both, the survival of an ancient funerary ritual, widely extended in all Europe, and its presence in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. We also review all the archeological sites in the Iberian Peninsula with similar archeological contexts and analyse the rite from the bioarcheology of the care.

IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. 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Like any genre or mode, the Gothic is malleable, changing according to time and place. This is particularly apparent when what is considered Gothic in one era is compared with that of another. The giant helmet that falls from the sky in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is a very different threat to the ravenous vampires that stalk the novels of Anne Rice, just as Ann Radcliffe’s animated portraits may not inspire anxiety for a contemporary reader of Stephen King. The mutability of Gothic is also apparent across various versions of national Gothic that have emerged, with the specificities of place lending Gothic narratives from countries such as Ireland, Scotland and Australia a distinctive flavour. In New Zealand, the Gothic is most commonly associated with Pakeha artists exploring extreme psychological states, isolation and violence. Instead of the haunted castles, ruined abbeys and supernatural occurrences of classic Gothics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those produced by writers as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Matthew Lewis, Edgar Allen Poe, Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and Walpole, New Zealand Gothic fiction tends to focus on psychological horror, taking its cue, according to Jenny Lawn, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which ushered in a tendency in the Gothic novel to explore the idea of a divided consciousness. Lawn observes that in New Zealand “Our monsters tend to be interior: they are experiences of intense psychological states, often with sexual undertones within isolated nuclear families” (“Kiwi Gothic”). Kirsty Gunn’s novella Rain (1994), which focuses on a dysfunctional family holidaying in an isolated lakeside community, exemplifies the tendency of New Zealand Gothic to omit the supernatural in favour of the psychological, with its spectres being sexual predation, parental neglect and the death of an innocent. Bronwyn Bannister’s Haunt (2000) is set primarily in a psychiatric hospital, detailing various forms of psychiatric disorder, as well as the acts that spring from them, such as one protagonist’s concealment for several years of her baby in a shed, while Noel Virtue’s The Redemption of Elsdon Bird (1987) is another example, with a young character’s decision to shoot his two younger siblings in the head as they sleep in an attempt to protect them from the religious beliefs of his fundamentalist parents amply illustrating the intense psychological states that characterise New Zealand Gothic. Although there is no reason why Gothic literature ought to include the supernatural, its omission in New Zealand Gothic does point to a confusion that Timothy Jones foregrounds in his suggestion that “In the absence of the trappings of established Gothic traditions – castles populated by fiendish aristocrats, swamps draped with Spanish moss and possessed by terrible spirits” New Zealand is “uncertain how and where it ought to perform its own Gothic” (203). The anxiety that Jones notes is perhaps less to do with where the New Zealand Gothic should occur, since there is an established tradition of Gothic events occurring in the bush and on the beach, while David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) uses a derelict slaughterhouse as a version of a haunted castle and Maurice Gee successfully uses a decrepit farmhouse as a Gothic edifice in The Fire-Raiser (1986), but more to do with available ghosts. New Zealand Gothic literature produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certainly tends to focus on the psychological rather than the supernatural, but earlier writing that utilises the Gothic mode is far more focused on spooky events and ghostly presences. There is a tradition of supernatural Gothic in New Zealand, but its representations of Maori ghosts complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. The stories in D. W. O. Fagen’s collection Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand (1952) illustrate the tendency in colonial New Zealand literature to represent Maori in supernatural terms expressive both of anxieties surrounding Maori agency and indigeneity, as well as Western assumptions regarding Maori culture. In much colonial Gothic, Maori ghosts, burial grounds and the notion of tapu express settler anxieties while also working to contain those anxieties by suggesting the superstitious and hence backward nature of indigenous culture. In Fagan’s story “Tapu”, which first appeared in the Bulletin in 1912, the narrator stumbles into a Maori burial ground where he is confronted by the terrible sight of “two fleshless skeletons” that grin and appear “ghastly in the dim light” (37). The narrator’s desecration of land deemed tapu fills him with “a sort of nameless terror at nothing, a horror of some unknown impending fate against which it was useless to struggle and from which there was no escape” (39). This expresses a sense of the authenticity of Maori culture, but the narrator’s thought “Was there any truth in heathen devilry after all?” is quickly superseded by the relegation of Maori culture as “ancient superstitions” (40). When the narrator is approached by a tohunga following his breach of tapu, his reaction is outrage: "Here was I – a fairly decent Englishman, reared in the Anglican faith and living in the nineteenth century – hindered from going about my business, outcast, excommunicated, shunned as a leper, my servant dying, all on account of some fiendish diablerie of heathen fetish. The affair was preposterous, incredible, ludicrous" (40). Fagan’s story establishes a clear opposition between Western rationalism and “decency”, and the “heathen fetishes” associated with Maori culture, which it uses to infuse the story with the thrills appropriate to Gothic fiction and which it ultimately casts as superstitious and uncivilised. F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) includes an episode of Maori women grieving that is represented in terms that would not be out of place in horror. A group of women are described as screaming, wailing, and quivering their hands about in a most extraordinary manner, and cutting themselves dreadfully with sharp flints and shells. One old woman, in the centre of the group, was one clot of blood from head to feet, and large clots of coagulated blood lay on the ground where she stood. The sight was absolutely horrible, I thought at the time. She was singing or howling a dirge-like wail. In her right hand she held a piece of tuhua, or volcanic glass, as sharp as a razor: this she placed deliberately to her left wrist, drawing it slowly upwards to her left shoulder, the spouting blood following as it went; then from the left shoulder downwards, across the breast to the short ribs on the right side; then the rude but keen knife was shifted from the right hand to the left, placed to the right wrist, drawn upwards to the right shoulder, and so down across the breast to the left side, thus making a bloody cross on the breast; and so the operation went on all the time I was there, the old creature all the time howling in time and measure, and keeping time also with the knife, which at every cut was shifted from one hand to the other, as I have described. She had scored her forehead and cheeks before I came; her face and body was a mere clot of blood, and a little stream was dropping from every finger – a more hideous object could scarcely be conceived. (Maning 120–21) The gory quality of this episode positions Maori as barbaric, but Patrick Evans notes that there is an incident in Old New Zealand that grants authenticity to indigenous culture. After being discovered handling human remains, the narrator of Maning’s text is made tapu and rendered untouchable. Although Maning represents the narrator’s adherence to his abjection from Maori society as merely a way to placate a local population, when a tohunga appears to perform cleansing rituals, the narrator’s indulgence of perceived superstition is accompanied by “a curious sensation […] like what I fancied a man must feel who has just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness” (qtd. in Evans 85). Evans points out that Maning may represent the ritual as solely performative, “but the result is portrayed as real” (85). Maning’s narrator may assert his lack of belief in the tohunga’s power, but he nevertheless experiences that power. Such moments of unease occur throughout colonial writing when assertions of European dominance and rational understanding are undercut or threatened. Evans cites the examples of the painter G. F. Angus whose travels through the native forest of Waikato in the 1840s saw him haunted by the “peculiar odour” of rotting vegetation and Edward Shortland whose efforts to remain skeptical during a sacred Maori ceremony were disturbed by the manifestation of atua rustling in the thatch of the hut in which it was occurring (Evans 85). Even though the mysterious power attributed to Maori in colonial Gothic is frequently represented as threatening, there is also an element of desire at play, which Lydia Wevers highlights in her observation that colonial ghost stories involve a desire to assimilate or be assimilated by what is “other.” Wevers singles out for discussion the story “The Disappearance of Letham Crouch”, which appeared in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1901. The narrative recounts the experiences of an overzealous missionary who is received by Maori as a new tohunga. In order to learn more about Maori religion (so as to successfully replace it with Christianity), Crouch inhabits a hut that is tapu, resulting in madness and fanaticism. He eventually disappears, only to reappear in the guise of a Maori “stripped for dancing” (qtd. in Wevers 206). Crouch is effectively “turned heathen” (qtd. in Wevers 206), a transformation that is clearly threatening for a Christian European, but there is also an element of desirability in such a transformation for a settler seeking an authentic New Zealand identity. Colonial Gothic frequently figures mysterious experiences with indigenous culture as a way for the European settler to essentially become indigenous by experiencing something perceived as authentically New Zealand. Colonial Gothic frequently includes the supernatural in ways that are complicit in the processes of colonisation that problematizes them as models for contemporary writers. For New Zealanders attempting to produce a Gothic narrative, the most immediately available tropes for a haunting past are Maori, but to use those tropes brings texts uncomfortably close to nineteenth-century obsessions with Maori skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape, which Edmund G. C. King notes is a way of expressing “the sense of bodily and mental displacement that often accompanied the colonial experience” (36). R. H. Chapman’s Mihawhenua (1888) provides an example of tropes particularly Gothic that remain a part of colonial discourse not easily transferable into a bicultural context. Chapman’s band of explorers discover a cave strewn with bones which they interpret to be the remains of gory cannibalistic feasts: Here, we might well imagine, the clear waters of the little stream at our feet had sometime run red with the blood of victims of some horrid carnival, and the pale walls of the cavern had grown more pale in sympathy with the shrieks of the doomed ere a period was put to their tortures. Perchance the owners of some of the bones that lay scattered in careless profusion on the floor, had, when strong with life and being, struggled long and bravely in many a bloody battle, and, being at last overcome, their bodies were brought here to whet the appetites and appease the awful hunger of their victors. (qtd. in King) The assumptions regarding the primitive nature of indigenous culture expressed by reference to the “horrid carnival” of cannibalism complicate the processes through which contemporary writers could meaningfully draw on a tradition of New Zealand Gothic utilising the supernatural. One answer to this dilemma is to use supernatural elements not specifically associated with New Zealand. In Stephen Cain’s anthology Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side (1996) there are several instances of this, such as in the story “Never Go Tramping Alone” by Alyson Cresswell-Moorcock, which features a creature called a Gravett. As Timothy Jones’s discussion of this anthology demonstrates, there are two problems arising from this unprecedented monster: firstly, the story does not seem to be a “New Zealand Gothic”, which a review in The Evening Post highlights by observing that “there is a distinct ‘Kiwi’ feel to only a few of the stories” (Rendle 5); while secondly, the Gravatt’s appearance in the New Zealand landscape is unconvincing. Jones argues that "When we encounter the wendigo, a not dissimilar spirit to the Gravatt, in Ann Tracy’s Winter Hunger or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, we have a vague sense that such beings ‘exist’ and belong in the American or Canadian landscapes in which they are located. A Gravatt, however, has no such precedent, no such sense of belonging, and thus loses its authority" (251). Something of this problem is registered in Elizabeth Knox’s vampire novel Daylight (2003), which avoids the problem of making a vampire “fit” with a New Zealand landscape devoid of ancient architecture by setting all the action in Europe. One of the more successful stories in Cain’s collection demonstrates a way of engaging with a specifically New Zealand tradition of supernatural Gothic, while also illustrating some of the potential pitfalls in utilising colonial Gothic tropes of menacing bush, Maori burial caves and skeletal remains. Oliver Nicks’s “The House” focuses on a writer who takes up residence in an isolated “little old colonial cottage in the bush” (8). The strange “odd-angled walls”, floors that seem to slope downwards and the “subterranean silence” of the cottage provokes anxiety in the first-person narrator who admits his thoughts “grew increasingly dark and chaotic” (8). The strangeness of the house is only intensified by the isolation of its surroundings, which are fertile but nevertheless completely uninhabited. Alone and unnerved by the oddness of the house, the narrator listens to the same “inexplicable night screeches and rustlings of the bush” (9) that furnish so much New Zealand Gothic. Yet it is not fear inspired by the menacing bush that troubles the narrator as much as the sense that there was more in this darkness, something from which I felt a greater need to be insulated than the mild horror of mingling with a few wetas, spiders, bats, and other assorted creepy-crawlies. Something was subtlely wrong here – it was not just the oddness of the dimensions and angles. Everything seemed slightly off, not to add up somehow. I could not quite put my finger on whatever it was. (10) When the narrator escapes the claustrophobic house for a walk in the bush, the natural environment is rendered in spectral terms. The narrator is engulfed by the “bare bones of long-dead forest giants” (11) and “crowding tree-corpses”, but the path he follows in order to escape the “Tree-ghosts” is no more comforting since it winds through “a strange grey world with its shrouds of hanging moss, and mist” (12). In the midst of this Gothicised environment the narrator is “transfixed by the intersection of two overpowering irrational forces” when something looms up out of the mist and experiences “irresistible curiosity, balanced by an equal and opposite urge to turn and run like hell” (12). The narrator’s experience of being deep in the threatening bush continues a tradition of colonial writing that renders the natural environment in Gothic terms, such as H. B. Marriot Watson’s The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure (1891), which includes an episode that sees the protagonist Palliser become lost in the forest of Te Tauru and suffer a similar demoralization as Nicks’s narrator: “the horror of the place had gnawed into his soul, and lurked there, mordant. He now saw how it had come to be regarded as the home of the Taniwha, the place of death” (77). Philip Steer points out that it is the Maoriness of Palliser’s surroundings that inspire his existential dread, suggesting a certain amount of settler alienation, but “Palliser’s survival and eventual triumph overwrites this uncertainty with the relegation of Maori to the past” (128). Nicks’s story, although utilising similar tropes to colonial fiction, attempts to puts them to different ends. What strikes such fear in Nicks’s narrator is a mysterious object that inspires the particular dread known as the uncanny: I gave myself a stern talking to and advanced on the shadow. It was about my height, angular, bony and black. It stood as it now stands, as it has stood for centuries, on the edge of a swamp deep in the heart of an ancient forest high in this remote range of hills forming a part of the Southern Alps. As I think of it I cannot help but shudder; it fills me even now with inexplicable awe. It snaked up out of the ground like some malign fern-frond, curving back on itself and curling into a circle at about head height. Extending upwards from the circle were three odd-angled and bent protuberances of unequal length. A strange force flowed from it. It looked alien somehow, but it was man-made. Its power lay, not in its strangeness, but in its unaccountable familiarity; why did I know – have I always known? – how to fear this… thing? (12) This terrible “thing” represents a return of the repressed associated with the crimes of colonisation. After almost being devoured by the malevolent tree-like object the narrator discovers a track leading to a cave decorated with ancient rock paintings that contains a hideous wooden creature that is, in fact, a burial chest. Realising that he has discovered a burial cave, the narrator is shocked to find more chests that have been broken open and bones scattered over the floor. With the discovery of the desecrated burial cave, the hidden crimes of colonisation are brought to light. Unlike colonial Gothic that tends to represent Maori culture as threatening, Nicks’s story represents the forces contained in the cave as a catalyst for a beneficial transformative experience: I do remember the cyclone of malign energy from the abyss gibbering and leering; a flame of terror burning in every cell of my body; a deluge of shrieking unreason threatening to wash away the bare shred that was left of my mind. Yet even as each hellish new dimension yawned before me, defying the limits even of imagination, the fragments of my shattered sanity were being drawn together somehow, and reassembled in novel configurations. To each proposition of demonic impossibility there was a surging, answering wave of kaleidoscopic truth. (19) Although the story replicates colonial writing’s tendency to represent indigenous culture in terms of the irrational and demonic, the authenticity and power of the narrator’s experience is stressed. When he comes to consciousness following an enlightenment that sees him acknowledging that the truth of existence is a limitless space “filled with deep coruscations of beauty and joy” (20) he knows what he must do. Returning to the cottage, the narrator takes several days to search the house and finally finds what he is looking for: a steel box that contains “stolen skulls” (20). The narrator concludes that the “Trophies” (20) buried in the collapsed outhouse are the cause for the “Dark, inexplicable moods, nightmares, hallucinations – spirits, ghosts, demons” that “would have plagued anyone who attempted to remain in this strange, cursed region” (20). Once the narrator returns the remains to the burial cave, the inexplicable events cease and the once-strange house becomes an ideal home for a writer seeking peace in which to work. The colonial Gothic mode in New Zealand utilises the Gothic’s concern with a haunting past in order to associate that past with the primitive and barbaric. By rendering Maori culture in Gothic terms, such as in Maning’s blood-splattered scene of grieving or through the spooky discoveries of bone-strewn caves, colonial writing compares an “uncivilised” indigenous culture with the “civilised” culture of European settlement. For a contemporary writer wishing to produce a New Zealand supernatural horror, the colonial Gothic is a problematic tradition to work from, but Nicks’s story succeeds in utilising tropes associated with colonial writing in order to reverse its ideologies. “The House” represents European settlement in terms of barbarity by representing a brutal desecration of sacred ground, while indigenous culture is represented in positive, if frightening, terms of truth and power. Colonial Gothic’s tendency to associate indigenous culture with violence, barbarism and superstition is certainly replicated in Nicks’s story through the frightening object that attempts to devour the narrator and the macabre burial chests shaped like monsters, but ultimately it is colonial violence that is most overtly condemned, with the power inhabiting the burial cave being represented as ultimately benign, at least towards an intruder who means no harm. More significantly, there is no attempt in the story to explain events that seem outside the understanding of Western rationality. The story accepts as true what the narrator experiences. Nevertheless, in spite of the explicit engagement with the return of repressed crimes associated with colonisation, Nicks’s engagement with the mode of colonial Gothic means there is a replication of some of its underlying notions relating to settlement and belonging. The narrator of Nicks’s story is a contemporary New Zealander who is placed in the position of rectifying colonial crimes in order to take up residence in a site effectively cleansed of the sins of the past. Nicks’s narrator cannot happily inhabit the colonial cottage until the stolen remains are returned to their rightful place and it seems not to occur to him that a greater theft might underlie the smaller one. Returning the stolen skulls is represented as a reasonable action in “The House”, and it is a way for the narrator to establish what Linda Hardy refers to as “natural occupancy,” but the notion of returning a house and land that might also be termed stolen is never entertained, although the story’s final sentence does imply the need for the continuing placation of the powerful indigenous forces that inhabit the land: “To make sure that things stay [peaceful] I think I may just keep this story to myself” (20). The fact that the narrator has not kept the story to himself suggests that his untroubled occupation of the colonial cottage is far more tenuous than he might have hoped. References Ballantyne, David. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Melbourne: Text, 2010. Bannister, Bronwyn. Haunt. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000. Calder, Alex. “F. E. Maning 1811–1883.” Kotare 7. 2 (2008): 5–18. Chapman, R. H. 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