West-Southwest

En l’absence de sépultures, la parure est peu connue.

Jean Courtin, Le Néolithique de la Provence

Now that they accustomed to burn or bury with them, things wherein they excelled, delighted, or which were dear unto them, either as farewells unto all pleasure, or vain apprehension that they might use them in the other world, is testified by all Antiquity.

Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia

‘In the absence of burial sites, little can be said about their self-embellishments’, writes one of Provence’s most outstanding archaeologists in regard to a particular Neolithic settlement.¹ Burial sites? Self-embellishments? The two terms seem to clash, one against the other, as totally antithetical. If burials can only suggest death and bereavement, self-embellishments, to the contrary, resonate with life, life abundant, luxuriant. How, indeed, did Neolithic societies, living over four thousand years earlier, reconcile these two terms and, by extension, those two, diametrically opposite conditions: life and death? Existence and non-existence? Eros, ultimately, and Thanatos?

The dead, we learn, were buried with all their finery. Decked in necklaces, bracelets and talismans, and accompanied, more often than not, by the tools, weapons and ceramics of their day-to-day life, they were dressed for – as if dispatched towards – a second life. How, though, could this second life have been very different from the first, given the life-perpetuating characteristics of all that finery? The metonymy of all that artifact? In examining grave goods from this particular period, none can be considered primarily symbolic in its function: invested, that is, with transfigurant value. Here, it is as if everything celebrates the ‘same’. Suggests redundancy, replication: a second life identical, in its material aspects, to the first. Soapstone bead equals soapstone bead; a rock crystal pendant, a rock crystal pendant in this transliteration of identicals. Everywhere, in fact, in Neolithic burial rites, we discover a marked absence of otherness. For these prehistoric people, ‘life after death’, according to the archaeologist Gérard Sauzade, ‘was nothing more in reality than a state of “survival”; that is to say, a prolongation of life but at a reduced rhythm.’²

We’re dealing here with some of the earliest agrarian communities in Western Europe. We may assume the ‘psychic structure’ of these people was profoundly marked by the mysteries of the vegetal: the stabilised source, now, of their sustenance. Inevitably, this psychic – call it mystico-religious – investment of the grain would affect the very nature of their vision. How could it help but determine the character of their rituals and, more especially, that of their burial rites? Even if the Neolithics weren’t the first to inter their dead in a flexed, fetal position – in a posture, that is, of incipient rebirth – they were the first to do so on a regular, collective, institutionalised basis. ‘Planted’, these germinal corpses, these embryos wrapped in all the regalia of an on-going existence, might well have been expected to ‘sprout’ at the appropriate moment: ‘spring’ into an afterlife of their own. There, regenerated, they could only resemble their previous selves. Even on the raised octave of an afterlife, ‘grain’ could do little but equal ‘grain’, the ‘dried seedlings’ of one season, the ‘shoots’ of the next.

We’ve entered, here, a prehistoric discourse based essentially on reiteration: a vision founded on the recurrent, the cyclical, the fixed rotation of the heavens above, the wheel of the seasons beneath. If, in this discourse, ‘word’ has come to equal ‘word’, we may assume that the conjunction of these words – so equal in weight, density, tenure – could only occur at a propitious distance, from the other.

Manifestly, it wasn’t for the living that they built colossal structures, but for the dead. Indeed, it’s a fair indication to compare the poverty of their dwellings – natural shelters for the most part or provisional pleine aire huts of thatch, hideskin, daubed clay – with those megalithian chamber tombs they constructed, at such immense effort, for the deceased. Clearly, they set a far higher value on that discourse – the transliteration of the corpse – than on the grammar of their own fixed existence. We only have to examine the scant traces of their dwellings in relation to their tombs (mistakenly called ‘dolmens’, in the nineteenth century, in a revisionist attempt to Celticise such structures). If the dwellings left little more than potsherds, flint and the vaguest traces, here and there, of earthworks, the chamber tombs still stand, more often than not, in all their monumental grandeur.

Usually situated in dramatic relief against the side of a hill or upon its summit, these structures seem to draw, magnetise unto their assembled masses all the chthonic forces of their immediate surroundings. They appear to be collecting, compressing those very forces for the sake of some impending release. Usually paved, invariably pillared with rock uprights called orthostats and capped with tabletop slabs that can weigh anything up to one hundred and eighty tons, these burial chambers have far outlasted every other structure of that period. As is often the case with archeological vestige, it’s only the houses of the dead that finally ‘speak’.

Even if many of the tombs themselves have suffered partial or total degradation (converted into shooting blinds, hovels for itinerant shepherds, or simply ransacked by clandestine ‘treasure hunters’) enough of them remain relatively intact today, both in terms of their structures and their contents, to offer up an abundance of information. In Provence these collective sepultures appeared relatively late.³ As the expression of a rising social hierarchisation within Neolithic communities (the dead, presumably, were buried according to caste or clan affiliation), this megalithic movement, originating along the Atlantic coastline, would take two full millennia to reach Provence. There, it would last well over a thousand years, beginning in the Late Neolithic (circa 2400 B.C.), continuing through the Bronze Age and vanishing at the outset of the Iron Age. It might be mentioned in passing that we have here a rare instance of prehistoric acculturation travelling in an easterly direction. Invariably, the great routes of cultural penetration would do quite the opposite. As we know, the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ with all its innovating techniques had infiltrated Europe from east to west, moving either by sea across the Mediterranean or by land, following the confluents of the Danube. Curiously enough, it’s only in reaching its natural geographic limits along the Atlantic coastline that the first chamber tombs would as if erupt out of the rocky soil of Brittany.

Nothing, it might be said, more fully epitomises the sedentary nature of Neolithic societies than the chamber tombs. ‘A people who dig or construct burial vaults’, as one archaeologist put it, ‘is no longer nomadic.’⁴ We’re dealing, after all, with agrarian communities which had come to occupy and cultivate delineated areas of earth on a permanent basis for the first time in human existence. We may assume that, within the seasonal round, they constructed their megalithic tombs in winter. It was then, of course, that their fields lay fallow. Not only would a workforce be available at this particular period (as were their Egyptian counterparts, the pyramid builders), but they could benefit from the frozen state of the topsoil in order to slide, on wooden winches most likely, the massive slabs of their ledger-stones. Even in Provence, ice can cover the ground – in the early hours, at least – for several months of the year.

Capped in round domes, in tumuli of earth and rubble, the rectangular chamber tombs served as collective sepulchres over prolonged periods of time. They often contain the remains of thirty to forty individuals. These remains, however, are rarely in anatomical connection. Displaced, scattered, or crushed under a paving of small cobbles, they’ve suffered the abuse, or simply the indifference, of so much successive inhumation. Only what lies on the topmost level remains relatively intact.⁵ Everywhere, though, intermingled among the bones themselves, one finds beads, amulets, perforated seashells. Spilling, for instance, over a dislocated clavicle, will hang a necklace of bright white colombellas interspersed with slick, polished cylinders of blue soapstone. Axeheads, arrowheads, flint daggers, not to mention all the ceramic offered up as viatica, will lie in hopeless disarray about the broken rib cages, shinbones, fibulae of these prehistoric skeletons. Everything but the bones themselves still speaks of dress, preparation. Speaks of the self-embellishments of those setting out – as if celebrant, filled with anticipation – on that ultimate journey.

It should be noted that throughout Provence, Languedoc and Roussillon, the vestibules or corridors leading past the chamber tombs themselves and towards the exterior world beyond point, infallibly, in a west-southwesterly direction.⁶ Most are oriented, in fact, between 240 and 260 degrees in that direction, both in regard to their floor alignment below and their ‘axis of visibility’ above. This seemingly minor observation is charged with great relevance. For oriented in that direction we ourselves are left facing the setting sun: the direction, that is, of all solar-funereal mythologies. This setting sun, in Mircea Eliade’s words, had the power to ‘inhale the souls of the dead’.⁷ As psychopomp, the sun drew, guided those souls through the dark reaches of the underworld, only to charge itself with their resuscitation, the next morning, in its diurnal rebirth. As much hierophant as psychopomp, the sun enjoyed – in the mysteries of its own endless regeneration – an ambivalent power, reigning over both life and death, radiance and obscurity, the here and hereafter.

West-southwest, indeed. For these megalithic tombs were virtually pointed and the dead they contained virtually dressed: addressed in the direction of their rebirth. How close we are, here, to the cyclical mysteries of the grain itself: to both its burial as seed and its germination as seed. Within the context of a Neolithic economy based essentially on the production of cereals, we shouldn’t be surprised to discover in these rituals an equivalent preoccupation with the recurrent, the self-replicating. As mentioned previously, the dead were likely to be sent towards an identical, if remote, world of their own. There, they could be expected to reappear in all their finery, equipped, if need be, with the weapons, implements, ceramics they’d managed to import from their previous lives.

Haven’t we, here, an instance of pure translation: of the word ‘translation’, that is, in its original (one might even say, veritable) sense as something transferred. A saint’s bones, for instance, in Medieval Latin, were ‘translated’ (translatio) into the bejewelled receptacle of their reliquary. As for ourselves, aren’t we continuously translating our own thoughts, our own fears and desires: transferring them, that is, from one point, one level of apprehension, to another? Call it music, poetry, prayer. Whatever, it’s within our very nature, it would seem, to reiterate experience but only through the bias of a privileged medium and across a distance (be it intuited, invoked or simply contemplated) sufficiently removed from our own, day-to-day susceptibilities.

Don’t we, after all, under certain pressures, motivated by a particular set of circumstances face, occasionally, west-southwest ourselves? And, in those chosen moments, haven’t we, in the granary of our breath, an address especially intended for such circumstances? There, as Sir Thomas Browne put it, where ‘Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dogge-starre’⁸, don’t we ourselves bury our words, our very language, but only for the sake of their eventual resuscitation? That ‘grain’ might equal ‘grain’, but only as a germinated entity: there on the far, the opposite, the facing side, that is, of the intervening night.

Sources

1.  Jean Courtin, Le Néolithique de la Provence, Editions Klincksieck, Paris 1974

2.  Gerard Sauzade, Les Sépultures du Vaucluse du néolithique à l’age du bronze, Editions du Laboratoire de paléontologie humaine et de préhistoire, Paris 1983, p.283.

3.  Odile Roudil and Georges Bérard, Les Sépultures megalithiques du Var, Editions du CNRS, Paris 1981.

4.  Claude Masset, Les Dolmens: Sociétés néolithiques, pratiques funéraires, Editions Errance, Paris 1993, p.15.

5.  Notions of so-called “human progress” are quickly dispelled in reading osteological reports on excavated bone deposits. Analyses often show a far healthier, more advanced state of development of the bone tissue itself in the Neolithic than, say, the Medieval, three to four thousand years later.

6.  Roudil and Bérard, p.173

7.  Mircea Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, Editions Payot, Paris 1949, p.124 et al.

8.  Religio Medici and Other Works, Oxford 1993, p.123.