Stonehenge: is the medium the message?(response to Michael Parker Pearson and colleague, Antiquity, vol. 72, p. 308, 1998)

From: Antiquity | Date: December 1, 1998| Author: Barrett, John C.; Fewster, Kathryn J. | Copyright information

Mike Parker Pearson and his Madagascan colleague claimed that the stone at Stonehenge are symbols for death and the dead through ethnographic analogy from Madagascar. They pointed out that ancestor cult is common among small scale societies which based their organization on kinship connections. Consequently, they developed an analogy of materiality which associates wood to the living and stone to the dead. However, the universality argument fails because it invites debate for finding an excep...

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