Stonehenge: Making Space

(Hardback)

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Description

This book is an imaginative exploration of a place that has fascinated, intrigued and perplexed visitors for centuries. Instead of seeing Stonehenge as an isolated site, the author sets the stones within a wider landscape and explores how use and meaning have changed from prehistoric times right through to the present. Throughout the millennia, the Stonehenge landscape has been used and re-used, invested with new meanings, and has given rise to myths and stories. The author creatively explores how the landscape has been appropriated and contested, and invokes the debates and experiences of people who have very different and often conflicting experiences of the same place. Today, heritage managers, archaeologists, local people, free festivallers, and druids come to the place with entirely different understandings and agendas. The book demonstrates that the creation of spaces and places for people to express divergent viewpoints is powerfully constrained by social and political forces that allow some voices to be heard while others are marginalized. With dialogues and illustrations that range from the conventional to the cartoon strip, this multi-vocal book not only presents a wide range of views in an innovative way, but provides important new insights on how people shape and are shaped by landscape.

Reviews

'... a book that will enrage some and delight others: it is a milestone in writing about the past in the present.' Julian Thomas, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 'A book for reading everywhere and for scribbling in (it even has a page to write notes and comments) ... Written by the foremost woman prehistorian in Britain, some will hate [it] and others will love it ... a very enjoyable book written in an enticing and stimulating format.' Antiquity '... unusually insightful and a very refreshing reading experience too ... written with equal amounts of wit and intellectual commitment. In sum, a must for those who are keen followers of the current events around Stonehenge.' Cornelius Holtorf, American Journal of Archaeology 'Bender has altered the tack of the sociological account through dialogue, explanation and interpretation. However, after bombarding the intellect, social perspective and senses (both political and economic) of the reader, as the climax of (the) volume is reached, it can be suggested that we are, in fact, seeing something new - what is possibly the end of the division between the traditional subjective and objective accounts.' Cambridge Archaeological Journal 'A useful text on the 'politics of the past', and a lively, stimulating book which says much that needed saying.' Landscape History 'This book is quite clearly an experiment in publishing, an attempt to explore whether books can be more than a monologue. This will be an anathema to some and a delight to others, depending on their reactions to post-modernism.' Landscape Research 'Bender brings together a wide range of evidence relating to the monument's recent history, examining the completely different points of view held by people in varying political and academic positions.' Culture and Cosmos 'A splendid book,erudite,provocative and with disturbing implications...bender has shown that there are alternative ways to an apprehension of a major site...and that some scholars may be brought to accept other viewpoints'. Oceania

Author Bio

Barbara Bender Professor in Heritage Anthropology,University College London