Selective Amnesia There was a point to this. But I forgot.

Ancient Light: On Public Archaeology, Stonehenge and Petrified Forests.

This post originally started on twitter, three tweets about the Stonehenge/Google-Under-the-Earth project. My tweets are here, on my tumblr blog.

Anyway, stone circles, cairns and dolmens are common across the world. We’ve all seen them, seemingly random boulders strewn across our landscapes. But they are in fact the result of human agency. For instance, here’s one.

(Photo credit: Pandiyan)

That’s in Thiruvakkarai, near Tindivanam, Tamil Nadu. Petrified, fossilised trees lie half buried in the ground, and dolmens, cairns and stone circles abound. There are many legends associated with this place: the trees-turned-to-stone are demon limbs, signs that a protective diety watches over the little village; while the stones are the hearth of other, less frightening demons.

The petrified trees and the surrounding land have been fenced off and put under the Geological Survey of India care. On my many visits there, a tired old man repeats the much-abused information+legend of the trees, and people go away barely interested. Instead, if archaeologists, historians, story tellers, documentary filmmakers were allowed to study and talk about this fascinating place, imagine what it could do, what it could tell us.

When did people first come here?

Why did they come here, what did they do?

What they ate and when, how did they cook their food?

Are the people of the villages nearby related to the people buried under the hills?

How old is the piece of rock, formerly a living tree? Where did this tree come from? Why did it land here?

When did this place flood up? When did this place dry out?

So many questions can be answered, if only people looked at their landscape as something more than just a maze to conquer on the way to work or play. Which is something I do, try and get people interested in their landscapes and city scapes. Because:

That was shot, to complete the loop, on another old site with a stone circle. Hawkcombe Head in Exmoor.