Christopher Chippindale

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This page is written by Christopher Chippindale. Last update: 12/2/2000. © Christopher Chippindale and/or its other author(s).

Chippindale, Christopher. In press. Small marks on rocks, large marks with rocks: labour input to rock-art and to a megalithic construction of later prehistoric Europe, in John Steinberg (ed.), Systematics of chiefdom societies.

Functional approaches offer a convenient, and now-routine, approach to aspects of prehistoric remains which are resistant to other research strategies. Faced with the hard-to-answer question, "What is a henge monument for?", one can instead say, "We don't know what a henge monument was for, but we can make a fair estimate of what effort it required of how many individuals, and how much its construction consumed in the way of resources, and that tells us much about the social context and the economic impact of its construction. Informed by those real truths about its society, we do not need to know exactly what the henge was for." Yes, to an extent. The approach can be developed to the point of a reasonable case being made that the building of burial pyramids in Pharaonic Egypt itself became a or the substantial motor of that ancient economy; in parallel with that, one thinks of the celebrated role of the military-industrial complex in powering the pre-1989 economy of California, even though the objects it manufactured may have been every bit as "useless" as is that ancient — and to our common values today pointless — curiosity of a burial pyramid.

A pitfall to be avoided is accidentally to endow ancient societies with a self-knowledge of these reflexive social and economic impacts. These ancient societies lacked, we believe, all awareness of economics (and of functional anthropology) of the kind that structures the decisions of our society; the economic consequence of what they did was not any kind of aim. Pyramids were not built in Egypt in order to keep the national economy rolling, as dams were built (and archaeological sites excavated) in the USA in the Great Depression of the 1930s with that conscious intent of make-work. Pyramids were built with good reason, but those good reasons were in a quite different domain. It is only by projecting back the insights of 19th- and 20th-century economics that we believe ourselves enabled to grasp those essentials of the ancient Egyptian world, or to see how the fundamentals of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire may best be gauged through economic models (Tainter 1988). Properly seen, this is a strength of the approach. What we are modelling may match little or not at all ancient peoples' perceptions of their own world. We give an account of their world in terms which make sense in our world.

An approach by estimating labor input, and thence by assessing economic and social consequences, may have value whether that input is consequential or inconsequential in its scale. The estimate itself provides another scrap of information about the material and its makers. Accordingly, this short paper sketches such a study for samples drawn from two bodies of later prehistoric European material, in a spirit of good-humoured exploration, and without preconceptions as to whether the results will themselves be consequential or inconsequential by what they might add to our knowledge and in relation to the modest labor input by the present writer which it represents! Comparison with the estimated impact of the great building projects of later prehistoric Europe will place these new findings in some kind of research context.

A fitting respect for the uncertainties that surround the true "purpose" of actions and objects in later prehistoric Europe makes one cautious in neatly dividing the essential tasks of survival from the inessential tasks of the ritual world. Indeed, since that survival was a matter of social survival, carried through in a world of practical knowledge, one would have to be arrogant and anthropologically ill-informed if one supposed that the agricultural tasks in later prehistory divided neatly into those which were necessary, the ploughing and the sowing, and those which were not, should there have been elaborate business alongside involving the cosmology of the supernatural in the controlling heavenly bodies. There are, to this day, successful farmers in Europe who have regard for the "irrational" controlling influence of the Moon and the planets alongside the "rational" practice of optimally managing the paperwork by which they obtain their subsidy support. (Critics of the eccentricities in European farm policy can also say that this "rational" policy is an irrational confusion even in the modern-day terms of fulfilling a defined and wished-for goal!)

There is evidence for violent death across prehistoric Britain from the Neolithic (e.g. Mercer 1980), from the Iron Age (e.g. Cunliffe 1978), and from the Beaker period (e.g. Evans 1984) in between. Yet the unqualified rationality of "total war" (Calvocoressi et al. 1989) is an invention only of our own 20th century AD. Historic periods of millennia in between record all manner of habits, devices and courtesies in warfare of a kind calculated to minimize the killing impact. Who is to say that the defended enclosures of later prehistoric periods were primarily structured by military concerns, directed to one's own survival and the enemy's death, and therefore to be measured in those terms to assess their labor efficiency? (And that before one notices the historical example of the Cheyennes, where the "suicide boys" amongst the warriors actively sought to die in combat: Moore 1996: 106—7.) Who is to say that the defended enclosures of later prehistoric periods were primarily about show and ceremonial impression, and therefore to be measured in those terms to assess their labor efficiency ? Who is to see, who is to say which attitude to combat and to human death is rational, which is irrational? Before the rationality and the promise of labor efficiency come controlling cultural values, which will decide just which classes amongst a population will be engaged in warfare, and whether the habits of war are actually directed towards killing, and towards killing whom amongst the opposing group.

Some telling bodies of evidence from prehistory are demonstrably inconsequential in their impact on the human economics of their own eras. First, then, an example of this. The celebrated panels of Palaeolithic art from the French and Cantabrian caves amount to not a great many figures, a matter of a few thousand only from all Europe (Bahn & Vertut 1998). These are distributed over a time-span of well upwards of ten thousand years — in all likelihood twenty thousand years (Clottes 1998). This means an average time-lapse of a matter not of months but actually of years between the making of each of the figures we know about! We do not know what vagaries are concealed by the word "average". As the experimental work by Michel Lorblanchet (1991) shows, the painting of a group of figures is not a matter of many hours, rather to be counted in minutes and tens of minutes. So the material we have results from an averaged exertion of — at most — a matter of minutes per year by the combined effort of all the inhabitants of later Palaeolithic Europe! (Plus, it must be admitted, the greater and extra exertion to penetrate often deep into challenging grottoes to reach the panels which were painted.)

No useful analysis of social impact in terms of indirect economic consequences is possible.

This negative finding has merit, nevertheless. The art shows a high competence, and the maintenance of distinctive traits and quirks in the manners of depiction proves a craft tradition of continuing expertise; it is evident, for example, in the idiosyncratic way of depicting rhinoceros ears seen in the Grotte Chauvet, in figures separated in time by thousands of years (Clottes 1998), a depictive device not seen in the few other caves elsewhere in Europe where rhinos are painted. Demonstrably, then, the art that survives in the caves is only a small portion of some larger and continuing tradition. This might have encompassed equivalent figures on open-air surfaces now largely eroded away; these survive at some Iberian sites (Bahn 1985; 1995) in a few examples, and perhaps in the mass in the Côa Valley, Portugal (Zilhão 1995). Or the rock art may relate to a lost corpus of imagery on perishable materials such as wood or hide.

In varied areas of Europe, especially where glacial action left exposed rock-surfaces scraped smooth, later prehistoric peoples made petroglyphs (Abelanet 1986). Main well-known concentrations are in Nordic Europe — in Karelia (Savvatejev 1984), in Arctic (Simonsen 1958; Helskog 1988) and in temperate (Hallström 1938, Sognnes 1998) Norway, in Sweden (Janson et al. 1989) and down into Denmark (Glob 1969) — and in the Alps, with outlying groups in Atlantic Europe (Bradley 1997). The Alpine group is concentrated in two areas with a famous quantity of figures, the adjacent valleys of Valcamonica (Anati 1961) and Valtellina (e.g. Fossati 1989) in the central Italian Alps north of Brescia, and south-west from there the single small massif of Mont Bego (De Lumley et al. 1995) in the French Maritime Alps; other localities are well scattered.

The standard of record, and even of exploration, is very varied. For some small regions, there is a full published record. For others, there is a good knowledge from recent survey. For Valcamonica—Valtellina, the record of recent discoveries emphasizes how little we know, and how much is hidden under the soil blanket of its chestnut woods and high mountain pastures. Alta, the great region in northernmost Norway, only came properly to light and scholarly notice within the last generation (Helskog 1988). Estimates of the number of figures in the regions, and across Europe, will be uncertain, and so will records of their nature and size of a kind that could support good estimates of labor input.

The dating of the corpus is imprecise. Many demonstrably post-date the Mesolithic. It appears this petroglyph tradition certainly perished across Europe by or in the presence of literacy, which means the classical period in the south and centre of Europe. Within the broad bracket of time those limits provide, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age components are likely, with the bulk of the figures in Nordic Europe thought as being of Bronze Age date (Helskog 1989; Sognnes 1987; 1995). The decisively dated component of the Mont Bego corpus is largely of early Bronze Age date. The Valcamonica—Valtellina group certainly includes substantial Chalcolithic (Copper Age) and Iron Age elements, and likely runs through from the Neolithic.

One would not pursue these kinds of studies were one to be timid in the face of imprecision and uncertainty! Nevertheless, and before one starts to depend on uncertain multipliers derived from considered guesses as to the total number of these petroglyphs in later prehistoric Europe, one should start from some reasonably certain arithmetic. The place that can be found is Mont Bego, thanks to two bodies of study. The first is the full survey of the mountain, and the recording in detail of every single detected petroglyph, in an unusually long-term research project. A valuable volume (de Lumley et al. 1995) presents summary results, with good accounts of the number and the nature of the figures; publication of the whole corpus, figure by detailed figure, is imminent (de Lumley et al. in press). The second, much less substantial, are the small-scale experimental studies made by the present writer in the early 1980s (Chippindale 1988), intended to provide a first estimate of how easy or difficult the figures are to make, and of how much time their making requires. Combining these numbers gives an overall estimate for the labor represented by the Bego figures, from which one can extrapolate towards some order-of-magnitude estimates for Europe as a whole.

De Lumley et al. (1995) report 3,639 surfaces on Mont Bego bearing 32,382 figures (Table 1), from their near-thirty years of field survey. A few more are still being found, overlooked in the surveyed areas, or in newly noticed outlying zones. Since some figures may have been buried since prehistoric times, or eroded away, the original total will have been higher. Rather than guess at that total, we shall use a working figure rounded to the nearest thousand, at 33,000.

Mont Bego is a small zone with unusual geology (Begin-Ducornet 1991) within the Alpine arc of primarily calcareous rocks. The prehistoric figures are for the most part on surfaces of schist or metamorphic sandstone. Many of the figured schist surfaces bear brightly coloured patinas, and on some the figures stand brightly out because their repatinated surfaces have acquired a distinctly different colour. Some are on sandstone surfaces, as are most figures in the other great Alpine rock-engraving zone of Valcamonica—Valtellina, and there the pecked areas of the figures are nearly or the same colour as the unpecked rock, and correspondingly harder to see. On all the rocks, when first made, the rock-engravings would have stood out brightly as raw areas of pale hammering (as seen in Figure 1).

The work involved in pecking out a petroglyph is a simple function of the area pecked; to make broad estimates of average labor input, the Mont Bego petroglyphs can be divided into four size classes, from the smallest 1 to the largest 4 (Chippindale 1988). Table 2 uses the typical sizes for figures of each type of motif. A better estimate will be made possible by the de Lumley corpus.

Chippindale (1988) reports replication studies of figures of Mont Bego type. These were done on schist surfaces from the same geological deposits, where these are exposed in the lower valley of the Roya some dista nce away and below near St Dalmas de Tende, a place where the rocks are today quarried. Experimental studies can therefore be safely made there without chance of the results being taken for prehistoric. Using a quartzite pebble and a hammerstone, Chippindale found figures easy to make. So little force was needed that his son, then aged eight, found the making of small figures well within his physical capabilities. Depending on its size, a figure would take between 8 and 75 minutes to make, a remarkably short time. The softness of the stone in the face of mechanical force was confirmed by materials science study of the rock bearing a detached figure from a Mont Bego surface, now in the British Museum (Strangwood 1985); importantly, this study confirms that the schists of the high mountain are not materially tougher than are the quarry rocks used in experiment below. Table 2 uses estimates for labor related to the typical size of a motif of each group. An order-of-magnitude estimate follows of some 23,000 person-hours to make the Mont Bego figures (Table 2). A key variable not addressed in that small experiment is the depth of the figures; many Bego figures as they now survive are cut a matter of some millimetres deep, with the individual peck-marks distinct, so one may think that depth is largely original, rather than a secondary product of subsequent erosion.

The Mont Bego figures are thought to be of Chalcolithic and earlier Bronze Age date, and therefore may span the period 2500—1700 BC, some eight centuries. Their making may be concentrated largely within a shorter period of about a century within that span. If we suppose that to be the case, then we can think in terms of the work being spread over the equivalent of four centuries, that amounts to an average labor output of 23,000/400 = 57, say 60 hours per year (Table 3). One might choose to multiply this up by several times. The ancient figures appear deeper than those which were made experimentally and more even in their pecking. Ancillary time would have been taken to go up the mountain, and additional labor would have been necessary to take up food and supplies. Ceremonial business at or to do with the figures may have been a much greater affair than was the work of making what is archaeologically visible today. And so on.

Is this consequential? Whether or not it is depends on the population involved. What would be consequential as the labor input taken from a single mountain family would have been inconsequential were the people of the whole region involved. That would be a number to be counted toward tens of thousands for what is now the French and the Italian Maritime Alps. Barfield and Chippindale (1997) see a pattern of symbolism in the Bego figures congruent with that evident in the Remedello burials, the sepulchres of a Chalcolithic group some 300 km to the north-east, and with that of the statue-stelae both of Valcamonica—Valtellina and of the Lunigiana, again, some 200 km east of Bego. In our view, the Bego figures are part of a broad regional pattern of symbolism, rather than one confined to the immediate environs; but it does not follow that the Bego figures were themselves of concern to prehistoric communities across that entire wide area of northern Italy. Still, within the terms of this paper's framework, one must conclude that the figures themselves are not demonstrably of functional consequence through the direct expression of labor they record.

So many estimates and suppositions are involved in the Bego figures, one hesitates to generalize. So here is a guess (no better than that) extrapolated to Valcamonica—Valtellina, the other and bigger Alpine group (Table 3):
• perhaps 15 times the number of figures, say one half-million;
• perhaps 10 times the time-span, say forty centuries from Neolithic to Iron Age;
• perhaps distribution of figure size very broadly like Mont Bego;

then:
• perhaps 23,000 times 15 =
• perhaps 350,000 person-hours over 4000 years
• and perhaps 90 person-hours per year.

This result, much like the Mont Bego figure, is startlingly low, in relation to the human numbers in a local population. The region of the two Italian valleys is greater. At a much lower altitude, they support today agriculture and year-round occupation, while the high slopes of Mont Bego are snow-covered half the year; with access in summer only, they are used as seasonal high pasturage for a few flocks.

One can conclude that these petroglyphs require inconsequential labor input, a dismaying conclusion that should perhaps be cautiously applied across Europe as a whole until such time as better-founded studies may give more secure arithmetic. The Scandinavian figures, numerous and distributed across a great stretch of northern Europe, do not offer any pattern of occurrence in relation to land area which would imply a consequential labor input for large or medium-sized communities; nor do other regions with yet smaller numbers of later prehistoric rock-figures.

In the face of these low and therefore discouraging figures for labor input on the rock figures, let us not pause with prehistoric built monuments of intermediate size in Europe, but go to the grandest of them all, Stonehenge. New experimental study of the moving of its larger sarsen stones, and of the erection of the largest ones into its great south-western trilithon, gives new estimates of the labor input involved in those tasks (Richards & Whitby 1997). There are other new studies of the Stonehenge rocks and their origins (Green 1997; Scourse 1997; Williams-Thorpe et al. 1997), an assessment of the economy of the communities who built Stonehenge (Allen 1997), revised dating (Bayliss et al. 1997), a re-thinking of the Stonehenge phasing (Lawson 1997), and a comprehensive account of the collected modern record of Stonehenge (Cleal et al. 1995). There is also a new account of Silbury Hill, the great non-megalithic mound not far from Stonehenge that is broadly contemporary and may amount to broadly the same labor input (Whittle 1997b); that study includes also the great timber palisade settings near by of the class to which one must look when it comes to the engineering of Stonehenge, and the work-teams of its constructors. Finally, there are two new essays on Stonehenge in the sacred geographies of its meanings (Darvill 1997; Whittle 1997a). Altogether, these give support for some tolerably well-founded estimates, superseding those of a generation ago (Atkinson 1956, with estimates for several aspects but no cumulated total for the whole project). Despite recent radiocarbon programmes for each site, the dates of building for both Stonehenge and Silbury Hill are placed only approximately in the mid to late 3rd millennium BC, Stonehenge 2850—2480 and 2440—2100 calBC (Lawson 1997: 31, which see for the uncertainties surrounding), Silbury Hill 2800/2500—2400/2000 calBC (Whittle 1997a: 26).

The labor involved in creating late Neolithic Stonehenge mostly involves the moving of sarsens (from north Wiltshire), their shaping, and their erection (Table 4).

The new experiment (Richards & Whitby 1995) moved a replica of one of the great Stonehenge sarsens, weighing 40 tonnes, up a slope of 1 in 20 with a labor force of about 130 individuals. This was done by dragging a stone-laden sledge on laid timber rails, eased generously with grease, rather than with the use of rollers as has before been supposed. Allowing for prehistoric circumstances, Richards & Whitby (1995: 251) estimate an optimum team size of 200 people, and the whole set of some 80 Stonehenge sarsens moved to the site from their outcrops of origin in some 100,000 person-days. If this was done in a single campaign, then about two full-time years is required; or longer if part-time or seasonal.

Neither Whitby & Richards (1997) nor Atkinson (1956) offer estimates for moving the bluestones from Wales or for the labor requirements in shaping the stones; since these stones were on-site in Sub-phase 3i, a little before the building of the sarsen structure, this number is not required. The sarsens are naturally found in sub-rectangular shapes, with two roughly parallel faces; so the builder's work may begin with a block having the general proportions of a trimmed Stonehenge stone. Although a sandstone, sarsen is reckoned exceptionally hard, more like granite in its toughness than a sedimentary rock.

Raising the sarsen uprights and placing the sarsen lintels, Richards & Whitby (1995: 251—2) estimate, required a team of up to 150 people and consumed about 21,000 person-days.

Also to be allowed for is the modest labor of rearranging the bluestones, thought to be already on site.

Important to the Richards & Whitby (1995) estimates are the minimum number of individuals required to work as a team for the tasks requiring greatest force at one moment. If there are to be so many working at one moment, may they have not been there all the time? This brings Richards & Whitby (1995: 252) to conclude that Stonehenge could have been built in so short a time as three years. With a short time-span, it becomes more remarkable that so many could be assembled together, and provided with subsistence by others. With a longer time-span, and the need still to gather a large team for certain tasks, the other remarkable point would come into play, that the ambition and design were pursued consistently over a large number of years.

Broadly comparable in its late Neolithic date and the singularity of its impact is the great mound of Silbury Hill, immediately south of the Avebury henge and stone setting complex. It has been seen as amounting to a labor input also broadly comparable with that for Stonehenge, as Whittle (1997a: 145) reports the varied estimates. Silbury Hill is a chalk mound of roughly 250,000 cubic metres volume (Atkinson 1967); this makes it about four times (Burl 1979: 255) the bulk of the passage-tombs of Newgrange (O'Kelly 1982) and Knowth (Eogan 1986), the next largest round mounds in the Neolithic British Isles. From that estimated volume of Silbury Hill, one can infer:

• a permanent workforce equivalent to 500 people for 10 years (Atkinson 1978); or

• some 18 million person-hours (reported by Renfrew 1973: 548); or

• some 4 million person-hours (Startin & Bradley 1981; Startin 1982) — about 8 times the about one-half million to make the great earthworks at Avebury and Durrington Walls; or

• 1000 people working for 2 years (Parker Pearson 1993: 71).

The first estimate, 500 people for 10 years, may equate to between 12 and 13 million person-hours; the last may equate to 5 million. The four estimates are therefore about: 4, 5, 13, 18 — the highest over four times the lowest. More experimental study, of the kind done in and after the building of the experimental earthwork on Overton Down in 1962 (Bell et al. 1996) may reduce this range. The lowest figure is more than twice that for Stonehenge, that figure being much reduced by the Richards & Whitby study from earlier estimates.

At Silbury Hill, with its distinct layering of the mound, no turf-line appears in the stratigraphy, of a kind that would develop were work there to cease for a spell of some years and bare chalk to be greened over.

A generation ago, it was contended (Renfrew 1973; also Thorpe and Richards 1984) that the scale of the Wessex monuments — of which Stonehenge is the most celebrated — was such that decisive inferences can be made from that fact about the society which built them. The model followed of a chiefdom society (Earle 1991), a ranked system marked by its distinctive specialization, redistribution and centralization. This account is muchcriticized nowadays (e.g. Barrett 1994: 29—32; Whittle 1997a: 145—147): the Wessex contexts do not unambiguously record those traits identified as diagnostic of chiefdoms; the chiefdom itself is too vague and baggy a concept to define a distinct type of society; and a more complex and reciprocal relationship is to be envisaged between the society and the monuments it makes. That apart, something useful can surely be said from a monument like Stonehenge about the nature of work organization (Startin & Bradley 1981). By extension, inferences of the same general kind apply elsewhere in Neolithic Europe (Eogan 1997), where or wherever there are such substantial monuments.

Richards & Whitby's (1997) study usefully reminds us that two distinct kinds of labor input may be involved: the total number of individuals working together at any one moment for a given task; and the total labor input, which could equally be supplied by many individuals for a short time or a few individuals for a longer time. Richards & Whitby (1997; and see also Pavel 1992, another recent experimental study in engineering Stonehenge) think that previously theoretically derived estimates of human power requirements now seem to have been over-cautious.

The functionalist view, characteristic of 1970s study of prehistory in north America and Britain, stands today; it remains comfortable with our not being able to know what these relics – the rock-carvings of Mont Bego and across Europe, Stonehenge and the other megalithic monuments, the great mounds like Silbury Hill – were for, or what they meant in the simple or the naïve sense of the answer that would be given were we to ask a prehistoric person of Wessex, "What is Stonehenge for?" Yet we can see their function is not direct, but indirect — for instance in holding together social groups (see, e.g., Taçon et al. 1996). Did Stonehenge and the other "constructions of excessive zeal" (Whittle 1997a: 146) perform this function 1000 times as well, or for that much longer, or for that many more people than did the rock carvings at Mont Bego — in some broad congruence with the labor input each production consumed? Conversely, did the rock-carvers by their work create a much greater degree of social cohesion (if that is the function which our analytical approach recognizes) per hour of labor than did the builders of Stonehenge?

The theories of the art/ideology and economics relationship that so many use, as in other articles in the present volume — e.g. those deriving from Marx, Weber, and Veblen — may hold for a given region, in a given time, and for a social context. But what if those theories are neither broadly cross-cultural, nor can they be applied over really long periods of time, and to the societies of a remote time? If theories of the relationship of ideology and economics are only useful within the individual cultural systems from which they are derived, then cross-cultural comparison of this relationship — even of something that as universal as human labor — is not helpful. From this caution there follows one newer trend we see in interpreting Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Whittle, leading theoretician of Neolithic Europe and citing Kehoe (1974) and Wrigley (1989), remarks (1997a: 163): "Our view of Stonehenge has been too scientific and too socio-political." His own studies of Stonehenge (Whittle 1997a) and of Silbury Hill (1997b) and Darvill's of Stonehenge (1997) then directly attempt to make some statement that recovers the meaning of these places in some reflection of ancient and authentic knowledge.

The numbers in this essay — all of them subject to large uncertainties — underline how great is the range of labor inputs; some of the numbers in the arithmetic are a thousand-fold more than others. Within these limits — and without having addressed that other relevant fact, the population from which this labor input was taken — it seems to me that there maybe no consequential consequences of rock-engraving to be reached by a functional analysis of its labor requirements, for Mont Bego, for the western Alps as a whole, or indeed for all Europe. And the approach is not decisive even for the stupendous monuments! Accordingly, we must use the varied and other approaches available to us by which we can with good confidence recover meaning in the rock-art of later European prehistory. I offer Barfield & Chippindale (1997), a study of this aspect to the Mont Bego figures, as just one example of what can in that spirit be done; and I also acknowledge Milisauskas's (1998) well-founded and well-stated fears that these new stories of the European Neolithic give accounts which are true neither in the realities which those ancient people experienced nor in the logical mechanisms which people of our present culture know in greater truth govern the lives of human beings.

Paul S.C. Taçon and I, introducing a recent book (Chippindale & Taçon 1998) in which many of these issues occur in respect of studying rock-art, distinguish two fundamentals of method there: the informed methods are "those that depend on some source of insight passed on directly or indirectly from those who made and used the rock-art – though ethnography, though ethnohistory, though historical record, or though modern understanding known with good cause to perpetuate ancient knowledge"; the formal methods are "those that depend on no inside knowledge, but which work when one can come to the stuff 'cold'" (Taçon & Chippindale 1998: 6—8). In the most fortunate circumstances, as prevail in Aboriginal northern Australia, one can demonstrate from the rock-art such a long continuity of iconography that a statement can be made about meanings of 4500 or so years ago which build from recent ethnohistory — that is, by using informed methods. Lacking any such continuity, we have no matching access to these subjects in the European prehistory of 4500 years ago by tracing back from the present, and so face an uncomfortable choice. There are the formal methods, like that sketched in the empirical portion of the present essay, which flourished a generation ago and which we may now fear do not reach the root of the matter. And there are the new views being taken of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, which hanker after the insider's insight but which in European circumstances are decisively not the genuinely informed methods we would enjoy. Patty-Jo Watson (1991: 270), wise woman amongst us, crisply defined this disconcerting dilemma as between "soulless method" and "methodless soul".

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Figure 1. A Mont Bego rock-engraving replicated.

A small figure has been made of the characteristic geometrical form of a "topographique' (perhaps a prehistoric map), with pecked zones, unpecked zones delimited by enclosing pecked lines, and an extensive line extending out. On the surface the quartz pebbles used in pecking the figure into schist, not a hard rock, of the type bearing the Bego figures.

Scale in centimetres. Photograph by the author.

Table 1. The Mont Bego petroglyphs: numbers of figures and of surfaces on which they are placed.

Figures from de Lumley et al. (1995: 51).

The surfaces and figures are too few in four areas for a value of figures per surface to be usefully reliable.

Table 2. The Mont Bego petroglyphs: labor estimates.

Calculated from numbers in de Lumley et al. (1995) and Chippindale (1988).

Table 3. Consequent estimates for labor involved in making Alpine petroglyphs.

Table 4. Labor estimates in building the sarsen structures of Stonehenge 3 (numbers largely from Richards & Whitby 1995).