Making Sense of Monuments: Narratives of Time, Movement, and Scale (Routledge Studies in Archaeology) 9781138371101, 9780429427756

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“In this book, anthropologist Michael Kolb productively explores the cultural and communicative roles of the built environment. Systematic without being deductive, thematic without universalizing, the author guides the reader through detailed analyses of case studies to illustrate and explain how monumental architecture constructs and communicates content. Not limited to how humans think about their environments, Kolb also skillfully demonstrates how embodied experience is intrinsic to ‘making sense’ of places, and their significance. The result is an ambitious book that makes important contributions to studies on the multifarious meanings materialized by the built environment.” Thomas Barrie, AIA, DPACSA, Professor of Architecture, NC State University, USA “Monuments bulk large in archaeology. In this book, Michael Kolb offers a very new approach to thinking about them, combining insights drawn from cognitive science, phenomenology, and cultural theory with his own handson archaeological experience in both the New and Old Worlds. You will never look at a monument in quite the same way again.” Ian Morris, Professor, Stanford University, USA

Making Sense of Monuments

Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Confederate statues, Egyptian pyramids, and medieval cathedrals: these are some of the places that are the subject of Making Sense of Monuments, an analysis of how the built environment molds human experiences and perceptions via bodily comparison. Drawing from recent research in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and semiotics, Michael J. Kolb explores the mechanics of the mind, the material world, and the spatialization process of monumental architecture. Three distinct spatial-cognitive metaphors—time, movement, and scale—comprise strands of knowledge that, when interwoven, create embodied contours of meaning around how humans interact with monumental spaces. Comprehensive, lucidly written, and thoroughly illustrated, Making Sense of Monuments is a vibrant, extraordinary journey of the monuments we have constructed and inhabited. Michael J. Kolb is Professor of Anthropology at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and Presidential Teaching Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University. His scholarship focuses on the political economy of emerging societies, and he has conducted field research around the world. He has examined the energetics of monumental building for 30 years in both the Pacific and the Mediterranean.

Routledge Studies in Archaeology

Material Worlds Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity Edited by Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee An Archaeology of Skill Metalworking Skill and Material Specialization in Early Bronze Age Central Europe Maikel H.G. Kuijpers Dwelling Heidegger, Archaeology, Mortality Philip Tonner New Perspectives in Cultural Resource Management Edited by Francis P. Mcmanamon Cultural and Environmental Change on Rapa Nui Edited by Sonia Cardinali, Kathleen Ingersoll, Daniel Ingersoll Jr., and Christopher Stevenson Making Sense of Monuments Narratives of Time, Movement, and Scale Michael J. Kolb Researching the Archaeological Past through Imagined Narratives A Necessary Fiction Edited by Daniël van Helden and Robert Witcher Cognitive Archaeology Mind, Ethnography, and the Past in South Africa and Beyond Edited by David Whitley, Johannes Loubser, and Gavin Whitelaw For more information on this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Archaeology/book-series/RSTARCH

Making Sense of Monuments Narratives of Time, Movement, and Scale

Michael J. Kolb

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michael J. Kolb The right of Michael J. Kolb to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-37110-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42775-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Rajah, my biggest fan; to George Loss, who put me back together again; not forgetting of course Jane, Pumpkin, Pooter, or the Samster.

Contents

List of figures Preface/hyperbole 1 Making sense of monuments Cognitive event  4 Place making  10 Spatial sequencing  17 Commemoration 29 Notes 32 Bibliography 34

xi xvi 1

2 Time Death marker (ancestral time)  46 Reef of heaven (ancestral time)  55 Sacramental church (sacred time)  61 Pyramid (sacred time)  67 Machu Picchu (god time)  76 Stone Mountain (god time)  82 Notes 94 Bibliography 94

43

3 Movement National Mall (encoding)  102 Gothic Cathedral (encoding)  112 Forum Romanum (performance)  120 Minoan palace (performance)  129 Karnak (wayfinding)  136 Stonehenge (wayfinding)  144 Notes 152 Bibliography 154

100

x Contents 4 Scale The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant  163 Mons Vaticanus  168 Greek Sanctuary  181 Giza 190 Borobudur 198 Giants of Rapa Nui  204 Notes 214 Bibliography 214 Conclusion/litotes Index

160

219 223

Figures

1.1 Ancient inscription at Delphi, Greece 2 1.2 Cleopatra’s Needle, London 6 1.3 A model of event segmentation 7 1.4 Examples of schemas relevant to architecture 8 1.5 Event segmentation for the experience of visiting a tomb using relevant architectural mental schemas; this parsing achieves better perceptual success as well as event-model augmentation/retention9 1.6 Fallen statuary, Abney Park Cemetery, London 11 1.7 Henri Lefebvre’s triad of a social space 12 1.8 The mental space is a cognitive analog of the physical world 13 1.9 The conceptual path of making and reading a map 16 1.10 Valley temple of Menkaure, Giza, Egypt 18 1.11 Three primary spatial-cognitive metaphors relevant to monuments20 1.12 Death marker dedicated to Captain James Cook Kealakekua Bay, Hawai’i 30 2.1 Eighteenth-century death markers from Old Burial Hill, Marblehead, Massachusetts 44 2.2 Modern Buddhist tombstones at Kiyomizudera temple in Kyoto, Japan 47 2.3 Effigy tomb of Edward “The Black Prince” Plantagenet, Canterbury Cathedral, England 48 2.4 Greenwood Cemetery is the original cemetery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama 49 2.5 General Grant at the tomb of Abraham Lincoln: Oak Ridge cemetery, Springfield, Illinois (1868) 50 2.6 Effigy tombs of the Brudenell family, St. Peter’s Church, Deene, England 51 2.7 Second century a.d. funerary relief of Alexandra in Athens in 1870 53

xii Figures 2.8 A first century a.d. Roman tomb on the outskirts of Tyre, Lebanon54 2.9 The island of Pohnpei in Micronesia 55 2.10 Isometric drawing of a simple lolung platform 56 2.11  Lolung platforms overlaid upon the lagoon at Nan Madol 58 2.12 The lolung of Nan Dawas 59 2.13 The burial crypt of the Nan Dawas lolung60 2.14 The Aula Palatina, a civic basilica built by Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century, Trier, Germany 64 2.15 All Saints’ Church, founded by Sexwulf, bishop of Mercia, and built in the eighth century style of an early Christian basilica, Brixworth, England 65 2.16 Isometric drawing of All Saints’ Church, lighter stonework indicates the earlier foundation not restored after the church was partially destroyed by roving Vikings in 870 66 2.17 The stepped pyramid of Sakara 68 2.18 The distribution of the four phases of royal pyramid construction over time 69 2.19 Isometric view of the stepped pyramid complex of Djoser 69 2.20 Isometric view of the Red Pyramid complex of Sneferu at Dashur 71 2.21 Isometric view of pyramid tomb of the Egyptian New Kingdom colonial administrator Siamun, located at Tombos, Nubia 73 2.22 Isometric view to the northwest of pyramid BEG S 10 from Meroë73 2.23 Carved relief depicting the god Apade-mak at the Merotic Lion Temple at Naqa 74 2.24 Ruined pyramids at the north cemetery at Meroë75 2.25 Machu Picchu to the north 77 2.26 Stonework at Machu Picchu 78 2.27 Schematic map of Machu Picchu showing the relevant architectural areas 79 2.28 View to the north of the Royal Haven and Sacred Plaza at Machu Picchu 80 2.29 The Groton Monument, Groton, Connecticut 85 2.30 New York Monument, Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 86 2.31 The DeKalb Country Civil War Memorial, located in Sycamore, Illinois 87 2.32 A 150-year timeline of public Confederate construction 88

Figures 

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2.33 Contemporary view to the south of Stone Mountain 89 2.34 Stone Mountain Monument of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson 90 2.35 Plan view of the Memorial Lawn with the locations of the Valor and Sacrifice statues and the walkways that reveal flag terraces for thirteen states, eleven of which formally seceded91 2.36 The laser light spectacular at Stone Mountain 92 2.37 The conceptual path of making and reading Stone Mountain 93 3.1 Graffiti at the ruins of the Roman temple of Jupiter, Baalbek, Lebanon 101 3.2 Washington D.C. Boundary Stone Northwest Mile 7, placed in 1791–1792 by Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker103 3.3 National Mall, Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, Washington D.C. 104 3.4 Plan view of Washington D.C. circa 1811 overlain upon a modern city map 105 3.5 Ford Motor Co. Lincoln at Lincoln Memorial 107 3.6 Dr. Moton, principal of the Tuskegee Institute at the Lincoln Memorial dedication 108 3.7 Jefferson Memorial, aerial view, Washington, D.C.  109 3.8 Vietnam War Memorial after a snow storm, Washington D.C.  110 3.9 Ely Cathedral, England 113 3.10 Isometric cross section of a Gothic cathedral 115 3.11 The nave ceiling in Ely Cathedral, England 116 3.12 Simulacra gargoyle atop Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris 118 3.13 The location of the Forum Romanum is between the Capitoline and Palatine hills 121 3.14 Panoramic view of the Roman Forum 122 3.15 Isometric view of the temple of Saturn in the Forum Romanum122 3.16 Isometric views of the Forum Romanum circa 168 b.c. and a.d. 203 123 3.17 The Forum Romanum as a tourist venue 128 3.18 The sesi grande of the island of Pantelleria, Italy 131 3.19 Isometric view of the tholos tomb at Moni Odigitria, Crete 131 3.20 Isometric view of the palace at Knossos facing north 132 3.21 Bull-leaping (Toreador fresco), from the palace at Knossos, 133 (circa 1450 b.c.), Archaeological Museum, Heraklion

xiv Figures 3.22 Fallen obelisk at Karnak 136 3.23 Plan view of Karnak 138 3.24 Isometric view of the Temple of Amun-Re  139 3.25 Construction volume totals of pharaohs grouped by century 140 3.26 The first pylon 142 3.27 Shadows upon the columns of the Hypostyle Hall at the Temple of Amun-Re  143 3.28 Stonehenge, Salisbury, England 145 3.29 Isometric map of Stonehenge with the sun setting at winter solstice147 3.30 The physical and social spaces of Stonehenge 148 3.31 The conceptual path of making and reading ancient Stonehenge149 4.1 The colossal Stone of the Pregnant Woman at Baalbek, Lebanon (circa 1890); it is the largest cut stone in the world, measuring over twenty meters long and weighing one thousand metric tons 161 4.2 Schematic drawing of the WIPP permanent marker 165 4.3 An aerial view of the WIPP facility with a 3.3 × 3.3 kilometer isometric overlay of the monument’s berm and buffer zone, Carlsbad, New Mexico 165 4.4 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 80 169 4.5 The circus of Nero and the Tomb of Hadrian in the distance, map of ancient Rome 170 4.6 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 900 170 4.7 Isometric drawing of the old basilica overlain upon the Circus Nero 171 4.8 Castel Sant’Angelo today, a remodel of Hadrian’s Tomb 173 4.9 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 1350 173 4.10 Design for the Basilica of St. Peter’s in 1514 174 4.11 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 1667 175 4.12 The Vatican in 1565 175 4.13 The transportation of the Vatican Obelisk to its new location 177 4.14 Tomb of Pope Paul III 179 4.15 Saint Peter’s Basilica and Square today 180 4.16 Ruins of the temple of Poseidon, Cape Sunio, Greece 183

Figures 

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4.17 Scaled model of the Sacred Way at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi (circa 200 b.c.), Delphi Archaeological Museum, Greece186 4.18 The Athenian Treasury at Delphi, Greece 187 4.19 Schematic and isometric views of the temple of Athena Parthenos (Parthenon) in Athens 189 4.20 Napoleon before the pyramids (1895) 191 4.21 The Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza (circa 1867) 193 4.22 The Giza Plateau. After Lehner (1997: 107) 194 4.23 Isometric cross-section of Khufu’s pyramids denoting the yearly construction progress of the fourteen-year project 195 4.24 Borobudur on the Kendu Plains, Java 200 4.25 Isometric map of Borobudur 201 4.26 Borobudur architectural features 202 4.27 Terraces and encasement mantle of Borobudur 202 4.28 Moai on Easter island 205 4.29 Isometric view of an ahu with three moai statues 206 4.30 Ahu Tongariki 208 4.31 The excavation of statue RR-001-157 209 4.32 Peaked embellishments on the dorsal side of statue RR-001-157 211 4.33 The conceptual path of making and reading an ahu platform from Rapa Nui 212

Preface/hyperbole

This book is about monumentality and, more specifically, the cultural structures that arise when a monument is conceptualized, constructed, and utilized. These structures—referred to here as the spatial-cognitive metaphors of time, movement, and scale—comprise the focal points of this work as I ask: how do we derive meaning from material objects? How can we learn from the past? Monuments are seen in this work as a single medium of material culture, all those things that humans construct, acquire, utilize, and share during their lifetimes. Material items in turn represent important signs of culture that define, describe, and communicate specific social meanings and collective representations. Culture is conceptualized as a set of signifying practices that interplay between symbolic and objectified dimensions, as well as the epistemological and substantive, thus offering an approach that is appealing for those of us who seek to better understand the dynamic nature of both the modern world and the ancient past. To begin, there are several definitions of the term “monument” that deserve consideration. The term is Middle English and derives from the Latin words monumentum, “a memorial,” and monēre or admonēre, “to remind, warn, or advise.” The first meaning of monument is a structure erected to commemorate a person or event. The most literal (and perhaps ancient) examples of such monuments are the gravestones and sepulchers of the dead. For example Horace (Carmen Saeculare IV, 8) notes during the 1st century b.c.: “Marble statues, engraved with public inscriptions, by which the life and soul return after death to noble leaders” (literally: Incisa notis marmora publicis, per quae spiritus et vita redit bonis post mortem ducibus). This meaning has changed little, as the English churchman and historian Thomas Fuller wrote (Essay on Tombs, 1648): “Tombs are the clothes of the dead. A grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered.” Monuments such as burial markers thus serve as memorials to the exalted dead, commemorating their achievements or lives, preserving their memory, and offering a degree of immortality. Another meaning of “monument” is a structure built to venerate a collective social experience or idea. Edifices of this type represent some of the most poignant and sophisticated accomplishments of human society.

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Contemporary examples include towering skyscrapers and expansive bridges, structures that showcase our modern technological capabilities. More impressive perhaps than modern monuments are humanity’s ancient edifices; built from hard-carved stone, they possess a combination of archaic technological sophistication and a resilience to natural decay. The Egyptian pyramids, for example, are familiar to the youngest of school children because they remain the quintessential case study of power and wealth. The lofty trilithons of Stonehenge remain the enigmatic fusion of cosmology and landscape. And Machu Picchu offers an unparalleled glimpse into a richly codified social order of kings and nobles. These places of veneration offer a certain allure to modern visitors who seek a glimpse into the past, who thoughtfully touch the stones that ancient hands once carved, deriving a sudden sense of something beyond the self. These are structures that have endured the havoc and corrosion of the ages; preserved testaments from the unfathomable depths of deep time after lesser things have crumbled into dust, forcing us to ponder what collective endeavors we are part of. A third meaning of the term “monument” is an object used to mark or maintain a boundary or position. Monuments of this sort include those human alterations to the natural environment, such as upright stones or statues that serve to define a border or designate a limit. The boundaries that markers denote and the relationships that they define may be natural to social, living to dead, or the past to the present. Cemeteries, royal palaces, the Great Wall of China, for example, all exemplify marking monuments. Similar to our previous definitions, marking monuments help manage and regulate social interaction because they are not easily altered or removed. However, they are polar opposites of the memorializing monuments. Instead of serving as temporal anchors lodged in space, marking monuments serve as spatial references lodged in time. Once established, a marker may, at some point, become outdated, a vestige of obsolete ideas and interactions, or they may in turn be used to produce and circulate new symbolic meanings. As the Roman poet Ovid (Fasti, bk. IV, 709) wrote in the year a.d. 15: “The need has gone; the memorial thereof remains” (literally: Factum abiit; monumenta manent). This diverse array of definitions offers a variety of ways to describe and interpret the meanings of monuments by archaeologists, architects, art historians, artists, and historians. Perhaps their immensity is alluring, or perhaps it is their timeless immutability. Whatever the inspiration, monuments offer an extraordinary glimpse into human aesthetics, ways of life, and social values. However, their very aura of timelessness also represents their greatest paradox: having their social values change after they become transfixed in time; values that undergo transformation into new meanings by subsequent generations who desire to redefine and contest meanings from the past; values that become socially derelict or irrelevant, or even forgotten completely. The original builders are long dead—the peasant farmer, the ancient stone mason, or the queen of consequence—making it difficult

xviii Preface/hyperbole to comprehend their intent no matter how many monuments we scrutinize and study. This challenge of retrospective interpretation is something that modern researchers contend with constantly, and it is a paradox that is fundamentally irresolvable. My view as a researcher is retrospective—how do we know what a monument is “supposed” to mean, or what its “real” meaning is? In the long march of interpretation, monuments have been treated as antiquarian relics of deep history, as processual vehicles charged with cultural and stylistic meaning, and postmodern symbols for visual reference and memory. Yet these views are all somewhat limited in their ability to understand monuments because they either favor a behavioralist interpretation (where meanings are determined by how people respond to external stimuli) or an ideational interpretation (where meanings are determined by the ideas created inside people’s heads). The behaviorist view has in turn spawned the antiquarianist, scientific/stylistic, and neoevolutionary approaches. The antiquarianist stresses the formal properties of a monument—the architecture, the layout, the building material, the imagery and so forth—defining the encoded behavioral meanings intended by the architect. All then that is required is a thorough and competent study of a monument in order to properly “read” the original meaning of its architect. The scientific/stylistic approach emphasizes more general cultural conventions of meaning, where common traditions and contextual conventions of usage, practice, and interpretation dictate meaning. In this way, a monument still remains a historical document and a material fact, yet its meaning is inevitably cultural and contextual. Monuments in the neoevolutionary approach also emphasize more general cultural conventions of meaning, but they are framed in a historical tradition and context, where they become meaningful only in their relationship to other material expressions. Finally, the postmodern approach follows the ideational interpretation by viewing monuments as lacking any deep connotations, where meanings exist only insofar as they evoke a set of responses in a visitor (there is no need for patterns, symbols, or structural codes). Yet, often a dialectic forum of behavior versus idea generates descriptions and explanations that still remain disappointingly dilute. An analytical perspective may prove valuable for specific case studies, yet how do we fully explain the ferocity and measure to which monumentality pervades our entire cultural history? The aim of this book is to link the many social strands—both substantive and epistemological—of monumental construction, and explore a series of case studies from around the world and through time. It would not be so unusual if this work began with a descriptive investigation, or with a critical comparison of the written and archaeological records, or with a privileged focus on one particular phenomenon, such as the monumental reproduction of the political hierarchy. I have certainly followed this approach, but I must confess that in my own work there have been certain qualities to

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these monuments that remain unexplained; particular meanings that I have missed. It is for this reason that this book seeks to simultaneously articulate a number of distinct processes whose interaction might lead to more variable explanations and contingent outcomes. This book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the mechanics of the mind, the material world, and the spatialization process of monumental architecture. Monuments share similar social meanings in many societies, and it is with this establishment of social meaning that I examine the first key process in our cultural circuit, that of representation. Meanings do not necessarily arise directly from an object, the thing itself, but rather from the way in which an object, in this case a large mound of stacked stone, is represented in both physical space and time. After this discussion about ways of perceiving, I next speak to issues of process, and outline the approach of metaphorical blending and how material objects serve as delegated agents of human thought. I finally discuss three important models of spatial-cognitive metaphors that operate as agents to create, utilize, and sequence monumental architecture. These are: (1) metaphors of time; (2) metaphors of movement; and (3) metaphors of scale. Each of these structural categories operate simultaneously to contour monumental space and can therefore be used to provide specific clues as to the meaning of monuments. I conclude Chapter 1 with a discussion of commemoration and the use of monuments. Chapters 2 through 4 of this book seek to link the substantive, ontological, and epistemological social strands of monuments using examples from specific time periods and regions. These chapters present case studies organized along the three main contouring spatial structures. Chapter 2 addresses a set of monuments whose meanings rely primarily upon spatial metaphors associated with time. Chapter 3 presents monuments primarily associated with the spatial metaphors assigned to movement. Chapter 4 addresses metaphors of scale and monuments that are uniquely colossal. The combined narratives of these 15 monumental examples repeatedly return to the spatial-cognitive sequences described in Chapter 1. These metaphors—of time, movement, and scale—comprise strands of knowledge that, when interwoven, create contours of meaning around how humans interact with monumental spaces. The accompanying notes and bibliography acknowledge the many intellectual and practical debts of this work, which are cited in the appropriate places. Those who have detailed and summarized the vast research on human cognitive thought have been very important, particularly the musings of such noted scholars as Loren Eiseley, Merlin Donald, Jerome Feldman, and George Lakoff. Those who view material culture as generating distinct conceptual metaphors have also been particularly influential. The works of Henry Glassie (Vernacular Architecture) and Christopher Tilley (Material Culture and Metaphor) have been particularly insightful. Moreover, I also

xx Preface/hyperbole draw on a growing body of literature that views space in equal terms with history and society as a means for enriching and guiding human life, and that includes explicit practical applications which incorporate and develop space into our theoretical perspectives. The seminal works of Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space) and Susan Stewart (On Longing) are particularly illustrative in this regard. I wish to express my appreciation to the following individuals for their photographic expertise: J. Stephen Athens, Kaspar Bams, Jimmy Baikovicius, Carol Highsmith, Jim M. Hollister, David Holt, Steve James, Emma H. Kolb, John C. Kolb, John Miksic, Pattie Rechtman, John Rosemeyer, Stuart Tyson Smith, and Jo Anne Van Tilberg. I would like to thank the following colleagues for their special assistance, from initial conception to final submittal: Ian Morris, Douglass Bailey, Michael Shanks, Monica Smith, Cara Rolfe, Eliot Abrams, Michael Smith, Timothy Earle, Megan Drennan, Willeke Wendrich, Diane Favro, Graeme Davis, and Samuel H Williamson at MeasuringWorth. The chapter cover art of the temple at Segesta is courtesy of Emma H. Kolb. I also acknowledge the herculean efforts of my good friends and colleagues Dan Gebo, Jane Mall, and James Snead, for keeping me on task. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Samuel Kolb, Jackson Kolb, and Emma Kolb, all of whom had no choice but to support this work to its ultimate conclusion.

1

Making sense of monuments

Nobel Laureate and diplomat George Seferis sought to best describe the ancient monumental ruin of Mycenae, abandoned in the Greek countryside, forlorn and forgotten. An astute poet, whose works often focused upon Greek history, Homeric myth, and Mediterranean landscapes, Seferis wrote: “voices out of the stone out of sleep, deeper here where the world darkens, memory of toil rooted in the rhythm, beaten upon the earth by feet forgotten” (Seferis 1995: 34). At first glance, Seferis seems to simply describe an ancient a relic, a jumble of collapsed stones. But upon closer reading his meaning is better revealed; the scale and design of its architecture provide new representations and broader meanings, the secrets within offer new abstractions. The metaphors that Seferis uses are meant to communicate ideas of durability, stability, and permanence. The physical quality of a stone, its substance, serve as a cultural referents: to be “hard as rock,” “old as stone,” or “rock bottom.” A stone’s constitutive process, movement, or action serve as another: “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” “a word from the mouth, a stone from the hand,” and “those hit by a stone never forget.” We might also describe this monument as “gigantic,” “spacious,” “despotic,” or “ancient,” words that signify meaning (Figure 1.1). This semantic contrast of quality and action is an illusion largely created by a monument’s materiality—its unique physical attributes—producing mental meanings that, through description, transforms an object into something culturally significant. This mechanism of signification, of generating meanings through language, is a fundamental core of understanding culture.1 Language, however, tells only one aspect of the cultural narrative. For example, experiencing a ruined monument (i.e., seeing, touching, or smelling it) conjures up specific images and meanings that help make sense of the past. A photo of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, for example, might call up

2  Making sense of monuments

Figure 1.1 Ancient inscription at Delphi, Greece. Source: Author photo / Delphi Archaeological Museum, Delphi / © Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports Archaeological Receipts Fund.

images of omnipotent pharaohs driven to architectural perfection in their headlong dash for immortality; or maybe ideas of alien visitations or harmonic convergences. In this way every person can be imagined as a connoisseur of culture—their own to be precise—capable of making sense of a monument by comprehending the social discourse that surrounds it, integrating this discourse within some interpretative framework that makes it “cultural,” and then decoding it using their personal spheres of reference. This book contains a series of narratives about the construction and use of monumental architecture, narratives from around the world and through time. My goal is to offer a productive avenue of inquiry, one that has not yet been fully explored, of how to make sense of monuments. While a culturally specific “emic” framework certainly dictates how and why a monument is utilized in a contextual fashion, there are also general “etic” insights that may be employed to better understand why humanity, from the inception of complex culture to the present day, continues to construct and utilize monuments. The internal emic perspective is often viewed as incommensurable with the comparative external etic viewpoint; however, synergy between the two does exist, and I employ both approaches in a complementary fashion where one stimulates the other’s progress. The essential methodology of this book is based upon four interrelated etic and emic principles: 1. Culture represents shared patterns of cognitive events of thought and experience that may be structured and externalized into the physical world.

Making sense of monuments  3 2. Physical spaces are transformed into culturally meaningful places when cognitive events become collectively associated with spatial locations. 3. Monuments are places that contour and spatially sequence cognitive events by directing how people move through and interact together in space. 4. The commemorative success of a monument is correlated with its capacity to track changes over time in both public and private dialogue. First, every mental thought or experience is extremely personal, processed by an individual’s brain, and encompassing higher brain functions such as subjective consciousness, personality, reason, memory, and emotion. Even though thoughts and experiences are individually formed, culture is a body of group-shared thought or information, such as language, values, or social practices. Biologically, culture is represented as a cumulative set of shared mental representations (events, or schema), a set of shared meanings and experiences that is greater than any one individual. Monuments, as humanmodified materials, are imbued with cultural values and meanings (other physical objects include tools, writing, artwork, and forms of architecture). Human-modified objects, or material culture, have a history just about as old as humanity, and we have become incredibly reliant upon our things to help us negotiate the world around us. Objects play a seminal role in the structuring and operation of the human mind, and as the prominent British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has consistently argued, they externalize, amplify, and distribute how both individuals and societies represent reality (Renfrew 2007; Renfrew et al. 2008; Renfrew and Scarre 1998).2 Similar to the cognitive scientists who study the mind, language, or robotics, the crucial question for Renfrew is how specific cultural practices build upon the human biological endowment in order to produce cognitive accomplishments. Second, unlike most other forms of material culture that archaeologists study, a monument is constructed as a culturally emic place, a permanent space upon the physical landscape that mediates human experience and memory (formative works include Bourdieu 1977; Lefebvre 1991; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; also see Hendon 2007; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Meskell 2003; Rubertone 2008; Whitridge 2004). Place-making is a ubiquitous social and cognitive process that is cumulative and culturally specific that, over time and space, becomes associated with a vast network of experiences and memories as people reoccupy, reuse, and recreate places. People build and alter spaces in ways that demarcate and personalize their life experiences, and each constructed place becomes a mediator of social experiences, possessing a horizon of meaning that is discernible at many different levels and in many different ways. What sets a monument apart from other places is its spectacle-like character that evokes collective social identities and values. Group histories cling to their stones as enduring residues of human experience, much in the way that a family heirloom informs about ancestry. A monument provides both material and psychological structure and form to society, casting social ideals and principles as being naturally true

4  Making sense of monuments within the landscape in which they stand, and transforms private actions and behaviors into movements of the collective public. In this way, a monument represents an emergent nexus of collective mental representations, embodied behavioral practices, and material things. Third, although immutable and immobile, a monument also mediates spatial practice by directing how people move and interact together in space using explicit spatial relationships. Any given monumental palace or fort, temple or tomb offers a commentary about a society; it is an assembled spatial story that creates collective narrative through the process of movement. A pilgrimage, a ritual, a procession—all orient and demark real and imagined boundaries that enable people to “make sense” of things. It is the rendering of meanings into stone, the construction of walls and other architectural elements that formalize movement in durable fashion. The building of monuments casts social ideals and principles as being naturally true, because they become physically codified upon the landscapes in which they stand. Fourth, a monument is intractably linked to the commemorative process—those cultural practices that recall or show respect for a person, event, or idea. Commemoration is contingent upon a place and a time, allowing a monument to represent a medium that carries important messages, urging us to not only remember, but to remember in a certain way. A monument is intentionally constructed to enhance recollection in a fixed and permanent fashion, integrating memories related to the narrative of commemoration, and serving as a spatial anchor that holds firm in the dynamic flow of memory-making. However, because they are static objects, they also have difficulty addressing the multiplicities of memory, the fuzziness of recollection, and the temporal changes in commemorative activities. In sum, every human learns how to merge thought and culture together. Humans literally recast what they learn about culture onto their own cognitive patterns to generate personal meanings. As artificial intelligence expert Jerome Feldman (2006: 3) notes: “From the child’s internal perspective, all social and cultural interaction start as additional [cognitive] inputs that must somehow be understood and incorporated using existing knowledge.” What this means is that the brain, a biological organ made up of neurons and neural-electric pathways, absorbs, carries, and then communicates the practices and values that are known as culture. Decades ago, it was quite difficult to draw the substantive links among thought, material objects, and culture, or to devise adequate scientific methodologies to study such links. However, many of the basic premises and pieces of the cognitive puzzle are now in place so that we might begin to consider how to make sense of monuments.

Cognitive event English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was the first modern scholar to state that the meaning of a material object lies in its

Making sense of monuments  5 relational properties rather than its physical properties. In a passage written in 1920, Whitehead speaks about the ancient Egyptian obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle, gifted to the British government and erected in London in 1878 (Figure 1.2). He states: there is Cleopatra’s Needle. If we define the Needle in a sufficiently abstract manner we can say that it never changes. But a physicist who looks on that part of the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it gets dirtier and is occasionally washed. Thus the question of change in the Needle is a mere matter of definition. The more abstract your definition, the more permanent the Needle. (Whitehead 1920: 174–177) To Whitehead, this monument is more than a stone sitting upright on the Victoria Embankment; it is in fact what he named as an event, a gathering of diversities best described as relationships. “Where does Cleopatra’s Needle begin” he continues, “and where does it end? Is the dirt and soot part of it? Is it a different object when it sheds a molecule or when its surface enters into chemical combination with the acid of the fog?” So with every encounter by a passerby, every changing moment of time, Cleopatra’s Needle is an event that is unfolding, original and newly formed. “There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Whitehead states (1978: 244), “everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity. It is either transmitted from an actual entity in the past, or belongs to the subjective aim of the actual entity to whose concrescence it belongs.” How does a monument influence people? How does it affect the cognitive events that lie behind cultural ideas and behavior? In order to understand monuments, it is important to first digress into cognitive science to address how people mentally conceptualize and process events. Whitehead’s “event” falls best within the framework of cognitive science research called event segmentation—what cognitive psychologist Jeffery Zacks and colleagues describe as the function of human perception that divides continuous experience into discrete parts in order to structure and regulate memory (Kurby and Zacks 2008; Swallow et al. 2009; Zacks 2004; Zacks and Tversky 2001; Zacks et al. 2006, 2007; Zacks and Swallow 2007). In other words, the human brain makes sense of the continuous stream of activity occurring around Cleopatra’s Needle by parsing it into a modest number of meaningful units—units such as the towering obelisk, a person walking by, the fragrance of flowers, swaying tree branches, or the slowly shifting shadow of the Needle in the sunshine. Event segmentation is a powerful cognitive tool because it economizes perceptive input and memory retention by reducing what would normally

6  Making sense of monuments

Figure 1.2 Cleopatra’s Needle, London. Source: Photo © David Holt.

be a continuous influx of activity stimuli to a manageable number of discrete events (Figure 1.3). Although perceptive input is received from all of our senses—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and mechano-receptive— one sensual modality does not necessarily preclude another. The brain sorts these diverse sensory inputs and segments into an event in a similar fashion, by building event-models of any current situation in order to comprehend a narrated event. Segmentation has been identified using neuro-imaging MRI scans to track transient brain wave activity changes as physical and social

Making sense of monuments  7

Figure 1.3 A model of event segmentation. Source: Author drawing.

features or information flow abruptly alter. Thus the brain parses an event into identifiable chucks or subevents, much in the way a novel, television show, or film is divided into chapters or “scenes.” Ever wonder how or why we are able to parse and comprehend a storyline that radically shifts between scenes, skipping around actors, times, places, or even plots? It is because our brains know how to segment an event by identifying boundaries and recombine segmented subevents into larger, meaningful units that become encoded memory, selectively updating event-models if a new experience is incongruent with the current model. Event segmentation is therefore predictive rather than integrative—if we see clouds approaching, we have event-models based upon previous experience that we use to predict whether it will rain or not. This predictive ability has important implications for the long-term memory retention of events, as well as the short-term accessibility of information related to those events. But how do we properly perceive, comprehend, and sort those objects and events of culture from the continuous flow of perceptual information, and then retain and reiterate them in meaningful ways? One idea is that perceptions are organized using schema, a condensed re-description of perceptual experience for the purpose of mapping bodily spatial experience onto cognitive thought. Linguist George Lakoff and his colleagues argue schemas are the building blocks of cognition, emerging in the human mind from our embodied interactions of sensory-perceptual experience (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff and Turner 1989; also see Hampe and Grady 2005; Cöegnarts and Kravanja 2012; Treichler 2007). Schemas build upon the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). Schema are not directly linked to any sensory mode, but are instead “abstract” or “skeletal” concepts, consisting of repeated patterns of embodied experience, “frames” that organize thought. The notions of a “dog” or “walking home” are not really conscious ideas; they are pre-conceptual,

8  Making sense of monuments converting sensory experience into conceptual representation, built from the embodied experiences we acquire before we even learn language. Three relevant schemas pertain best to architectural space and monuments. They are: container/center-periphery, scale/balance, and sourcepath-goal. Container is a fundamental schema consisting of three minimal parts: interior, exterior, and boundary (Figure 1.4a). When we experience a container, we measure the interiority or exteriority of an actual physical or metaphorical amount; things appear in or out of containers such as houses, automobiles, laundry machines, or our mouths, etc. This schema is physically rooted in the experience of the body as a spatial epicenter, and where distance is judged as being peripheral to the body. In this way, container is conjoined and superimposed upon another schema, the center-periphery schema. The container/center-periphery hybrid schema is responsible for the separating of monumental space using inside and out, subject and object, yours and mine, and over and under. Another important schema is scale (Figure 1.4b). It consists of three minimal parts: less than, equal to, and greater than. When we experience a scale, we measure a relative increase or decrease of an actual physical or metaphorical amount, such as snow, houses, cars, a bar of soap, the food on our dinner plate, and other people. For example, when we experience last evening’s snowfall, we cognitively determine if it is larger or smaller compared to previous snowfalls from the week or year before. We measure its scale relative to something else. One of the most important measures of scale relative to monuments is our human body. As we approach a monument we judge its scale in relation to our own body height: taller, bigger, small, shorter, or about the same. Scale is similar and conjoined to the balance schema; the physical experience of the symmetrical distribution on either side of a fulcrum point or central axis, such as a measuring scale or see-saw. The scale/balance hybrid schema is responsible for the physical experience of balance, equality, and symmetry; or conversely, imbalance, inequality, and asymmetry.

Figure 1.4 Examples of schemas relevant to architecture: A. The container/centerperiphery; B. The scale/balance; C. The source-path-goal. Source: Author drawing.

Making sense of monuments  9 Source-path-goal is a complex schema involving physical or metaphorical movement from place to place (Figure 1.4c). It consists of three parts: a starting point or source, a destination or goal, and a series of contiguous spatial points in between the source and goal. When we use source-pathgoal, we identify forward locomotion by people, automobiles, airplanes or other objects, such as a ball that falls off a table and begins to bounce away. We gauge where and how fast this locomotion is occurring. We perceive and organize such concepts in relation to our bodies. As we ride in an automobile, walk up a hill, or use our hand to grasp a cup, we directly experience or perceive movement along a path, sensing the visual changes in the distance and quality of objects around us, feeling movement as the wind brushes our face. Although complex, the source-path-goal schema nonetheless emerges as a coherent whole, similar to a constituted Gestalt experience. The comprehension of the source-path-goal schema requires not only the perception or sensation of locomotion and the “experience” of movement, it is also critical for the conceptualization of time. Only when we have experienced variation in moving fast or slow are we able to categorize the changing nature of both space and time. Schemas appear to be both deployed and constructed during the event segmentation process to aid perception and memory retention (Hard et al. 2006). Consider the experience of parsing the continuous sensual information while visiting the tombstone of a deceased relative (somewhat simplified here for argument’s sake—Figure 1.5). The tombstone is a monument used to commemorate the past, similar in style and function to Cleopatra’s Needle, but, in this case, memorializing the life of a loved one. As a physical object it is nothing more than an upright cut-stone slab inscribed with a suitable epitaph, sitting among countless other tombstones in a cemetery, arrayed in neat rows. However, the perceptual experience of visiting this

Figure 1.5 Event segmentation for the experience of visiting a tomb using relevant architectural mental schemas; this parsing achieves better perceptual success, as well as event-model augmentation/retention. Source: Author drawing.

10  Making sense of monuments tombstone becomes mentally parsed into discrete subevents that are quickly assimilated using the framework schemas. Your mind employs the sourcegoal-path schema to structure spatial movement while approaching the headstone, moving from living place to place of dead, with its repeated visual reminders of death; evergreen trees, religious markers, and other tombstones. The motion and perceptual cueing give you time for contemplation and reflection. Next, you employ the container schema once you have identified your relative’s headstone, gauging the qualities of centrality and interiority. The headstone physically marks the tomb boundary; you are outside, above ground, and in the periphery. Your loved one is inside, below ground, and in the center. These schemas help you properly parse the relationship of you and the deceased: corporeal versus disembodied, animate versus nonliving, and now versus then. You next employ the scale schema to measure the headstone. Is it larger or smaller, opulent or impoverished, more realistic or imprecise than nearby markers? What does this say about the importance of your loved one, both in this life and the next? As you further experience the marker—the weathering of the stone, its worn color, or its inscription of an urn symbol, you might reemploy the source-goal-path schema to measure the temporal distance metaphorically that separates the two of you. A visit to the cemetery was of course unnecessary; you could of course have stayed at home to simply “remember” your relative without the tombstone visitation event. But the segmentation of this event provides you with a more intense experience, increasing the strength and duration of your existing memories by augmenting your event-models with new memory structures associated with your deceased relative. The idea of event segmentation using schemas is important because it articulates how our brains strive to interrelate and internalize certain external processes; how an event or a physical object changes the way we think about an experience. Eventmodels and schemas allow us to conceive of the mind as a holistic system of both biological functions and complex cultural mental functions, such as focused attention, preconceived planning, and intentional memory.

Place making An unknown writer penned the following words in an 1840 issue of London’s The Art-Union, a monthly journal of fine arts, in the hopes of encouraging native architects of the time to design and advance monuments worthy of the British Empire. The editorial states: “who will direct public taste? Who decide[s] on the size, the sentiment, and character of national works … and the necessity of poetry in our public monuments” (The Art-Union, 1840: 17: 90, June 15). This editorial sought to critically “elevate and encourage public taste” through editorializing because they believed that modern British monuments were “unworthy” compared to the efforts of ancient Greece (Figure 1.6). Their overt pleas to imitate the great efforts of the ancient world sharply contrasted with the patron’s sometimes gaudy desires

Making sense of monuments  11

Figure 1.6 Fallen statuary, Abney Park Cemetery, London. Source: Photo © David Holt.

for immortality as the fickle aesthetic values of the time, illustrating the fact that a monument may possess a kaleidoscope of expressed meanings. A monument is a culturally constructed place, a permanent space upon the physical landscape that mediates human experience and memory. A place is what the eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977: 4) refers to as locations of “felt” value, physical spaces where perceived, occupied, and lived meanings are attached. Much has been written in regards to architecture, the built environment, social meaning, and place-making (Pierre Bourdieu 2003; Giddens 1979: 209; Glassie 2000; Goldhagen 2017; Panofsky 1957; Rapoport 1980; Smith 1987; Wilson 1988). As places, monuments provide structure and form to society materially, as well as psychologically. As structured architecture, monuments give personal relationships precise spatial definitions, making people’s lives more explicit, and helping to direct human activities. The idea of a monument being a cultural place is best articulated by French social theorist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991: 221; 1996),3 best known for his investigation of social spatial conventions, who describes monumentality as a “singular spatial representation of collective identity” negotiated through discourse between the absolute realm of physical space (natural locations of topography or territory) and the abstract realms of culture (distinct socially encoded topographies or mental spatializations). The range and breadth of his intellectual accomplishments are still being evaluated (see the summary provided by Bower 2017: 244; Soja 1996). Lefebvre conceptualized a three-fold dialectic of space: (1) an ideal or perceived notion of space; (2) a planned or conceptual spatial representation; and (3) actual used or lived places (Figure 1.7). Perceived space refers

12  Making sense of monuments

Figure 1.7 Henri Lefebvre’s triad of a social space. Source: Author drawing.

to the physical form of space, both a medium and outcome of human activity. It is the physical phenomena of Cartesian geographies and quantitative physical descriptions (Soja 1996: 66), the conceptual foundation of “positivist” spatial science. Conceptual space is an imposed abstract spatial or mental template (designed by scientists, urban planners, engineers, or priestly architects) creating and implementing formal systems of spatial grammars that closely control codes of spatial knowledge. It is the primary realm of ideational thought and vision, created and conceived as codes of spatial knowledge. Lived space is distinct from perceived or conceived spaces because it is affective bodily practice; the thinking, walking, talking, and observing of space in which private experiences are expropriated into space and spatial templates are appropriated back into private experience. Lefebvre’s triad of space describes the cognitive outcome of creating “place” and extending culture out into the physical world—merging abstract to absolute levels of existence that are sometimes contradictory or sometimes corresponding.4 The result is a place that is susceptible to strategic choice and thus politically charged, polarized at any particular moment towards one of the three primary spatial configurations, crystallized into formal and institutionalized places of meaning. Cognitive scientists and functional linguists would model Tuan’s locations of “felt” value, or Lefebvre’s “lived” place using the concept of mental space (also referred to as a conscious analog, domain, or a cognitive map). A mental space represents the gathered sum of the physical world around us, and is a cognitive entity or mental representation that involves meaning construction (Fauconnier 1994, Fauconnier and Sweetser 1996; Fauconnier and Turner 1997, 2002; Jackendorff 1997; Nehaniv 1999; for a unique perspective on mental spaces also see Jaynes 1977). Mental spaces are used by cognitive linguists to analyze how intrinsic conceptual thought is juxtaposed from one mental domain to another, or how grammatical usage organizes background knowledge to trigger a mental “place” or “frame.” Mental spaces

Making sense of monuments  13 are higher level meanings constructed in the brain. As the cognitive linguists Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (1996: 11) note: The dynamics of mental space construction and space linking are technically abstract … but set up, structured, and linked under pressure from grammar context, and culture. The effect is to create a network of space though which we move as discourse unfolds. A mental space is composed of lower-order mental structures such as schemas and other vital relations such as spatial-cognitive sequences, each operating simultaneously as a single integrated unit (Figure 1.8). For example, visiting a loved one’s tomb is a mental space consisting of a series of spatial-cognitive sequences formulated by schemas of movement, force, and balance; walking through the cemetery, centering perception upon the headstone, and measuring how large the headstone is. A representative mental space is involved in any major undertaking we attend to, and is thus an analog of the real world, a reflective mental construct, a model, or pointto-point replica of representation consisting of subjective “experiences,” “pictures,” schemas, and other event relations.5 They are often a potpourri of fiction and fact, combining experiences, memories, and senses; some bits are based upon subjective ideas, others are based upon real and perceived Euclidian distance and directions. But a mental space does not match physical reality; it is an impoverished representation, never truly able to express the entirety of the world around us, making it more of a relationship of analogy or a schematic map of the real world.

Figure 1.8 The mental space is a cognitive analog of the physical world. Source: Author drawing.

14  Making sense of monuments But how are traits of a physical space cognitively translated to a mental space? Such progressions are not haphazard but in fact follow a highly structured cognitive process called cross-domain mapping, best explained by the essential linguistic tool for establishing relations: the metaphor. The metaphor is a fundamental trope of rhetoric, representing a unique linguistic expression (a word or phrase) that uses analogy or substitutions in speech (summaries include Büring 2005; Donald 2001: 279; Feldman 2006: 199; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Sfard 1994; and Tilley 1999; for a discussion on primary metaphors see Grady 1996). Language overflows with various types of metaphorical references; terms such as “time is money,” “head start,” and “give me a hand” are routine conversational turns. Such literal illusions help overcome the inherent problems of relating a world of words to the world of ideas by offering a simple and expeditious way of communicating ideas among socialized individuals in the same culture.6 The metaphor is more than just a linguistic trope. It also refers to any form of associative learning, where familiar visual, auditory, tactile, or proprioceptive understandings are transferred into abstract concepts. Whenever we make sense of the world, metaphors enhance our ability to comprehend it. For example, the human body is a common explicator; where we physically enter someone’s house, its surroundings might make us feel comforted and “at home.” The body is often used to provide understanding to the world around us: the “head of government,” the “face of a clock,” the “eye of a storm,” the “arm of the law,” and the “foot of a table.” By elucidating the parts of a body, we map and describe unfamiliar objects or events, familiarizing and then incorporating them into our broader sphere of understanding. Another common metaphorical connection is using space to describe time: “the longest yard,” “time travel,” “at this second,” or “on Monday.” Metaphors generate, extend, and change our verbal lexicon, becoming a means of perception rather than a simple tool of communication. In this way, they become potent weapons in our cultural arsenal to convey ideas and socially express ourselves. Material objects likewise evoke metaphors; an object’s physical and aesthetic qualities function as do the sounds and signs of language. As the eminent anthropologist Henry Glassie (1999: 46–47) notes: Material culture is as true to the mind, as dear to the heart, as language, and what is more, it reports thoughts and actions that resist verbal formulation. Like a story, an artifact is a text, a display of form and a vehicle for meaning. Both stories and artifacts arise out of concentration, both are created in time and shaped to cultural pattern, but they differ in apprehension. The story belongs to temporal experience.

Making sense of monuments  15 It moves in one direction, accumulating associations sequentially. The artifact belongs to spatial experience. It unfolds in all directions at once, embracing contradictions in simultaneity, and opening multiple routes to significance. Glassie’s point is noteworthy. Objects encode meaning in a more generalized and fuzzy way than words, replacing verbal precision for the expansiveness of space and the longevity of the material world (especially for the archaeologist, see Buchli 2002; Chilton 1999; Christiansen 1995; Tilley 1999). Objects become “emblematic,” similar to gestures, body postures, and graphic depictions that serve as non-verbal communication, invoking visual responses much in the way body gestures do, although their physical substance allows them to sit still for us so that we may carefully scrutinize and retrace meanings, much in the way textual writing preserves speech (although writing systems represent a special case of unifying visual and verbal representation).7 Archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1999: 263–264) concurs that the power of an object transcends mere words. He refers to objects as solid metaphors, communicating meanings immediately, because they are concrete and spatial, and create meaning in two ways: (1) internal or physical quality; and (2) biographical or temporal context.8 Internal qualities include shape, form, texture, and color, traits that are analogically similar (or dissimilar) to another object, such as the way in which a toy doll analogizes a human, complete with hair and smiling mouth. An object’s biography is also important, and includes biographical information such as an object’s genealogy, its manufacture, its function, its ownership, its movement from place to place, and how it may have been discarded, all binding it to social perception (Godson and Marshall 1999; Langness 1965; Kopytoff 1986; and Tilley 1999). The diamond ring that is a family heirloom is simply metal and stone, yet the phases of its use are contextually bound to social interaction and social relationships. Its history makes it dynamic and active, intersecting with human lives and human experience, reproducing and transforming the social contexts in which it is employed. But how do monuments metaphorically cross-map mental spaces? How does our brain strive to interrelate and internalize the physicality of space? How does a house or a tomb change the way we think about the world around us? Consider for a moment the paper map my young son creates after we visit the cemetery (Figure 1.9). As the map-maker, he first crossmaps multiple meanings by drawing various graphic symbols as landmarks upon paper—a meandering line tracing the path of movement through the cemetery, a rectangle for a headstone, and a small flower marking the urn. He does this by first using two contributing models for his mental space of our journey: the physical world of the cemetery as well as a specific mental space filled with his artistic imagery. By integrating these two contributing

16  Making sense of monuments

Figure 1.9 The conceptual path of making and reading a map. Source: Author drawing.

spaces, he creates a new emergent structure independent of either physical space or imagery. This is called conceptual integration, the mental process of creating a new blended mental space from the existing elements of at least two contributing spaces (Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Nehaniv 1999). A verbal description of this process would be: “the many things in the cemetery are similar to the different symbols on this map.” After he hands me his completed map, I am then able to structure my own bodily and cognitive experience by using his piece of paper to direct my thinking. For me, the map-reader, the map becomes the known domain, not his mental map or the physical world. I scrutinize his drawing to cross-map his symbols onto my own mental space that represents our journey. My verbal metaphor is: “[t]he symbols on my son’s map are like places in a cemetery.” My son’s map may not communicate unerringly; it may be wholly unreadable if the context of the cemetery is not known, or if the spatial precision is not accurate. Although this new space is a model of the physical real world, it is still one step removed. My ability to translate this map likewise diminishes because of this more distant relationship to the real world. Without a sense of context I may have no idea what the meander or rectangle represent. In fact, the only sign on his map that I might able to make sense of is his scrawled “flower,” which exists already in my own symbolic lexicon as a sign of beauty, tranquility, or love. Place-bound experiences establish the framework upon which we build our identity and invoke our sense of self. Each place serves as an extension of our cultural selves, half of it existing in the physical world, the other half residing as a manifestation inside our heads. Thus, when a church or temple stirs our emotions, when a tombstone reminds us of our childhoods,

Making sense of monuments  17 or a memorial tells us a tale of a powerful king, it is only because our culture makes it so. Human culture is greatly diminished without places such as monuments; while monuments, without culture, remain inanimate and static spaces, mute and lifeless.

Spatial sequencing The French philosopher, Charles Magloire Bénard, while solemnly pondering the relationship between mental thought and monuments, notes that: the eye passes over objects which are there for their own sake, designed only to strike the imagination by their colossal aspect and their enigmatic sense, not to serve as a dwelling for a god, and as a place of assemblage for his worshipers … You walk on into the midst of those human works, mute symbols which remind you of divine things … books of stone as it were, leaves of a mysterious book. (Bénard 1867: 172) He found this relationship between thought and object to be a complex story relying upon the laws of scale and geometrical proportion to convey ideas (Figure 1.10). From event segmentation using schemas, to placemaking using mental spaces and blended metaphors—monuments exist simultaneously in our heads and the physical world. Cognition represents a collaboration between the mind, the body, and the environment. We come to know a monument (or art, or music, or language) by becoming one with it—and we become one with it through the practice of abduction or metaphor. Knowing a monument, therefore, is a process; it is not a thing that we are able to grasp or tuck away. The cognitive process of making sense of a monument is known as spatial sequencing. Spatial sequencing assumes that any architectural space is a series of linked spatial points that offer structure and information about its designed mental space (Barrie 1996: 6–7, 45–46; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Morreti 1974; Tschumi 1996: 152–168). Any building may be analyzed and parsed into a series of fundamental architectural elements, such as rooms, columns, doorways, and halls. Taken as a whole, such an architectural space is the synchronized sum of its elements combined with the relative location and orientation of these elements to one another. However, an architectural space is nearly always perceived sequentially one element at a time, using ambulatory or pedestrian movement in and around that space. A visitor effectively perceives and interprets each element of a space using spatial-cognitive sequences, examined in terms of their physical and symbolic characteristics. In this way, a monumental space becomes a powerful and memorable place that sequences aesthetic understanding and meaning. Architect Bernard Tschumi (1996: 142–151) argues that the formal relevance of an architectural sequence cannot be dislocated from the event’s

Figure 1.10 Valley temple of Menkaure, Giza, Egypt (circa 1860–1900). Source: Miscellaneous Items in High Demand Collection / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-ppmsca-04943.

Making sense of monuments  19 that “take place” within it: “ritual-architectural events” that bring people and buildings into active interaction (cf. Jones 2000). The meaning of an architectural sequence depends upon the inter-relationship between architectural form, the events that occur there, and pedestrian movement. The sequence itself is cumulative, a group of juxtaposed architectural elements or “frames” where each subsequent element is assembled upon the memory of the preceding element until a path of events is constructed. In this way, each pathway sequence serves as an integrated spatial-cognitive metaphor, where the connectedness and direction of this sequence are just as critical to meaning as the emergence of any particular element. While the architect employs geometric design to assemble the full sequence of elements and envision the movement required for spatial experience, the pedestrian visitor is less able to scrutinize the entire sequence and instead structures each element sequentially, generating a horizon of meaning that becomes increasingly evident with each successive movement. The principle way by which we explore a monumental space is through spatial comparison. By situating ourselves before or within a monument and its assorted architectural elements, we are able to determine the size, proportion, inclusivity, and relationship of its elements to one another. Typically, we first experience a clear delineation of entry by crossing a threshold which, once traversed, permits access to a full sequence of defined spaces and architectural elements. Vision is the primary sense by which we employ spatial-cognitive sequences to perceive and interpret these elements, although the other modalities such as auditory and mechanosensation are by no means excluded (Fontijn 2007; Frieman and Gillings 2007; Insoll 2009; Watson 2001; Whitmore 2006). The echo of footfalls, the reverberation of voice, the textured feel of stones or walls, the smells of an enclosed room all contribute to enrich an architectural experience. As a monument is encountered, we identify contexts that are known to us, and try to make sense of unrecognizable ones by fitting them into what is already familiar. We do so by metaphorically blending and cross-mapping the experience from one domain to another, sorting, processing, and converting these elements into meanings. It is time now to detail exactly how to make sense of monuments using three related spatial-cognitive metaphors that are schematically generated and metaphorically mapped as we contour an architectural place: 1. Metaphors of time 2. Metaphors of movement 3. Metaphors of scale These spatial-cognitive metaphors are graphically depicted in Figure 1.11. For any given monument, these metaphors sequentially mold our experiences and perceptions into understanding, spatially cross-mapping the concepts of “contained,” “anchored,” and “proximal” from one cognitive domain to

20  Making sense of monuments

Figure 1.11 Three primary spatial-cognitive metaphors relevant to monuments. Source: Author drawing.

another. These three spatial-cognitive metaphors are by no means exclusive, nor do they suggest anything special about a monument when operating alone. Yet each describes an essential part of making sense of a monumental encounter, operating simultaneously and in tandem with one another to provide specific clues as to the meaning of monuments. Metaphors of time Consider a monument of your own choosing; maybe a headstone, maybe a civic memorial, or maybe a famous archaeological site. Imagine moving towards it, standing next to or inside it, seeing and touching its stones or concrete, sensing your spatial relation to the monument itself. As you do this, you are evoking our first spatial-cognitive contour, that of time, which employs the cognitive schema of container/center-periphery and sourcepath-goal as perceptual frameworks for comparing and contrasting the proximity of this monument relative to the present. In this way, a monument is built to spatially sequence time, serving as a vessel of memory that drifts upon the symbolic sea of human cognitive capacity. The power of this temporal vessel arises from its status as a cultural place, belonging simultaneously to both the present and the past. Its architectural features direct human activity, providing the spatial foci around which social memory condenses and histories are constructed. How does monumental architecture enhance temporal reasoning? First, the human brain is fuzzy when processing time. Unlike our ability to process movement or space, the brain lacks distinct temporal modalities, allowing our perception of time to be warped by factors such as mental focus,

Making sense of monuments  21 memory, motivation, emotions, and more (Lakoff 1993: 218; Kranjec and Chatterjee 2010; Matlock et al. 2010). The brain therefore uses space as an aid to perceive time because it is easier to cognitively process, given the body’s natural sensory-motor modalities to segment location and movement. Yet, because of the imprecision of temporal experience, embodied or psychological time does not always correspond with chronological time (Barrie 1996: 49–50; Lövgren et al. 2010). Time seems to slow down with perceived unfamiliarity, life-threatening situations, pain, or new stimuli. Time also speeds up with familiarity and routine activities. For example, time moves slowly as a youth because everything is new and foreign, a potpourri of experiences. But as we mature, time moves faster, blurring years together because new experiences lessen and become monotonous. As the physicist Albert Einstein once quipped: “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity” (New York Times, March 15 1929, Page 3, Column 3). A monument possesses and offers spatial connections that are novel and unfamiliar, giving our brains new stimuli to experience, encouraging a sense of temporal change as the mind employs spatial-cognitive metaphors to metaphorically articulate and structure it. A monument encourages a visitor to move in unfamiliar ways, examine architectural elements that are novel, and prolong their ambulatory experience. The result is a spatial blending or cross-mapping of time that uses the container/center-periphery and sourcepath-goal schemas to sequence and segment temporal perception. The container schema segments time into proximal and distal, where the contours of architecture and the built environment create temporal relevance: past/ present, past/future, or present/future (see Figure 1.11a). By crossing a monumental threshold, such as a tomb entrance, we figuratively crossover into a different time—from exterior to interior, from here to there, and from the present to the past. The source-path-goal schema also metaphors time, partitioning a linear spatial path into temporal segments of past, present, and future. Movement from a source towards a goal represents temporal duration and, as Catherine Bell (1992: 109–110) notes, “it temporally structures a space-time environment through a series of physical movements … thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing.” The spatial-cognitive metaphors of a monument assist in the transfer and validation of social memory, collective recollections and social repetition that supplant individual beliefs and remembrances (see Connerton 1989; Halbwachs 1980; Luhmann 1997; Nora 1989; Ricoeur 2004). They encourage us to collectively remember some things, but also to forget others (Bonder 2009; Boric 2010; Wilkie and Farnsworth 2005; Sherlock 2008; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003).9 The spatial-cognitive metaphors of monumental time follow two tangents. The first tangent is the prospective memories intended to message subsequent generations, where the construction

22  Making sense of monuments and recursive use of a monument facilitates the transference of worthy ideas and collective experience, making society conscious of itself, and reaffirming social identity and mutual affinity (see Assmann 1992). All levels of society employ prospective memory—from families to communities and social groups. The second tangent is the retrospective memories intended to revise or “forget” the past, where the decay or desecration of a monument rearranges or reconstitutes what is remembered (Bradley 2003; Forty and Küchler 1999; Nelson and Olin 2003). Monuments are prime targets for retrospective interpretation because their immutability as vehicles of remembrance make them vulnerable to the spasmodic episodes of iconoclasm that commonly occur during social unrest. Thus, those in positions of social power, the builders and users of monuments, often hegemonically control collective memory, signifying that “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind—manipulating the past in order to mold the present” (Kammen 1991: 51). Monuments communicate different temporal rhythms or scales that closely correspond to the ways in which people experience them. Cultural time is not absolute nor strictly linear, but may instead be more subjective and perceived as cyclical flow or duration. In this view, the past represents accumulated strata of social practices that embed the present, just as the present may embed the future (Foucault 1982). Past ideas, expressed as architectural contouring, persist and intrude into the present, modifying or shaping the context of the present into newly emergent realities. A number of noteworthy scholars have contributed to the theory of how places generate culturally subjective time (e.g., Foucault and Miskowiec 1986; Holloway 2003; Luciano 2007; Kieckheffer 2004: 21; Knott 2005; Shiner 1972; Smith 1987). Most notable are the frameworks of the co-present (St. Clair and William 2008); the semantics of historical time (Koselleck 2000, 2004), time perspectivism (Lucas 2005), and culturally determined temporal systems (Fabian 2014). I identify three types of monumental time, each influencing the present in different (and perhaps overlapping) ways: 1. Ancestral time 2. Sacred time 3. God (or heroic) time The most pervasive frame of temporal reference is ancestral time, where chronology is measured generationally, juxtaposing a familial past with an inherited present, structuring meanings into a simple past/present dichotomy following the logic of the container schema. Ancestral time allows for a simple past/present dichotomy, or a sequential chronological order stretching back generationally (e.g., parents, grandparents). Tombstones or family burials best epitomize ancestral time, contouring familial information

Making sense of monuments  23 into expressions of ancestral time. A second temporal scale is sacred time, where the temporal characteristics of a particular ritual are delineated or recreated. Sacred time represents “time out of time,” when the sense of the sacred interposes the experiences of ordinary time (see Eliade 1959). Religious sanctuaries or places of worship are examples of monuments that mark and organize the moments of sacred time. The last frame of temporal reference is god time or heroic time, a framework that marks the unknown and instantaneous mythical events of the universe, representing or tracking origin myths or the movements and actions of a god or hero (see Campbell 1949). Monuments that track god time may be designed to follow celestial agents such as the sun, moon, and stars—proxies of the gods. Stonehenge or Machu Picchu are examples of monuments build as celestial calendars to track god time. The success of any prospective or retrospective memory, and the efficacy of any level of temporal scale, is dependent upon how remembrance creates an immediate reaction, how meanings are affected in the present moment to stimulate behavior. As historian Walter Benjamin (1969: 255) writes, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’ … It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” For Benjamin, the power of both history and collective cultural memory lies in the immediacy of a memory. This is what I refer to as the power of the moment, an important spark of insight beyond the routine, when the past merges with the present, a critical merger of social meanings. For example, the experience of watching the transits and standstills of the sun or moon powerfully conveys the link between the proximal present with the distal past, creating emotion as time literally stands still. In an interesting experiment, archaeologist Daniel Brown (2015) captured some of the intense emotional responses of individuals who were offered opportunities to observe celestial events within some ancient British Neolithic stone rings; their descriptions included the phrases “fantastic,” “magical,” “aware,” and “one with the universe.” This power of the moment ultimately derives its potency through a monument itself; orchestrated movement, concentrated observance, relational perspective, and physical representation. Monuments twist and mold our memories into new meanings between existing representations, meanings that are both intentional and novel. Both prospective and retrospective social memories vie for the attention of the visitor; both struggle to supplant each other; and both settle into an uneasy coexistence, simultaneously communicating disparate and perhaps conflicting messages. Metaphors of movement In addition to time, a monument also mediates spatial practice by directing how people move through and interact with one another. The permanent nature of a monument functions much like an anchor of a ship, holding fast in the seas of space and time, connecting and overseeing human activity,

24  Making sense of monuments serving as a landmark, encouraging visitation. As a fixture upon the landscape, a monument is an assembled spatial story that creates collective narratives through the process of journeying, movements that evoke the cognitive schema of source-path-goal (depicted in Figure 1.11b). A pilgrimage, a ritual, a procession—all orient and demark real and imagined places, as well as those boundaries and transitions that enable people to “make sense” of things. Three types of monumental movements exist: 1. Encoding 2. Performance 3. Wayfinding Encoding is the act of physical construction that captures and records a history. It is the rendering of meanings into stone, the construction of walls and other architectural elements that formalize movement in durable fashion. The building of a monument casts social ideals and principles as being naturally true because they become physically codified upon the landscape in which they stand. Encoding employs space in a very unique way to forge the consciousness and movements of the collective public. The more complex the architectural plan, the larger the effort to devise a collective vision and encode symbolism. Physical construction uses space to create a public consciousness very different from other communal activities. Monuments as “space” create metaphorical underpinnings of social life by virtue of a movement of substitutions, casting social ideals and principles as being naturally true within the landscape in which they stand, transforming the private into actions and movements of the collective public. The second monumental movement is performance. Performance includes the actions of public spectacle; the funeral processions, sacrificial rituals, and commemorative ceremonies that reconstruct spatial history (see DeMarrais 2014). It is the movement through and the use of different portions of a codified monument that enacts shared social practices to broadly forge relationships, ideas, and values among people. The durable architecture and design continuity of a monument conveys a sense of permanence in the phenomenology of everyday life not found in other places (Gilibert 2011; Inomata and Coben 2006; Insoll 2009). Because of the interactive and collective nature of monumental performance, monuments have been referred to by archaeologists David Turnbull and Trevor Watkins as “theaters of knowledge” or “theaters of memory,” merging place, art, and collective social action (Turnbull 2002; Watkins 2004a, b, 2012). Religious Studies scholar Catherine Bell (1992: 98–99), in her important study of ritual, likewise notes the link between space and ritualized performance movements: through a series of physical movements ritual practices spatially and temporally construct an environment organized according to schemes

Making sense of monuments  25 of privileged oppositions. The construction of this environment and the activities within it simultaneously work to impress these schemes upon the bodies of participants. Thus, performance structures space into theatrical focal points of social action while space communicates and influences movement. Architect Thomas Barrie (1996) identifies a set of movement types by the processional path designed by its architecture. An axial path is one that moves the procession progressively closer to the sacred, crossing sanctified thresholds and boundaries yet terminating directly at the goal of the sanctum sanctorum, the holiest of places. A split path has two or more divergent pathways that eventually merge near the goal. A radial path has a series of pathways that converge to a center point from several directions simultaneously. The grid path has direct termination points, or several points at once. The circumambulating path maneuvers around a goal in a circular fashion, representing a sacred journey with no specific termination point. The segmented path deliberately twists and turns, symbolic of the decisions and trials of those who follow its symbolic or spiritual journey. The third monumental movement is wayfinding. Wayfinding is movement that uses spatial information to orient and navigate the individual within and between places (see Turnbull 2002). It proceeds along paths of observation and integrates knowledge laterally rather than vertically, constructing spatial stories and forms of narrative understanding that proceed from a part to a whole (Arthur and Passini 1992; Ingold 2000: 229; Lefebvre 1991: 225; Tilley 1994: 28; Weisman 1979). Social actions such as pilgrimages, journeying, and other motions in and around a monument, are wayfinding movements that convey meanings by crossing thresholds, experiencing geometric principles, identifying landmarks, or mapping relationships (Lynch 1960; Unwin 2003: 197–201). One particularly potent mode of wayfinding includes a category of monuments built as emergent architectural analogs that track skyscapes and celestial movements; such places highlight the movement of celestial bodies around the monument itself to link the earth to the sky and the physical realm to the spiritual realm. The monumental analoging of skyscapes and celestial structures took various forms, such as monoliths, ziggurats, pyramids, temples, churches, and kivas. The defining element with such monuments is to align their features with the night sky or the sunrise or sunset (Brown 2015; Penprase 2010: 189–227; Silva and Campion 2015). Wayfinding engages fundamentally different meanings of the collective than other types of movement. It creates textures rather than text, generating spatial anchors rather than spatial networks, conveying meanings that are acted out and experienced rather than read. The wayfinding itself become localities to which attention is drawn through movement. For Lefebvre, movements such as wayfinding evoke the processes of displacement and condensation (Lefebvre 1991: 225). Displacement involves a movement from a part to a whole, a process

26  Making sense of monuments called metonymy, usually within a single domain. Condensation involves substitution, similarity, and metaphor to communicate value. A palatial throne room becomes a “seat” of royal power around which politics ebbs and flows. A sacred altar becomes a “fulcrum” for uncritical devotees. A burial mound is a “house” of the dead for mourners. A monolith becomes an “anchor” for moving celestial bodies that evoke distinct emotional experiences for those who observe. In sum, movements of monumental public action are powerful expressions of collective thought. Seeing a monument from a distance is one thing, walking its paths and touching its warm stones is quite another. A pilgrimage, a ritual, an offering—these represent social actions or “movements” in and around monumental spaces, movements that generate answers to those who cross the threshold—exploring and experiencing geometric principles, deciphering the cultural symbols. The spatial layout and geometry of a cathedral, administrative building, or war memorial each create different movements and orchestrations that generate collective thought. These may be movements of location, such as its celestial orientation or territorial boundary—or movements of certain social groups, such as rulers, priests, or war veterans—or even movements of public spectacle, such as funeral processions, sacrificial rituals, or commemorative parades. Such public movements and orchestrations enable us to “make sense” of things. Metaphors of scale Consider a monument of your own choosing; maybe a headstone, maybe a historical monument, or maybe a famous archaeological site. Imagine moving towards it, standing next to it or inside it, seeing and touching its stones or concrete, sensing your spatial relation to the monument itself. As you do this you are evoking our third spatial-cognitive metaphor, the metaphor of scale that employs the cognitive schema of scale/balance as a perceptive framework to compare and contrast the size of this monument relative to other things, either our own human body or other architectural structures. The structure of scale is shown in Figure 1.11c. While not all monuments are overtly grandiose in a fundamental sense, often their very size and scale sets them apart from other things. These objects are what philosopher Immanuel Kant refers to as “absolutely large” or “sublime;” what philosopher Jacques Derrida calls “overspill,” and Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas refers to as “bigness” (see, respectively: Kant 1781: 109; Derrida 1987: 125–126; Koolhaas 1998). Monuments may be larger than necessary to facilitate function and thereby convey social messages above simple aesthetics or artistic quality, superseding all convention and blotting out everything in their shadow. Bigness ruptures, subsumes, or eradicates any associative meanings, imposing its own structures through the sheer physical presence of engulfing, imposing, and overriding. The challenge is that a monument that approaches the gigantic must be properly

Making sense of monuments  27 designed to be spatially autonomous, sublime in its bigness, rather than fragmented in both architectural layout and therefore in its cognitive messaging (Marcos 2009). Metaphors of the sublime, bigness, or scale stem from two viewpoints: (1) an essentialist view of size; and (2) a nominalist view of scale. While both arguments seem to be at odds with one another, they actually juxtapose together in complementary fashion. The viewpoint of monumental size is essentially behaviorist, and argues that monuments are blunt expressions of social power. This means that the larger the monument, the greater the amount of energy and technology harnessed and controlled. Archaeologist Bruce Trigger (1990) observes that many large and impressive monuments around the world lack any basic utilitarian function, documenting a crosscultural ideological and behavioral trend of conspicuous consumption, the flaunting of resources above and beyond the basic needs of survival, and deviation from normal human conduct (see Abrams 1994; Moore 1996; Smil 2008; Wier 1996; and my own work: Kolb et al. 1994; Kolb 1997; Kolb and Snead 1997). Conspicuous consumption is a common strategy social leaders employ to mask the unequal distribution of resources, drawing attention and acknowledgement to those who use it. It is measured by examining the labor kinetics allocated to monumental construction, such as measures of area, volume of stone, or time of construction. While labor allocation is one facet of monumentality, it offers materialists a basic technique of evaluation, and if additional textual or contextual information is available, the explanatory power of labor becomes particularly robust. The viewpoint of monumental scale, on the other hand, argues that monumentality is more of a qualitative measure contextually established as a means of correspondence, relating the known to the unknown, the familiar to the unfamiliar. The best argument for scalar nominalism comes from Henri Lefebvre’s (1991: 174) discussions of space, where he notes that the most practical basis for understanding the outside world initially departs from our most important point of reference: the human body. The human body and its anatomy is the standard scale by which we measure and perceive social space. We intentionally extend our bodily experiences to interact with the world, discerning differences through the many spatial perceptions that we absorb, such as right and left, symmetry and asymmetry, and inside and outside. The bodily perception of the world has now received considerable scholarly attention.10 However, little theoretical interest has focused upon the scalar relationship between objects and body. One of the most cogent discussions of objects and scale comes from the literary theorist Susan Stewart, who focuses on two classes of meaning: (1) the miniature; and (2) the gigantic. Both generate meanings by narrating human bodily experience, using the primary position of our own body to perceive scale. The miniature, according to Stewart (1993: 60) is a metaphor for interiority, the process of imitation, the structure of memory, and the invocation of the self.11

28  Making sense of monuments A miniature may be held in the hand—such as a child’s toy or a souvenir of nostalgia—disassociating the scale of the hand that holds it, shifting our bodily perspective to a larger and undifferentiated scale. With the miniature we create an absolute universe represented in absolute scale. We generate meanings and history that are intimate and personal, focusing upon a personal space that is protected from contamination, easily manipulated, transcendent, and god-like. In contrast, Stewart (1993: 60) views the gigantic as the antithesis of the miniature, a metaphor for exteriority, an exaggeration of scale, and the lived relation to nature and landscape: Just as the miniature presents us with an analogical mode of thought, a mode which matches world within world, so does the gigantic present an analogical mode of thought, world without world. Both involve the selection of elements that will be transformed and displayed in an exaggerated relation to the social construction of reality. But while the miniature represents a mental world of proportion, control, and balance, the gigantic presents a physical world of disorder and disproportion. The gigantic, therefore, takes the scale of distanced perception, superfluous and exaggerated, a cultural place or lived space. Unlike the totality of the miniature, the gigantic minimizes the social role of the observer, prohibiting the vision of the whole, consuming the body much in the same way we are consumed by nature or history. The gigantic disassociates our bodily perspective to a small and minute scale. It envelops and surrounds us with its contours, exaggerates causality and process, and exposes every detail to examination and scrutiny. Gigantisms, such as monuments, generate history and meaning that are grandiose and communal. They embellish the laws of physical space to force specific meanings, temporarily interrupting and obliterating any existing spatial perceptions an observer might be experiencing, overpowering one’s knowledge of anatomy. Our fundamental relationship to the gigantic is similar to how we perceive the “cultural” landscape that surrounds us (see Sauer 1925), a humanized environment that evokes concepts of memory, history, cultural image, social process, and phenomenological experience (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Campana and Piro 2008; Causey 2003; Snead 2008). One particularly fruitful area of debate has been the monumental landscape of Neolithic Britain (Bender 1998; Bradley 1993, 2008; Edmonds 1999; Hill 2008; Nash 1997; Scarre 2002; Thomas 1996; Tilley 1994; Worthington 2004). We journey around and through the gigantic of both the natural environment and the built landscape in the same way; they do not move through us. Spaces of the gigantic draw together and integrate the natural and cultural as a framework for

Making sense of monuments  29 articulating experience, astonishing and confronting the viewer with an inspirational display of scale. Unfortunately, the subjectivity of bodily experience presents methodological obstacles for understanding ancient monuments (Brück 1998: 26; Chapman and Gearey 2000; Darvill 1999; Fleming 1999; Scarre 2002: 6). The corrosive powers of time collapse or obliterate monuments, while spatial experience is somewhat culturally subjective, making it difficult to rely on size and scale alone. Because of this, it becomes important to juxtapose the monument as an abstract experience and as an essential relation; scalar experience representing sublime meaning and a social dialogue or map of human activity, yet essential size representing what is important because people react to a monument’s colossal size in roughly the same fashion. How else can we explain the constant use of large monuments throughout the world? The spatial-cognitive contour of scale shapes ordinary context into extraordinary practice because, as Stewart (1993:71) notes, “both the miniature and the gigantic may be described through metaphors of containment—the miniature as contained, the gigantic as container.”

Commemoration The gentleman Robert Brooke (Brooke 1780, II: 44) in a 1780 eulogium dedicated to the renowned 18th century English navigator and seaman Captain James Cook, praised him with the following words: The ocean may be his grave, but the whole globe is his monument! His circumnavigating tracks have marked and have measured it almost thrice round in a curious variety of mazes and meanders; and I hope that the galaxy will be traced with his surer pilotage on high. Born with few social privileges, Cook died as one of history’s most renowned maritime explorers and, as such, was memorialized with the patriotic fervor of an enamored nation. Brooke’s imagery captures the essence of the many acclamations and tributes that lamented the loss of this brave and intrepid emissary of Western Civilization. Proclaiming the globe as a monument is a bit dramatic, but it does illustrate how commemoration serves a fundamental role in the monumentalization process. One bright and early Sunday morning I too commemorated Captain Cook at a much less pretentious monument. This monument is a simple plaque of carved marble that is now submerged in the shallows of Kealakekua Bay, on the island of Hawai’i. It is a difficult place to find, requiring a four-mile hike along a meandering trail down the steep hills surrounding the bay, used more frequently by feral pigs than people. My trek required the tempo of a forced march; it was my final day of an extended research project in the area, and I was scheduled to depart for the airport in three hours. My wife and young daughter prudently declined my offer of an early morning

30  Making sense of monuments hike and were resting soundly in our hotel room. The sunrise was striking that morning—the vegetation lush and verdant from the winter rains, the ocean sparkling blue. I walked at a brisk pace, paying more attention to the beckoning ocean rather than the trail before me. I was suddenly startled by a family of feral pigs wandering as well, who paused for a moment to eye me skeptically, disappearing into the nearby brush with loud snorts. As I approached the shoreline I began to anxiously comb the shallows for the submerged granite marker, difficult to locate since it was only visible at low tide. I quickly stripped off my boots after finally spotting it, and waded out into the water (Figure 1.12). Finally satisfied, I turned to enjoy a brief interlude—taking in the smoothness of the plaque beneath my feet, the luxuriant green shoreline, and the sunbeams dancing in the blue waters of Kealakekua Bay. It was here that Cook was struck down and killed in an argument and subsequent scuffle with local Hawai’ians. Under the surf below me the plaque read: “Near this spot Cap. James Cook met his death, February 14, 1779.” This encounter underscores the fundamental relationship that exists between monuments, space and time. No matter what preconceived memories or ideas we possess, any direct physical encounter with a monument— even the simplest slab of stone—will envelop us with an onrush of sudden realizations. Through direct bodily experience, we are forced to come to terms with new meanings. Perhaps we seek out a monument for reassurance—to reinforce memory or strengthen an existing meaning. At other times we need fresh dialogue, an active challenge for our known preconceptions and memories. In either case, we seek to create a transcendent vision of the past, known only through embodiment. So no matter what preconceptions we might possess regarding Captain Cook, whether as emissary of

Figure 1.12 Death marker dedicated to Captain James Cook Kealakekua Bay, Hawai’i. Source: Author photo.

Making sense of monuments  31 civilization or harbinger of cultural annihilation, all who visit Kealakekua Bay must at the very least face a vision of his last moments of life, the spatial context of his death. Perhaps this encounter reshapes our beliefs, urging us to accept new meanings regarding his life. Or perhaps it will merely reinforce what meanings we have already accepted as relevant and true. Taking our cue from the Captain Cook memorial, it is logical to ask the question: what meanings do we assign to monuments? How do we use them when we commemorate? Commemoration represents the shared historiographic soul of a society. What we commemorate is who we are—and where we commemorate communicates potent symbolic meanings. For example, our modern Euro-American traditions of commemorative practices are saturated with moments of remembrance; we collect items of nostalgia, celebrate specific days of remembrance or holidays, and visit commemorative locations such as museums and libraries. Even our recreation time is embedded in commemoration—battlefield reenactments, historic tours, zoological gardens, and historical theme parks. Not only do modern Americans and Europeans welcome acts of commemoration, but we have also pioneered new forms within the last century, particularly those associated with tragedy, violence, and shame (e.g., battlefield monuments, Holocaust monuments, and fallen hero memorials). It is with clarity that historian Andreas Huyssen states (1995: 251): “the issue of remembrance and forgetting touches to the core of Western identity, however multifaceted it may be.” The renowned philosopher Pierre Nora (1989: 19) has described this pervasive increase in remembrance, dubbing it the “era of commemoration,” focusing upon the rise of commemorative places of memory (lieux de mémoire) that serve as buffers between formal history and collective memory, affixing the past to specific physical and tangible locations, “just as if gold were the only memory of money.” The physicality of places of memory freeze time and immortalize the past, manipulating what we remember and what we forget, but are also easily modified, appropriated, or recycled. Mass media, electronic communication, rapid transit, and equal access to information about the past have shifted the process of who inscribes our history, minimizing the role of the state as the official arbitrator of the past and creating a more democratized (but contentious) forum for those who wish to write history or influence collective memory (see Erőss 2017). Nora’s argument that commemoration changes over time is a very salient point. Neither commemoration nor memory is straightforward or simple; it does not follow a one-way trajectory. Collective as well as private memories are subject to constant reformulation, and the diversification of the politics of remembrance explains why monuments can represent a multiplicity of meanings. Changing commemorative practices are not strictly a modern phenomenon, and have no doubt occurred in other places and in other periods of history. In fact, a cyclical discourse of centralized and privatized commemorative social practices may be the norm, the first being more prominent during periods of centralized

32  Making sense of monuments political authority, the other more prominent during phases of privatization or even societal fracturing. The fact that commemoration in any form is contingent upon a place and a time, and that remembrance inevitably involves dialogue, points to monuments being important indicators for measuring changes in commemorative practice over time. Monuments say more about those who built them than they do about those they were built for, making them an effective tool for examining how architecture metamorphoses space, and how space contours and tracks commemorative change. The following chapters present a series of case studies organized along the spatial-cognitive metaphors presented in this chapter, the goal being to add nuance to our interpretations of monumental space and place. These case studies are organized into three categories. Chapter 2 goes into more detail regarding the spatial-cognitive metaphors of time, illustrating how six different monuments contour various temporal scales. Chapter 3 addresses movement—encoding, performance, and wayfinding—presenting examples of the direction and flow of activates and monumental practices. Chapter 4 examines six monuments that employ the spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale, each offering a uniquely overpowering scalar and sublime experience. Taken as a whole, these chapters represent a journey into monumentality that spans a diverse set of locations and time periods. Despite such an assortment, a close logical connection binds them together. This connection is related to the ways in which they similarly contour space in order to create social meaning. Who exactly undertakes acts of commemoration and how do they employ place and spatial sequencing to achieve their goals? Does collective interaction or unity exist in the use of spatial contours and their associated metaphors, or is there a multitude of competing voices that contest memory amongst one another? By addressing such questions, I seek to demonstrate that, at a certain level and in particular ways, there exists some consistency in the way space is structured and bodily experienced; I attempt to do so without diminishing the emic cultural principles that are similarly at play in structuring commemoration and generating contextual meaning.

Notes 1 Theorists have long applied linguistic or semiotic concepts to culture, which tend to privilege its idealist or symbolic qualities. Anthropologists were the first to realize this; pioneers in the field such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes used what we call a “linguistic homology” to define culture as a series of sign systems made up of symbols that convey ideas and operate within an analyzable structure. 2 Renfrew’s diligence has encouraged other archaeologists to likewise develop innovative approaches for mingling the material world in such a way that they are ontologically linked to the human mind (e.g., Knappett and Malafouris 2008; Malafouris 2010; Malafouris and Renfrew 2010; Olsen 2003, 2010; Van Reybrouck and Jacobs 2006).

Making sense of monuments  33 3 Henri Lefebvre was a key contributor in the European avant-garde movements of the 20th century, and his most important cross-disciplinary contribution is his investigation of the social construction and conventions of space. Lefebvre’s writings on the geography of social relations are diverse, stemming from his studies of “everyday life,” rural economy, suburbia, and urban geography. His tour de force on the subject is his book The Production of Space, a systematic discussion of some of his most important concepts regarding space—its social transformation, its historical development, spatial dialectics, the notion of urban centrality, and architectonics. 4 Lefebvre is not the only one to envision a dialectic between absolute and abstract architectural spaces. Amos Rapoport (1982) in his work on built environments also refers to the notion of interplay between what he calls the perceptual and the associational. For Rapoport, the perceptual represent the physical architectural elements recognized by the user, while the associational are the actual social connections made identified by the perceived elements. Social behavior is then dictated by the intersection of the perceived versus the associated, the physical cuing the behavioral. While Rapoport’s model focuses more on the specific behavioral actions dictated by space rather than conceptual spatialities, he does advocate the same relationship between the built environment and the cultural realm outlined by Lefebvre. 5 Mental spaces are not always exact analogs of the physical world (see Muehrcke and Muehrcke 1992: 8; or Gell 1985). 6 Although not as functionally explicit as the cognitive scientists, anthropologists have long recognized that mental cognition has analogical and metaphorical components. Both early and modern ethnographers—Fredrick Barth, Franz Boas, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Lucien Lèvy-Bruhl, Edward Evans-Prichard, and Claude Lèvy Strauss to name some eminent examples—have explored how metaphor is an important principle for expressing the analogic mental spaces present in many non-Western societies (current treatments include De Boeck 1994; Ortman 2000; Shore 1996; Tilley 1999). 7 Some gestures and “body language” postures are closely related to language and employed only while talking. Other gestural elements appear to function independent from speech, a category that psychologist David McNeill (1985, 1996) calls emblematic gesture. Emblematic gestures are arbitrary from one culture to the next, and would include such things as the “thumbs up” sign to indicate everything is all right, or the “hand up” sign to indicate stop, or “pointing” to provide spatial reference. Such gestures may function independently in communicative exchanges, and are frequently employed in ritual. They represent communicative movement; visual signs for the observer that help represent topological meanings, particularly spatial representations, contexts that are more expedient that using words. 8 The distinguished architect Amos Rapoport (1982) specifically acknowledges the importance of physical attributes for architecture. In his book The Meaning of the Built Environment, he discusses three physical categories of architectural form that structure social behavior: that of height, color, and redundancy. These visual elements are used alone or in combination to provide visual clues into the meaning of any given spatial arrangement, communicating specific social messages. 9 Connerton emphasized the process of transference using repetitive social communicative acts: (1) commemorative ceremonies and (2) bodily practices. But while many scholars have focused upon the process of memory construction, few are able to actualize it. One pioneering effort to integrate collective memory and the inscribed practices of history is the work of social scientist Barry Schwartz

34  Making sense of monuments (2000, 2008), who documents in his research on American presidents in historical memory how inscribed factual histories create “core elements” of memory that permeate into collective thought. He argues that certain commemorative symbols of Abraham Lincoln, for example, shift and change over time as collective memory emphasizes or downplays certain “truths” according to social experience. Another leading effort is the work of historian Martha Norkunas (2002), who traces the changing relationship between public memories using war memorials and community oral traditions. 10 These include other prominent social theorists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, who have in turn stimulated debate and discussion in a variety of fields. Archaeologists have entered the fray as well (Hamilakis et al. 2002; Joyce 2005; Rautman 2000; Tilley 1999). 11 Stewart (1993: 60) uses the souvenir and the pathos of nostalgia to adroitly link collectible items and narrative: “The transcendence presented by the miniature is spatial transcendence, a transcendence which erases the productive possibilities of understanding through time. Its locus is thereby nostalgic. The miniature here erases not only labor but causality and effect. Understanding is sacrificed to being in context. Hence the miniature is often a material allusion to a text which is no longer available to us, or which, because of its fictiveness, never was available to us except through a second-order fictive world.” Thus the miniature is about an experience of the interior universe and the process by which that universe is constructed.

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Making sense of monuments  41 Tilley, Christopher Y. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Tilley, Christopher Y. 1999. Metaphor and Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Treichler, Michael. 2007. Metaphor and Space: The Cognitive Approach to Spatially Structured Concepts. Munich: GRIN Verlag. Trigger, Bruce G. 1990. “Monumental architecture: A thermodynamic explanation of symbolic behavior.” World Archaeology 22(2):119–132. Tschumui, Bernard, ed. 1996. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold Ltd. Turnbull, David. 2002. “Performance and narrative, bodies and movement in the construction of places and objects, spaces, and knowledges.” Theory, Culture and Society 19(5/6):125–143. Unwin, Simon. 2003. Analysing Architecture. London: Routledge. Van Dyke, Ruth, and Susan E. Alcock, eds. 2003. Archaeologies of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Van Reybrouck, David, and Dirk Jacobs. 2006. “The mutual constitution of natural and social identities during archaeological fieldwork.” In: Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations, edited by M. Edgeworth, 33–44. Lanham: AltaMira. Watkins, Trevor. 2004a. “Architecture and theatres of memory in the Neolithic of southwest Asia.” In: Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World, edited by C. Renfrew, E. DeMarrais, C. Gosden, 97–106. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Watkins, Trevor. 2004b. “Building houses, framing concept, constructing worlds.” Paléorient 30(1):5–24. Watkins, Trevor. 2012. “Household, community and social landscape: Building and maintaining social memory in the early Neolithic of southwest Asia.” In: As Time Goes By’ Monuments, Landscapes and the Temporal Perspective. SocioEnvironmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years, edited by M. Furholt, M. Hinz, D. Mischka Kiel, 23–44. Bonn: Rudolf Habelt. Watson, Aaron. 2001. “The sounds of transformation: Acoustics, monuments and ritual in the British Neolithic.” In: The Archaeology of Shamanism, edited by Neil S. Price, 178–192. London: Routledge. Weisman, Gerald D. 1979. “Way-finding in the built environment: A study in architectural legibility.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Michigan. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978 (1929). Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press. Whitmore, Christopher. 2006. “Vision, media, noise and the percolation of time.” Journal of Material Culture 11(3):267–292. Whitridge, Peter. 2004. “Landscapes, houses, bodies, things: “Place” and the archaeology of Inuit imaginaries.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11(2):213–250.

42  Making sense of monuments Wier, Stuart Kirkland. 1996. “Insight from geometry and physics into the construction of Egyptian Old Kingdom pyramids.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 6(1):150–163. Wilkie, Laurie A., and Paul Farnsworth. 2005. Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradtion at a Bahmian Plantation. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Wilson, Peter J. 1988. The Domestication of the Human Species. New Haven: Yale University Press. Worthington, Andy. 2004. Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion. Loughborough: Alternative Albion. Zacks, Jeffery M. 2004. “Using movement and intentions to understand to simple events.” Cognitive Science 28(6):979–1008. Zacks, Jeffery M., and Barbara Tversky. 2001. “Event structure in perception and conception.” Psychological Bulletin 127(1):3–21. Zacks, Jeffrey M., and Khena M. Swallow. 2007. “Event segmentation.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 16(2):80–84. Zacks, Jeffery M., Nicole K. Speer, Khena M. Swallow, Todd S. Braver, and Jeremy R. Reynolds. 2007. “Event perception: A mind/brain perspective.” Psychology Bulletin 130(2):273–293. Zacks, Jeffery M., Khena M. Swallow, Jean M. Vettel, and Mark P. McAvoy. 2006. “Visual motion and the neural correlates of event perception.” Brain Research 1076(1):150–162.

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The Easter Sunday sermon of Minister Robert Smith was a special one, ­written as a response to the alarming attention paid to the tombstones and other burials in the parochial churchyards of the American colonies in the year 1765. He professed: since the rising from the dead is to be certain and universal, let us not be over solicitous about the place or manner of our burial: for all the general conflagration, all tombs and monuments will be defaced … Tis of more important how we have lived … [than] whether we have a ground sepulcher or no sepulcher at all. (Nelson 2008: 246) Despite Minister Smith’s zeal, his sermon could not quash the growing interest in the accoutrements of ancestral veneration, which ran counter to the dominant Puritan beliefs focusing upon the condition of the human soul during life rather than after death (Deetz and Dethlefsen 1967; Habenstein and Lamers 1955). As a matter of course, funerals were simple and without ceremony. Mourning was a private matter, and public notification was not made until the following Sunday’s religious service. Burial markers were simple, roughly hewn stones with little or no decorative carving. They often bore simple inscriptions that gave the name and date of death of the deceased, and sometimes a “death’s head” motif; a stylized skull adorned with wings or crossed bones (Figure 2.1). Other stylistic designs of the times were also non-religious, including imagery such as an hourglass, dragons, imps, coffins, floret and foliage side-panels—imagery meant to communicate the fleeting nature of human mortality. The 18th century changes that Smith was concerned about were more emotive stylistic motifs, such as the winged cherub with fleshy faces, lifelike

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Figure 2.1 Eighteenth-century death markers from Old Burial Hill, Marblehead, Massachusetts. Source: Author photo.

eyes, and upturned mouths; soul effigy designs with a stylized human face with wings; and highly stylized carved portraits stones (that rarely resembled the actual deceased). These newer “death” motifs reflected an increased sentiment for the soul of the recently deceased, concern for their departed soul that was publically expressed. Funerals became similarly fashionable,

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allowing mourners to disentangle the living from the deceased, and reaffirm the community through gift giving, feasting, and social contact. The colonial American death marker represent an excellent example of the first spatial-cognitive sequence, metaphors of time, built as cultural places that belong simultaneously to the present and the past. As a living mourner approaches and stands before a death marker, seeing and touching its stonework, they perceive their spatial relation to the monument itself, allowing them to generate a cognitive framework for comparing the proximity of the present to the distal past. Perhaps more than any other monument, a death marker reminds us of our mortality, creating a heightened sense of time, and presents us with the ultimate step in naturalness that we cannot escape. The spatial interaction of mourner to death marker stimulates an emotional connection with a deceased, conveying the power of the moment, building a cognitive link to the past, retaining and curating ancestral memories that may be recalled and reckoned with in any given instant. As the American writer Eudora Welty (1998: 114) aptly stated, “memory is a living thing … but during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.” Monuments are used to record different temporal scales that are associated with collective cultural memory. As important details of memory sustained via human oral communication decay and are lost, monuments physically encapsulate certain temporal details for posterity, slowing the process of long-term generational forgetting. The temporal rhythm of cultural time is not strictly chronological, but rather one of flow and general process that creates a range of overlapping cultural narratives. The types of cultural time include: (1) ancestral time; (2) sacred time; and (3) god time. Ancestral time juxtaposes a familial past with an inherited present. Time is structured into a simple past/present dichotomy that follows the logic of the container schema, but may be more precisely measured by counting generations of family members. Sacred time recreates the characteristics of a particular ritual that interposes sacred experiences into ordinary chronological time. God time marks the chronological (or cyclical) mythical events of the universe, tracking origin myths or the movements and actions of the gods. This chapter explicitly examines each of these three spatial-cognitive metaphors of time. Although monumental metaphors of time cannot be fully disentangled from the other spatial-cognitive sequences of movement and scale, they are one of the most foundational and essential parts of making sense of any monumental encounter. Six monumental types are discussed: (1) the Death Marker; (2) the Reef of Heaven found on the island of Pohnpei; (3) the medieval Sacramental Church; (4) the Egyptian Pyramid; (5) the Incan mountain refuge of Machu Picchu; and (6) the American Civil War commemorative monument of Stone Mountain. The Death Marker represents the most ubiquitous and pervasive of monuments, tombstones and effigies that convey meanings associated with ancestral time. The Reef of Heaven

46 Time is the island city of Nan Madol, also built to communicate meanings of ancestral time. Both the Sacramental Church and the Egyptian Pyramid created and adjudicated sacred time for pious worshipers who sought a blissful afterlife. Machu Picchu in the highland Andes of South America was used specifically to convey the meaning of god time, as Stone Mountain and other American civic monuments were built to generate and commemorate the mythical events of a young nation that lacked any deep history.

Death marker (ancestral time) The French noble Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy and the Count of Soissons, prepared for his imminent death early in the year of 1397 by writing a lengthy addendum codicil to his existing last testament and will (Tuchman 1978: 568–567). Enguerrand lay in a prison in the Ottoman stronghold of Brusa, captured at the ill-fated battle of Nicopolis where a Crusader army led by the flower of French chivalry was destroyed. As many as 1,000 captured soldiers were executed after the battle in retaliation for an earlier conflagration at Rahovo, where Ottoman prisoners were massacred by French forces. The high-status prisoners, such as Enguerrand, were spared for later cash ransoms. After the indignation of defeat, the physical deprivation of an exhausting march on foot, and captivity under harsh conditions, Enguerrand fell gravely ill. In his last words, Enguerrand reiterated the provisions set out for his burial: his body was to be placed in a tomb at the Benedictine abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy in his ancestral lands (and where two daily masses had already been endowed for his soul), and his embalmed heart was to be placed in his liege lands at the Célestin monastery of Ste. Trinité in Villeneuve-les-Soissons. He donated to Ste. Trinité for regular intercessions of his soul, and made similar bequests to 21 additional churches and chapels including the Cathedral at Chartres. Two days later, Enguerrand died. As per his instructions, his remains were eventually returned to France and a grand funeral was conducted by the Bishops of Noyon and Laon. Enguerrand’s body (or bones) was placed in an imposing tomb at Nogent, while his heart was placed at Ste. Trinité beneath a plaque of an engraved heart super-imposed over the Coucy coat-of-arms. Similar to the carved motifs on American tombstones, the attention and detail that Enguerrand VII paid to creating two separate resting places is another illustration of how death markers represent the first and most ubiquitous of monumental spatial-cognitive sequences: metaphors of ancestral time. Death markers are the quintessential temporal vessel, their power arising from their status as a cultural place. They are built to measure generational time, encoded with personal or familial meanings that communicate hereditary understandings in very intimate ways. Simple stone slabs or other devices used to mark a burial is a common phenomenon existing across the globe and through time, from modern Judeo-Christian and Islamic tombstones, to Buddhist and Hindu burial markers and statuary, to the stone

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uprights or boat-shaped slabs of the Pacific (Figure 2.2). Some cultures prefer family vaults or tomb houses marked with epitaphs or imagery, others prefer unadorned and wholly enigmatic structures, such as the Neolithic dolmen tombs of Atlantic Europe, or the Hopewell effigy burial mounds of North America that are shaped in the style of totemic animals. Death markers with epitaphic inscriptions of verse or imagery were frequently used to enhance the temporal power of a death marker, providing commemorative focus. Epitaphs have been utilized since the inception of writing, memorializing the deceased by conveying family lineage, achievements, affiliations, or even wisdom or advice. For example, the epitaph of Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince of England who died in 1376 before he became king, offered sage guidance to visitors or mourners (Figure 2.3). It reads: Such as thou art, sometime was I. Such as I am, such shalt thou be. I thought little on the hour of death so long as I enjoyed breath…. But now a caitiff poor am I, deep in the ground, lo here I lie. My beauty great, is all quite gone, my flesh is wasted to the bone. (Byron 1854: 710, n. 3) Not surprisingly, modern epitaphic content varies by culture (Bada and Ulum 2016). Kinship descriptions represent the highest percentage of occurrence in the linguistic epitaphs of Judeo-Christian death markers (34–84%), varying by specific faith, with nonlinguistic religious symbols such as the Star of David or the Cross being very common (63–81% of all death markers). Islamic epitaphs express matters of faith most frequently (44–59%, depending upon the specific sect), usually with an inscription urging onlookers to pray for the soul of the deceased. Nonlinguistic symbols vary by sect.

Figure 2.2 Modern Buddhist tombstones at Kiyomizudera temple in Kyoto, Japan. Source: Photo courtesy of John C. Kolb.

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Figure 2.3 Effigy tomb of Edward “The Black Prince” Plantagenet, Canterbury Cathedral, England. Source: Photo © John Ward.

Community descriptions (village, province, dynasty, etc.) represent the highest occurrence in the linguistic epitaphs of Taoist death markers (47%), with nonlinguistic symbols completely absent. Finally, Shamanistic faiths primarily inscribe epitaphs denoting clan or group affiliation (67%), but uniformly employ pictures and decorations (100%), indicating that Shamanic cultures often communicate in nonlinguistic forms and in ways that cannot be captured through inscriptions only. An epitaph enhances the temporal power of a death marker by creating lasting communication between the dead and the living. Reading it enriches remembering by recalling the dead in a culturally specific way, forging a unique cognitive link between the present and the past. Nineteenth-century North American death markers were further embellished, in a trend that would have further distressed Minister Robert Smith. The willow and urn became the predominant stylistic motif, a style that coincided with the shift in American art and architecture to Classicism, imitating the buildings of ancient Rome and Greece (Figure 2.4). The willow signified perpetual grief while the urn, an imitation of the Roman urn burials, signified immortality. Social status was expressed through monumental embellishments, including larger vault-style monuments, life-size sculpture,

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Figure 2.4 Greenwood Cemetery is the original cemetery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Source: The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America / Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-highsm-06441.

Egyptian obelisks, Greek pediments, Roman columns, and Gothic detail. These changes reflect an ever-increasing sentimentality of mourning (Thursby 2006). The grieving process lengthened and included the pre-funeral household “wake,” compete with black draperies, flower arrangements, ornate coffins, and long hours of visitation. The funeral procession included a shrouded hearse with funeral attendants and ceremonial burial rites. All these embellishments led to the growth of a burgeoning funeral industry, including florists, photographers, and undertakers (Habenstein and Lamers 1955: 321–352; Sharf 1961). Masons carved elaborate monuments, developing their own American school of sculpture. The financial and emotional investments in such funerary accoutrements were considerable. The quintessential example of American funeral pomp was the interment of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 (Kundhardt and Kunhardt 1965). After his assassination in Washington D.C., Lincoln’s funeral train retraced the 1,654-mile journey he had traveled in 1861 as President-elect from Springfield, Illinois. The Lincoln Special had a photo of the President over the engine’s cowcatcher, and black-draped cars that carried the decorated coffin with approximately 300 mourners. The journey took 20 days and included frequent stops to meet hundreds of thousands of mourners (and expose them to the technique of embalming). Once in Springfield, the funeral procession zigzagged through town in front of thousands before the coffin was finally interred in a special tomb (Figure 2.5). Lincoln’s funeral spectacle was extravagant compared to that of the earlier American hero Benjamin Franklin, who was buried in 1790 in Philadelphia beneath a plain white marble slab.

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Figure 2.5 General Grant at the tomb of Abraham Lincoln: Oak Ridge cemetery, Springfield, Illinois (1868). Source: Currier & Ives, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-ppmsca-23607.

Medieval death markers in Britain followed a similar trend to those in North America. Death markers were first simple, made of wood, and employed skeuomorphic designs. Some carved limestone counterparts have survived, including grave covers and crosses (Williams 2006: 111). Sepulchral monuments and chantries, special chapels for reciting intercessional prayers for the dead, began to increase during the 10th century (Colvin 2000: 13; Daniell 1997, 2018; Saul 2009). Grave markers began to be produced at a large scale; the cost of an ostentatious freestone monument with relief effigies and canopy cost £100 and took one year to manufacture and install (Saul 2009: 108–114), the equivalent of $76,000 today using the relative price index, or over $1,700,000 using average earnings (MeasuringWorth.Com, accessed August 2018). A simple brass inscription and coat-of-arms ran considerably less. The mass-production of monuments by the 15th century further reduced cost, allowing lower-class clientele such excesses. In England, workshops produced large quantities of stock figures of ecclesiastical, military, and civilian figures that were sold locally, greatly reducing buyer cost. Personal details such as costume or hairstyle were added at the time of purchase and installation. Financial difficulty was common, and the willful disregard of a last will and testament by its executors was common even though canon law required the keeping of precise estate records. One inscribed quip (Saul 2009: 113) suggests such difficulties: “For widows be sloful, and children beth unkind, executors be covetos, and kepal that they fynd.” Monuments were essential “in the battle for salvation of the soul” (Saul 2009: 120), and by the 12th century there was a shift towards realistic effigy

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carvings in the likeness of the deceased, as well as the increased use of intramural church tombs, both thought to optimize intercessory success and the purification of the deceased soul. By the time of Enguerrand VII, those who could afford to be buried inside a church (rather than an extramural graveyard) increased their chances of redemption since they were placed closer to the center of Christian ritual. Prior to the 12th century, intramural burial was reserved for monarchs, well-positioned clergy, and principal benefactors or church founders, followed by knights and lesser gentry or nobles in the 13th century (Effors 2003: 211–212; Saul 2009: 114–119). Intramural burial necessitated considerable financial outlay for locational privilege, six shillings eight pence for placement near the altar, approximately $200 today using the relative price index, or $3,560 using average earnings. This increased sentimentality of mourning found in medieval Britain death markers mirrors the pattern seen among North American monuments. A family built an effigy death marker to span both past and future memory, capturing a visitor’s attention using architectural opulence and religious decorum, asserting meanings of societal rank and family consciousness, and “staking a claim to immortality” (Saul 2009: 371; see also Sherlock 2008). This function certainly held true for the medieval observer who immediately comprehended the social meanings of any given death marker. Yet, ironically, it also holds true for the curious but casual visitors today, who are mostly uninformed and distanced from the social machinations of medieval society. The modern visitor sympathizes more with the details of the deceased rather than their social standing or purpose. This perhaps was not the specific prospective intent of the effigy builders, but such is the changing nature of monumental retrospective meanings of genealogical time (Figure 2.6). 

Figure 2.6 Effigy tombs of the Brudenell family, St. Peter’s Church, Deene, England. Source: Photo © Steve James.

52 Time Death markers in Classical Greece and Rome followed a similar trajectory of commemorative elaboration. For example, Greek city-state hero commemoration developed from the earlier Mediterranean practice of ancestor worship and collective burial. As civic culture became more sophisticated, so did the responsibility to commemorate its founders. Consider the late 7th century b.c. stele death marker commemorating the warrior Arniadas: “This is the marker of Arniadas. This man fierce-eyed Ares destroyed, battling by the ships beside the streams of the Aratthos achieving great excellence amid the battle-roar that brings mourning” (Hansen 1983).1 Whereas genealogical worship focused upon local lineage relationships, the hero was regionally recognized and honored in epic tradition, even though some heroes were not even known by name. Yet individual commemoration among the general populace similarly accelerated during the 6th century b.c. For exam­ ple, marble or limestone stelai with capitals and relief sculpture were constructed at Kerameikos cemetery (Κεραμεικός) just outside the gates of Athens, employing generalized depictions of the deceased meant to evoke aspects of the person’s life (Figure 2.7). Such realism was pioneered by those who could afford such accoutrements, mainly aristocratic families, but by the 4th century b.c. period, modest versions were being produced for those who could afford them. This shift towards added realism is a trend shared with both modern North American death markers and medieval effigy tombs; realism that strengthened the temporal link between the deceased and their living commemorators. This epigraphic practice spread outward with Greek colonization, imitated by northern Italian Etruscan civilizations who carved hypogeum chamber tombs that imitated the typical layout of an Etruscan house, decorated in stucco with familial domestic scenes. Wealthy Romans placed decorated stelai or small mausoleums along roadsides or near gates to ensure good social exposure in order to perpetuate the memory of the dead. The median cost of a 1st century a.d. burial was 10,000 sesterces in Italy (about $20,000 today, if based on the price of silver), but only 1,380 sesterces (or $2,760 today) in Africa (Duncan-Jones 1982: 28–132). Considering that the average yearly income of a regular legionary soldier was 4,000 sesterces, the cost would be almost one-quarter of their annual pay if buried in the provinces. An explosion of Roman epigraphic activity coincided with the use of writing to standardize and incorporate newly acquired Roman territories (Bodel 2001: 38–39; Carroll 2006: 126–150). Tombs and inscriptions were concentrated in urbanized areas and militarized zones, and used for asserting individual social rank and mobility. Most epitaphs began with a simple invocation “to the spirits of the dead” (Dis Manibus and later abbreviated to D.M.) but became more secularized in later centuries, changing in the 2nd century a.d. to be “to the spirits of the dead and the memory of…” (D M et Memoraie), and in the 3rd century a.d. to “eternal memory” or “eternal rest” (memoriae aeternae or quietu aeternae). The commemorative relationships most defined are those of the nuclear family (fathers, mothers,

Figure 2.7 Second century a.d. funerary relief of Alexandra in Athens in 1870. Source: Miscellaneous Items in High Demand Collection / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-USZ62-108949 / National Archaeological Museum, Athens / © Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports Archaeological Receipts Fund.

54 Time children, and spouses), revealing the important societal role household affection and duty played even though these bonds were expressed primarily to non-familial or casual passers-by as they traveled to and from settlements. The Romans took their commemoration habits very seriously; humor was a rare occurrence but characterizes the personalization of epitaphs. Consider the following inscribed epitaph (Carroll 2006: 149) from the tomb of an aged manager of a company of mime actors from Sisicia—“I’ve died many times but never like this.”2 The Roman tomb and mausoleum, just as its Mediterranean antecedents, was a place that vied for the visitor’s attention and where the underlying theme was once again commemorating the dead for the benefit of the living (Figure 2.8). The overt spatial-cognitive sequences were similar to those of the medieval effigy tomb, where movement, time, and scale conveyed increasingly secular and personalized meanings of social standing and family relationship. This drastically changes as Rome became Christianized in the 4th century. Epitaphic declarations of status, worldly achievement, and even familial relations decreased and were replaced with simple inscriptions focusing upon the afterlife and the Christian virtues of the deceased (Carroll 2006: 260–278). Roman-era Christians, just as Renaissance Europeans who broke free of old religious entanglements by emigrating to North America, reinvented monumental commemoration in a way that revolutionized and simplified burial practice. In reshaping how events convey memory and meaning, Christianized Romans emphasized ideologies of religion and the afterlife, jettisoning past conventions of ingrained ideological dependence. Once again the monuments of the ancient past transformed later monumental practice.

Figure 2.8 A first century a.d. Roman tomb on the outskirts of Tyre, Lebanon. Source: Author photo.

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Death markers represent one of the simplest of emblematic spaces, the plainest and most straightforward of monumental places. Unlike other symbols of death, such as epitaphs or grave goods, the death marker seems to hold a unique quality in documenting everlasting rest. Usually built of durable stone, a death marker endures and succinctly distills a person’s life down to a few important meanings. It is a token of encapsulated meanings, a scrapbook in stone. Movement towards a death marker and perceiving the surrounding graveyard as a “place” of death give rise to social contemplation and reflection (also called a “deathscape,” Hartig and Dunn 1998). Feeling a stone’s texture, seeing its color, and reading its inscription and design enhances memory and a sense of time. Its human-like scale emphasizes one-on-one engagement rather than an overpowering of the surrounding sense of nature. They sustain social memories by serving as symbolic carriers, built to retain and curate genealogical memories, memories that can be recalled and reckoned at any given instant.

Reef of heaven (ancestral time) If you ever have the fortune of journeying to the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia, you may hear an ancient tale about a powerful magician who lived long ago (Figure 2.9). This magician was capable of sailing large stone logs to a distant corner of the island, far away, from where most people resided: he rode on a length of stone [in the water] … then set down the stone as the foundation stone … and his strength and confidence in his stone work was the spell … this ruler’s residence was built with magical power. (Bernart 1977: 29–30)

Figure 2.9 The island of Pohnpei in Micronesia. Source: After Kolb (2012: 14).

56 Time Thus, one of the most impressive cities in the ancient world was built: Nan Madol. The literal meaning of Nan Madol is “Spaces-between,” a modern label given to an ancient city that now lies ruined and abandoned, along the eastern shoal of the island. “Spaces-between” refers to the many watery canals that separated nearly 100 small islets; a place where the modern visitor may still canoe its ancient byways, now overgrown with palm trees and lush vegetation, watching the sunrise over its beautiful unspoiled coral reef, feeling the power of its ancient magic. Rightly so, the ancient name of the city was Soun Nan-leng, meaning “reef of heaven.” The many small islets that dot the lagoon and sandy shoals of Nan Madol are actually architectural platforms called lolung. The lolung functioned as a combined sleeping platform and walled tomb, their size reflecting the social status of both occupant and clan. A number of syntheses discuss the Pohnpeian lolung and their chronology (Athens 1983, 2007; Ayres 1979; Kolb 2012; McCoy et al. 2015; Rainbird 1999; Seikel 2011). The typical lolung covered an area of 250 square meters and was three meters high (Figure 2.10). It was constructed using a circumference wall built with basalt prismatic columns that averaged eight meters long and weighed several tons, and then filled with coral. These columns were stacked in a headerand-stretcher façade made of columnar basalt prisms and core filling of coral rubble (similar to the knitting of logs when building a log cabin), and an inner burial chamber, also lined and capped with columns. Hundreds of lolung have been located all over the island, both inland and along the coast. A lolung platform remains a premiere example of how monuments, particularly corporate tombs, are utilized to communicate spatial-cognitive sequences associated with ancestral time. Ancestor veneration was a universal practice in Micronesia (Dobbin 2011), and it was common for the living to root themselves in the lineages of the ancestors. The spirits of the dead could be a source of blessings and assistance for a family they left behind. In certain parts of Micronesia, ancestral skulls of ancestors were curated inside the family dwelling, anointed with oil, given food offerings, and occasionally moved about. Many of these practices were merged with Christian

Figure 2.10 Isometric drawing of a simple lolung platform. Source: After (Kolb 2012: 141).

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beliefs and persist today, particularly those associated with lay healing. It is not surprising then that a lolung spatially reinforced continuity between the past and the present, facilitating day-to-day movement and interaction of the living around the dead. Each platform provided a focus for mortuary rites where the ancestral dead were continuously accessible, yet enclosed to the outside world in order to prohibit any intrusive access. The corporate nature of the lolung burials segmented time into a familial past that could be juxtaposed with an inherited present. Outsiders or visitors approaching any lolung could quickly discern its ancestral relevance given its location, monumental size, and conspicuous placement. Similar burial practices of ancestor veneration have been described for Neolithic Europe, where corporate mortuary mounds were placed in order to lay claim to agricultural land (Bradley 1998: 51–67), and the ancient Maya who practiced subfloor internments in order to create ancestral lineages and facilitate transgenerational continuity of capital (McAnany 2004). The history of Pohnpei, a relatively isolated high volcanic island in the northwestern Pacific, has been well documented in oral traditions (Bath and Athens 1990: 276–279; Bernart 1977; Hanlon 1988; Rainbird 2007; Riesenberg 1968: 76). When the initial settlers arrived sometime in the first centuries a.d., they likely brought with them notions of ancestral inherited rights, eventually resulting in the formation of large political districts divided by matrilineal clans. A family of paramount chiefs, calling themselves saudeleur, arose and ruled Nan Madol. The saudeleur lasted for an estimated three to four centuries, until their dynasty was overthrown and replaced by a more horizontal network of district chiefs (called nahnmwarki) that remains in place today. A conservative estimate of Pohnpei’s pre-contact population was 20,000, however, European traders and missionaries dominated 19th century life, at which time Pohnpei became a colonial territory. There is no better place to experience the power of the lolung platform than Nan Madol, built in a sheltered tidal reef near Temwen Island. It is a city of dramatic beauty and grandeur. The foundation of 92 artificial stacked basalt islets were constructed in the shallows of a small lagoon, covering an area of 81 hectares and sheltered from the ocean by a massive sea wall. The individual islets were separated by narrow waterways that flood with water during high tide. The first accurate map of the city was made in 1910, and the city is laid out in loosely formal grid fashion. It was built over a long period of time and, as such, reflects a stately administrative center of a vast political network. The lagoon and sandy shoals were initially occupied on a modest scale at the time of colonization, and the construction of the artificial islet began by 900. Expansion of the monumental complex continued until 1600, after which time the inhabitants departed and abandoned the city. The earliest constructed islets were those in the habitation zone along the sand shoals. New islets were apparently added on further from shore. The city was the primary residence of the saudeleur elite, those who could well afford the expense of importing the large basalt columns for

58 Time islet construction. It has been estimated that over 750,000 tons of columnar basalt were used to construct Nan Madol, outcropped or quarried and then transported from various sources on Pohnpei (Ayres et al., 1997). Nan Madol was constructed in two separate wards: an inner cluster of 34 residential platforms and a seaward outer array of 58 ritual and lulung islets (Figure 2.11). A massive sea wall (up to ten meters thick in places) protects the southeastern edge of Nan Madol, stretching at least 1,000 meters along the border of the city. The residential area, called Madol Pah, comprises a series of large and small basalt and coral-filled platforms. These platforms functioned as residences, meeting areas, and storage facilities. Four large, square islets, each at least 8,000 square meters, dominate this residential ward. One of these large residences is Pahnkedira and, according to oral history, served as the saudeleur royal residence. Pahnkedira is a 115 meter-long islet that sits four meters above sea level. Its walls consist of several layers of stacked basalt columns used as terraces for stone and coral fill. The islet is subdivided into five major courtyards by large basalt walls. These courtyards were used as residential areas for elites and their retainers, a private altar, and a central court surrounding a three-stepped basalt platform used for public meetings and religious worship. The entire structure consists of at least 44,000 cubic meters of basalt and coral fill. The outer array of ritual and lolung islets at Nan Madol was called Madol Powe, and served as a ritual and mortuary sector. This precinct was also slowly expanded over time. The largest, most impressive lolong is associated with the first saudeleur chief and is located on Nan Dauwas islet, along with two other crypts that appear to have been added on later. Nan Dauwas is a double walled enclosure with an area of 3,100 square meters and served as the royal mortuary compound of the saudeleur (Figure 2.12). It has a

Figure 2.11 Lolung platforms overlaid upon the lagoon at Nan Madol. Source: Google Earth.

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Figure 2.12 The lolung of Nan Dawas. Source: Photo courtesy of J. Stephen Athens.

three-meter high foundation upon which was built a six-meter thick and five-meter high enclosing basalt wall. A second interior enclosure surrounds the inner burial chamber, which is a 42 square meter platform topped with 12 basalt columns (Figure 2.13). Additional (and presumably lesser) burials are located between the outer and inner walls. A five-meter wide entrance to Nan Dauwas is located on the west side. The entire lolung structure consists of at least 18,000 cubic meters of basalt and coral fill. The spatial-cognitive metaphors of Nan Madol’s islets may still be experienced first-hand. Using a canoe to paddle up and down its waterways, a visitor may be awed as they pass one venerable ancestral lolung after another. Islet after islet that was once filled with life: merchants bartering, women singing, children wading for shellfish in the shallows. Neighboring rival households, within eye and earshot of one another, focused on intentionally impressing and outdoing one other. Most impressive, however, is the gargantuan islet of Nan Dauwas lolung. All sea-going visitors arriving by canoe—merchants bearing trade goods or local crafters hauling large basalt columns— were required to paddle through the main sea wall entrance directly before the imposing Nan Dauwas. Towering walls and sharp angles consume the viewer, allowing them to capture the otherworldly majesty moments of the saudeleur ancestors. As they paddled by, a visitor both consciously and unconsciously paid homage to the elites buried there. Morgan (1988: 66) wrote: passing jungle-covered islets on both sides of the canal, we caught our first glimpses of Nandauwas’ southwest corner through the trees. A few moments later the canoe turned to the left, slowed, and stopped

60 Time before the main entry landing of the west front. For several minutes I sat quietly in the boat, gazing at the magnificent west façade, the stately podium, the noble entryway, and the ascending steps that led to the interior courts, enclosure, and tombs. The lolung represents an ideal architectural metaphor for ancestral time, a lived space where the inhabitants navigated between the living and the dead. Its tall stone façade was a display of wealth and power, where the living

Figure 2.13 The burial crypt of the Nan Dawas lolung. Source: Photo courtesy of J. Stephen Athens.

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conducted their daily affairs. Its formal entrance, elevated platform, and wooden huts for sleeping helped direct and dictate the flow of life. But ever visible are the burial crypts of the dead, a constant reminder of the timeless presence of the ancestral dead who protect and help guide the present. The permanence and scale of each lolung platform emphasizes the eternal link between the reposed living and the sleeping dead, and the resilient bond between the physical and spiritual worlds. Furthermore, the clusters of lolung at Nan Madol represented a unique place within the ancient Ponapean and broader Micronesian cosmological otherworldly map. Its array of sea-side lulung with restricted sea-side entrance, and its interior elite residences, would formally organize and direct the activities associated with social exchange networking. The collection, storage, and presentation of saudeleur tribute at Nan Madol, including canoes laden with basalt building materials, were conducted in a spiritually collective atmosphere that would have maximized the prestige of the saudeleur and their ancestors. To local Pohnpeians, Nan Madol was the physical representation of spiritual manna, a place of power, a place of history. Here was an extraordinary point of cosmology where the saudeleur were so powerful they could control and alter the otherworld by building two separate islets for living and for burying the family dead, perhaps a unique fissuring of the normal cosmological order. The living and the dead, no longer overlapped; they were bifurcated, polarized, yet still proximal to one another. The Nan Madolan ancestral worldview did not last, and the city was eventually abandoned. This abandonment likely coincided with the collapse of the saudeleur hegemony, and with the expansion of other political centers began at this time, including the Pohnpeian fortified hilltops of Sapwtakai and Ohlapel and the rise of a similarly designed lagoon city at Lelu on the island of Kosrae, some 600 kilometers east of Pohnpei. Perhaps the last saudeleur rulers could not maintain their long-distance inter-island trade networks, perhaps they had lost their connection with their ancestors, or perhaps they had lost their magic to fly stones when needed.

Sacramental church (sacred time) Upon entering a Christian sacramental church, a worshiper begins a transcendent journey into sacred time. This sojourn is succinctly noted at the entrance to the south porticus at Breamore Church, Hampshire, England, which bears this painted Anglo-Saxon incription dating to 980: “here the covenant is made plain to thee.”3 By entering through this gateway, congregating with others to pray, and then returning to the outside world, a worshipper is guided by a distinct set of spatial-cognitive metaphors associated with sacred time. Sacred time is a culturally defined temporality associated with the spiritual, honoring a society’s mythical origins, or a supernatural occurrence (Eliade 1959: 68–72; cf. Luciano 2007). Unlike normal or secular time, which is linear and irreversible, sacred time paradoxically is

62 Time circular, mutable, and recoverable. Entering sacred time restores the secular world by spiritually strengthening the everyday and the ordinary. Sacred time is manifested usually by way of ritual or the use of endowed places (cf. Foucault and Miskowiec 1986; Holloway 2003; Luciano 2007; Kieckhefer 2004: 21; Knott 2005; Shiner 1972; Smith 1987). Rituals or space that emulate heroic or godly actions allow an individual to detach from the profane and secular world and enter sacred time. The sacramental church served as the most emblematic of sacred monuments during medieval Europe. It served as the bastion of civilization and culture during the Early Middle Age, or Dark Ages, a period of cultural and economic decline in Western Europe after the fall of Western Roman civilization in 474. The Dark Ages lasted 25 generations until the Frankish king Charlemagne revived culture and art in 800 with the assistance of the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Roman Church. Early Middle Age population probably reached their low point in 542 during the Plague of Justinian, and bounced back to 25 or 30 million people by the time of Charlemagne (Russell 1972: 25–71). Populations were unevenly concentrated (France, the Low Counties, western Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, northern Italy, and parts of northern Spain), separated by tracks of wilderness that forced the medieval traveler to walk for days without encountering a human settlement of any kind. Twenty percent of the population was urbanized, dwelling in the now dilapidated Roman centers. Most lived in rural villages normally numbering less than 100 people and clustered in “champion” country, stretches of arable land that surrounded river valleys (Gies and Gies 1990: 17–18). Medieval village lifestyle was self-sufficient and insular as well as stark and brutish (see Chapelot and Fossier 1985; Gies and Gies 1990: 18). Villages were usually spaced about two kilometers apart, although they could be spaced as much as 20 kilometers in the hinterlands. Life was short and famine was expected one year out of four as villagers toiled under the authority of their sworn lord. As the 14th century chronicler Jean Froissart (Froissart with Brereton 1968: 221) wrote: It is the custom in England, as in several other countries, for the nobles to have strong powers over their men and to hold them in serfdom: that is, that by right and custom they have to till the lands of the gentry, reap the corn and bring it to the big house, put it in the barn, thresh and winnow it; mow the hay and carry it to the house, cut logs and bring the, up, and all such forced tasks; all this the men must do by way of serfage to the masters. Cruck houses were built with curved timbers, thatch, and mud. They incorporated animal pens to conserve heat during the winter months. They were smoky and so filthy that accounts note that dirt floors emitted unwholesome vapors of entrapped filth and offal whenever the weather turned warm.

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Their centerpiece was an enormous bedstead where everyone slept including visitors, piled high with straw and teeming with parasites and vermin. In such a mortal and precarious world the sacramental church provided some measure of village continuity. Medieval Christian belief was a template of ideas and behaviors that permeated the everyday life and psyche of the average villager, unlike the compartmentalized aspect of modern religious practice today. All social rites took place in the church confines; a newborn child would be rushed there to be baptized. Children received their First Holy Communion there. Consenting adults were married there, and eventually buried in its graveyard. Routine church activities included attending Mass and receiving the sacraments on religious Holy Days, listening to proclamations and news about the state of the Roman Church and the outside secular world, confessing their sins to the local priest, and attending the feasts and requiems that accompanied baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The local priest, often the only villager who could read and write, interceded on behalf of everyone within the larger spiritual and secular worlds (see Boyle 1955). Priestly counsel was delivered through vernacular homilies on Gospel teachings during Latin Mass or during the Sacrament of Confession, when parishioners could be individually warned about sins such as ­gluttony, drunkenness, sloth, and envy. Such responsibilities made the village priest the single figure who villagers personified both the teachings and the authority of the Church. The architecture of the medieval sacramental church has a distinct history (Stalley 1999: 29–32). The Roman Christian church was called the basilica and dominated Western Europe for hundreds of years. The basilica was a large civic or imperial public building that began to be used for religious purposes (Figure 2.14). It was designed with a longitudinal nave for seating and side aisles with an apse on the end. It was a well-lit interior space geared for large urban Roman parishes. Its adoption by early Christians for religious worship emerged from the basilica’s metaphoric association with Roman imperial and civic power, signaling both political and religious connotations between Christianity and imperial Rome, between God and the divine emperor (Bandmann 2005: 83–84; Kilde 2008: 48–49). The spacious basilica eventually gave way to the partitioned village church because large stone structures were unsuitable for smaller villages and towns (Figure 2.15). Brick-making and stone masonry skills were costly and eventually forgotten in most rural regions except the southern latitudes of Europe; as was the expense of quarrying and transportation of stone, which essentially doubled in price over 20 kilometers (Salzman 1992: 119). Few village churches from the Dark Ages survive because most were built with timber and not stone. Trees were hewn from local forests, squared and cut where they were felled and then hauled overland by oxen or horse. One beam from Salisbury Cathedral in England measured over one-meter thick and 24 meters long, attesting to the greatness of the European forests of the time (Scott 2003: 25). Stone became more popular by the 10th and

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Figure 2.14 The Aula Palatina, a civic basilica built by Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century, Trier, Germany. Source: Photo © Kaspar Bams.

11th centuries, seeing wider use by the many monastic orders that began settling in the countryside. Stone eventually becomes the preferred medium of church construction, and this preference cannot be overstated. Stone carries a strong metaphorical charge, conveying meanings of permanence, earthly stability, and biblical reference, made more potent when the stones for a church are quarried directly within a community (Kieckhefer 2004: 19–20). The typical medieval sacramental church was divided into two rooms: a larger section called the longitudinal nave and the chancel used by the

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Figure 2.15 All Saints’ Church, founded by Sexwulf, bishop of Mercia, and built in the eighth century style of an early Christian basilica, Brixworth, England. Source: Photo © Steve James.

clergy for the liturgical Mass (Kieckhefer 2004: 11–15). The nave was usually flanked on its long sides by aisles with accompanying columns and piers (Figure 2.16). The nave was used by the lay congregation to stand or sit while attending Mass. The chancel was the space around the sanctuary or altar that was used by the clergy. It was usually placed on the east end of the church, with the nave to the west. The chancel, depending upon the region and time period, could include specific areas such as an apse, the choir with its seating and additional transept wings that effectively changed the layout of the church from longitudinal to cross-shaped. The focal point of the church was the altar, the religious center point. The physical layout of the nave and chancel created a spatial dialectic between worshipper and clergy, emphasizing public assembly rather than private encounter. Entering a church meant entering sacred time and a departure from the secular world. The interior of a medieval church was lived space or place. Vaulted ceilings, columned walls, natural lighting, and interior accoutrements evoked notions of spiritual process and transcendence. As a sacred “place” or “gate,” a church interior, no matter how opulent or simple the decoration was, evoked the eminence of God and urged worshipers to

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Figure 2.16 Isometric drawing of All Saints’ Church, lighter stonework indicates the earlier foundation not restored after the church was partially destroyed by roving Vikings in 870. Source: After Watkins (1867: 44).

transcend from everyday consciousness. Through repeated visitations and shared participatory experience with others, this evocation was a learned response that reinforced the role of Christianity, making the sacramental church the literal and figurative center of the medieval universe. Worshipers were drawn into the Christian community that relived the rhythms of the life and death of Christ. The familiar symbolic vocabulary of both static architecture and spatial-cognitive sequences was replicated by churches all over Europe (with some variation), and offered a universal experience for medieval society as a whole, embodying a universality of principals for religious practice. Despite the physical distance between isolated villages or the cultural divides among European peoples, any traveler or religious pilgrim journeying to faraway lands could find solace and familiarity in sacred time by simply entering the confines of a sacramental church. The longitudinal shape and two-room design of the medieval church was designed to enhance the metaphors of sacred time. Worshiper and clergy were never segregated from one another; the spatial congruity between nave and chancel allowed for liturgical celebration that incorporated processions of interaction that were both dynamic and participatory. Movement within a sacramental church was dictated longitudinally along the axis between the nave entrance and the altar, creating a lengthy processional route. For example, the entry procession brought the altar cross, candles, Book of Gospels, and the priest to the altar, traversing an axial pathway that moved a procession progressively closer to the sacred, crossing specific sacred thresholds and space on the way (Barrie 1996). Such movement generated collective meaning and interaction between a priest and his laity, and between the group and the individual. As worshippers gathered within the nave, praying and singing, there were no pews or benches to confine movement. They were readily drawn forwards towards the anchor of worship, the altar. Stone columns alongside the nave mimic the procession in static

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array, visually cueing worshippers to move forward towards the chancel. This axial path was used during other portions of the liturgy such as when worshipers moved forward towards the altar to receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The repeated spatial transitions as worshipers shuffled forward signify movement from a state of lesser grace to a heightened state of sacredness, leaving the mundane and entering sacred time.

Pyramid (sacred time) From our modern Western perspective, ancient Egyptian culture seemed obsessed with the spiritual transition associated with the onset of death and the efficacious afterlife that could be secured. Ritual, prayer, art, architecture, writing, and commerce—all were geared to ready and strengthen the individual for dying. For the ancient Egyptian, death was the transitional apogee of life, the end and the beginning of a continued (albeit mysterious) temporal existence. However, the initial view of Egyptian everlastingness was reserved exclusively for the Egyptian kings. We know this from the earliest surviving writing, the Pyramid Texts, a series of prayers and incantations that lined the chambers of the earliest royal pyramid tombs. For example (see Mercer 1952; Faulkner 1969), one important prayer circa 2,290 b.c. reads: “Atum put your arms around the king, around this edifice, around this pyramid, like the arms of consciousness, so that the life-force of the king may be in it, enduring for ever and ever.”4 The destiny of the king was to join the otherworldly power and assure the order of the universe. The process of royal death and burial in the pr-djt, or “eternal house,” was closely intertwined with two Egyptian concepts of time: (1) neheh (nhh), commonly translated as “time”; and (2) djet (dt), translated as “eternity,” although the better meanings associated with these terms are “change” and “completion/perfection” (Assmann 2001: 74–75). Neheh refers to the cyclical nature of time; seasonal changes, celestial events, and genealogical time that can be divisible into years. Djet refers to the concept of linear, or non-repetitive time, earthly progress that stretches to eternity, and cannot be measured in years in any way. Neheh measures time in years, and is best connected to our modern everyday notion of time, while djet measures time in memory, and signifies the enduring continuation of that which has been completed. These two concepts of time were inseparable and employed symmetrically during ritual, created a distinct form of sacred time that best conforms to our idiomatic “forever and ever,” better phrased as “for eternity and everlastingness.” The earliest Egyptian burials were simple oval graves dug in the desert sand; however, the mastaba tomb style (mastaba is the Arabic word for “bench”) appeared at the end of the 4th millennium b.c. (Dodson 2008; Lehner 1997). Beyond the traditional funeral functions of preserving and commemorating a corpse, the mastaba tomb played a critical role in facilitating the proper passage of deceased between the worlds of neheh cyclical

68 Time time and djet everlastingness (Assmann 2003). A tomb had two parts, an above-ground offertory chapel where the deceased was remembered and celebrated, and a below-ground internment chamber for the corpse. The separate above- and below-ground portions symbolized the relationship between the physical and other-world, or eternal and everlasting time, allowing the spirit or life-force (called ka or ba) of the deceased to move freely between the two. The most important architectural feature to symbolize this interface between time states was the false door, a magical threshold over which the spirit is supposed to pass in order to return to neheh, the time of the living. The above-ground building was used to venerate the dead and contained imagery and inscriptions that emphasized this transitional passage, depicting or referring to offertory processions and priests performing the mortuary ritual. Carved inscriptional names, titles, or histories identified the tomb owner. The mastaba tomb served as the structure for royal interment for approximately 400 years (1st to 3rd Dynasties), and served as the precursor to the pyramid tomb which began in the 27th century b.c. (3rd Dynasty). The pyramid tomb and its associated building complex represented an important emblem of the political and economic prestige (Figure 2.17);

Figure 2.17 The stepped pyramid of Sakara. Source: Photochrom Print Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-ppmsca-41378.

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however, the accompanying funeral rituals and burial accoutrements were specifically intended to assist the god-king to transition to everlasting memory in order to assure the prosperity of the eternal cycles. Four major time periods of royal pyramid construction exist (Figure 2.18). The construction of the largest pyramids occurred during the first phase (averaging 585,000 square meters), and subsequently decreased over time. The first step pyramid was built by Djoser in the desert plateaus on the west bank the Nile, towards the setting sun and, more importantly, near available limestone quarried for their construction (Figure 2.19). Djoser’s tomb was originally a mastaba, but it was expanded into a step-from with the addition of five sequentially smaller mastabas placed atop the original (Hellum 2007: 80;

Figure 2.18 The distribution of the four phases of royal pyramid construction over time. The average tomb size and pyramid style is indicated. Source: Author drawing.

Figure 2.19 Isometric view of the stepped pyramid complex of Djoser. Source: After Lehner (1997: 84–85).

70 Time Lehner 1997: 84; Verner 2001: 108–128). The pyramid has the appearance of a primeval hill, clad in polished white limestone, and was the tallest building in the world at 62-meters tall and a volume of 330,000 cubic meters of stone.  A complex of decorated ceremonial structures, oriented north–south, was built around the pyramid, a facsimile of his palatial complex from which he ruled in life (Roth 1993). They included a mortuary temple, a large courtyard, a series of buildings designed as a backdrop for the king’s Jubilee Festival, and an enclosing wall with a monumental gateway. The complex was extremely difficult to enter; false doorways lined the enclosing wall. The true entrance led into the large courtyard south of the pyramid, and one had to navigate through the complex to reach Djoser’s mortuary temple. Subterranean passages and galleries were placed 28 meters below the pyramid, tiled with blue faience to replicate reed matting. Storerooms contained over 40,000 storage vessels, and Djoser’s burial chamber was constructed of granite, originally sealed with a 3.5 ton stone block. The function of this complex was to provide a home for his ba spirit to recognize when traveling in neheh time to visits to the earthly plane; and served as a place to venerate Djoser’s spirit with post-burial rituals in order to succor it in perpetuity.  In the immediate generations following Djoser, pyramidal design followed a distinct evolutionary path towards architectural precision. Using trial and error, engineering designs, building materials, and construction techniques were improved with impressive results. Pyramids became grander, built with larger stone blocks and larger work crews. One of the most important innovators of pyramid design was the ruler Sneferu (4th Dynasty). Over the course of a 35 year reign, Sneferu constructed three pyramids (the Meidum, Bent, and Red pyramids), all of which reveal distinct stages of evolutionary design necessary to build larger and more aesthetic-looking pyramid tombs (Lehner 1997: 101–105; Mendelssohn 1974; Verner 2001: 183–189). The Red Pyramid (2,560 b.c.) marks the rise of the architecturally precise pyramid tomb, correcting earlier architectural weight bearing mistakes that resulted in the previously built Meidum and Bent pyramids to be unsuitable for use. It was a “true” and accurate quadrilateral pyramid structure with smoothed sides that rose to a triangular point, 105 meters high, with a volume of 1.6 million cubic meters. The pyramid was also placed at location with firmer bedrock than that of the Meidum Pyramid or Bent Pyramid, helping stabilize the structure. The use of white Tura limestone as façade material produced a lustrous white structure that served as the place of ascent for the king’s spirit, a beacon that the deceased soul would recognize and so thereby return. The façade limestone casing stones were tightly fit, and placed horizontally to help support and distribute weight, although these stone were cannibalized for medieval buildings in Cairo, leaving it with its distinctive red color today. The capstone was a stone pyramidion

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coated in gold or electrum (a mixture of gold and silver) leaf that reflected the light of the sun, much in the way of a mirror, in a bright and twinkling flash of light that would further attract the soul, as well as stand as an otherworldly marker for the many nearby Egyptian villages along the Nile. A magnificent house for both neheh eternal time and djet everlasting time. The Red Pyramid also had a large affiliated mortuary temple, placed on the east side of the pyramid instead of the 3rd Dynasty location on the north side. This new orientation was representative of the growing link between the pharaoh and the sun that began to take precedence over the older symbolic connotation of the North Star and the belief that the pharaoh joined the stars after death (Ikram 2003: 153–154). The Red Pyramid was also the first tomb to elaborate the symbolic threshold between eternal and everlasting time by initiating an east/west axis of the internal rooms and corridors, thus further isolating the inner chapel and false door (and the subsequent burial chamber) from the outer world (Assmann 2003). As with the sacramental church, movement along an axis signified a transition from a state of lesser grace to a heightened state of sacredness, a journey into sacred time of the eternal and the everlasting (Figure 2.20).  The largest and most famous examples of pyramid building were the pyramids built upon the Giza Plateau near modern day Cairo, and are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. Khufu (or Cheops) was the son and successor of Sneferu, and was responsible for the construction of Great Pyramid (circa 2589–2566 b.c.), a formidable labor project of 2.5 million cubic meters that surpassed any previous or subsequent construction project. It is recorded as one of the ancient wonders of the world by the epigramist, Antipater of Sidon (Paton 1917: IX.58): I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids.

Figure 2.20 Isometric view of the Red Pyramid complex of Sneferu at Dashur. Source: After Lehner (1997: 104).

72 Time His son Khafre and grandson build equally impressive pyramid tombs at Giza. The pyramid projects of the 5th and 6th Dynasties were markedly reduced in scale (the largest being 114,000 cubic meters), and constructed with a lesser quality mud brick or rubble core that eroded quickly once the outer casing of limestone was removed. Emphasis was placed upon the adjacent funerary temples that were highly decorated and elaborate, their ceilings being adorned with five-pointed stars, signifying the divine and eternal plane. Imagery focused upon the pharaoh as cosmic ruler, earthly monarch, royal subjugator, and divine presence. A hiatus of pyramid construction extended until the 12th Dynasty (circa 1991 b.c.) when the ruler Amenemhat I cannibalized stone from 4th Dynasty complexes to build his burial tomb at Lisht. This reuse certainly had practical considerations, but it may have also had symbolic importance by linking Amenemhat with the great rulers of the Old Kingdom. A total of seven pyramids were constructed during this dynasty, also with poor quality mud brick or rubble core design that eroded quickly. They were also relatively small, the pyramid of Amenemhat I being approximately 129,000 cubic meters, half the volume of Djoser’s Step Pyramid. Pyramid tombs were begun for a number of the 13th Dynasty rulers, but none appear to have been completed. After a hiatus of a thousand years, the royal pyramid tomb returned to prominence in neighboring Nubia, where a set of pyramids were constructed during the Napata and Meroë kingdoms (circa 1,000 b.c.–a.d. 300). Nubia was highly influenced by neighboring Egypt, and eventually conquered and reunified the Nile Valley in the 25th Dynasty (circa 760 b.c.). While it may appear that the Nubian kings simply copied Old Kingdom pyramid tomb styles, the Nubian style pyramids emulated a form of Egyptian private elite family pyramid that incorporated a forecourt and mortuary chapel (see Smith 2003: 130; Smith and Buzon 2014). These family or “private” pyramids were common during the New Kingdom, at a time when royal burial architecture was bifurcated into a public mortuary temple and a secret tomb that was placed at a distance in a hidden desert valley near Thebes. The Nubian pyramids no longer signified centralized royal power, but family prestige with royal primogeniture. The Nubian kings of Egypt chose to adopt a more “privatized” style of pyramid in order to negotiate complex historical relationships, neither simply assuming an Egyptian identity nor attempting to obliterate the memory of their former colonial domination by Egypt (Ambridge 2008) (Figure 2.21).  Piye, one of the initial Nubian kings, built this newer style of pyramid at the Upper Nile royal cemetery of el-Kurru, which contains 14 Nubian pyramid tombs as well as round gravel tumuli and mastabas (Ambridge 2008). Piye’s pyramid (K.17) measures approximately eight meters square and was significantly smaller and steeper than the Giza pyramids. A subterranean burial chamber lay beneath, covered with a corbelled stone roof.

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Figure 2.21 Isometric view of pyramid tomb of the Egyptian New Kingdom colonial administrator Siamun, located at Tombos, Nubia. Source: After Smith (2003: 140).

His remains were interred here in typical Nubian style, upon a bed platform placed upon a stone bench built in the center of the chamber. His body, however, was prepared in typical Egyptian fashion: embalmed with Canopic jars used to hold his vital organs. A small funerary chapel had been built over the descending staircase. Subsequent rulers moved the cemetery to Nuri, across the river, and the pyramid field there contains the tombs of 12 more kings and 52 queens and children, the last pyramid being built in 308 b.c. The largest pyramid at Nuri (circa 690 b.c.) measures 52 meters square, 45 meters tall, and 45,000 cubic meters. The most extensive Nubian pyramid cemetery is at Meroë (Hinkel 2000), which is located between the fifth and sixth cataracts of the Nile, where approximately 220 Nubian pyramids were constructed (Figure 2.22).

Figure 2.22 Isometric view to the northwest of pyramid BEG S 10 from Meroë. Source: After Hinkel (2000: 15).

74 Time Three different cemeteries at Meröe were utilized over the course of 400 years. The Nubian practice was to place these cemeteries east of the settlement rather than west towards the setting sun. The pyramids there were faced with cut sandstone blocks and had a rubble core interior. They ranged between ten and 30 meters high. Smaller pyramids housed the burials of lesser royal family members and were surrounded by the richly furnished graves and tombs of nobles and wealthy citizens. Subterranean multi-room burial chambers were carved with arched pillars and vaulted roofs. Carved reliefs of the ruler sitting upon a lion-throne, with the typical Egyptian perspective, were placed in the funerary chapels located by the entrance on the east end of pyramid. The primary Kushite god was a deity known as Apede-mak, a manifestation of Amun that was also associated with the moon. Often portrayed as a lion-headed man, he was depicted in temple reliefs holding weapons and prisoners or lions and elephants. (Figure 2.23). Antechambers contained wine and food storage vessels, as well as the bones of slaughtered oxen, camels, horses, and dogs. The westernmost inner chamber served as the burial vault, containing lavish items such as weaponry, riding tackle, jewelry, furniture, bronze lamps, glass, and pottery. These burial goods were not only of Egyptian manufacture, but Greek and Roman as well. The Meroë pyramids were significantly damaged by Dr. Giuseppe Ferlini, a treasure hunter bent on looting. Ferlini started to demolish several pyramids in 1834 with hired laborers and gunpowder explosives (Figure 2.24). He leveled the Pyramid of Queen Amanishakheto (Begarawiya North 6)

Figure 2.23 Carved relief depicting the god Apade-mak at the Merotic Lion Temple at Naqa. Notable for the visually balanced and equal treatment of both King Natakamani and Queen Amanatore, a rarity in Egypt. Source: Photo courtesy of Stuart Tyson Smith.

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Figure 2.24 Ruined pyramids at the north cemetery at Meroë. Photo courtesy of Stuart Tyson Smith.

down to its foundation stones, discovering gold and silver jewelry in the burial crypt (Carus 1842; Markowitz and Lacovara 1996: 3). The littered landscape of truncated pyramids and stone debris at the north cemetery is further testament to Fertini’s methods of lopping off the stone superstructures to get to the foundations below. When Meröe was destroyed in 350, the sacred pyramidal traditions that dated back to the Egyptian Old Kingdom came to an end. The Nubian use of pyramidal sacred time was meant to re-invoke the Egyptian cosmological order even as Egypt itself faded from power. Just as the Giza pyramids, the Nubian ones were employed with a specific set of scalar metaphors. They still towered over all other structures, as their flawless geometry reached towards the sun.  The Egyptian pyramid tomb and its affiliated mortuary temple was designed to enhance the metaphors of sacred time. As monumental architecture the pyramid tomb was designed to engulf the senses of the living in order to commemorate the dead and facilitate the transition to the spiritual. The overt spatial-cognitive sequences included the use of precise geometric proportions, surrounding walls, structures, subterranean burial chambers, inscriptions, paintings, and natural topography, to evoke the transcendent processes of both neheh and djet time. As a “spiritual gate” the pyramid tomb spatially contoured the figurative apogee of both the cyclical and eternalness of the Egyptian universe. The architectural and symbolic perfection of the static pyramidal architecture was replicated over and over by subsequent rulers and dynasties, offering an unprecedented level of continuity for the Egyptian experience as whole, and exemplifying a commonality of physical space associated with sacred time.

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Machu Picchu (god time) The explorer Hiram Bingham III was at the right place at the right time. He states: “It seemed like an unbelievable dream. Dimly, I began to realize that this wall and its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave were as fine as the finest stonework in the world. … What could this place be?” (Bingham 2003: 185). Yet it was no coincidence that he was able to discover the 15th century Incan citadel called Machu Picchu, a crowning achievement of a very successful career as a professor of Latin American history at Yale University. Bingham possessed a keen intellect, gushing optimism, and a relentless drive for success that had led him to explore the Peruvian Andes during the summer of 1911. Bingham had become interested in the Inca civilization of South America while visiting Chile and Peru as a delegate to the First Pan-American Scientific Congress. He became so enthused that, upon his return to Yale, Bingham convinced some of his classmates at the university to fund a joint American–Peruvian expedition to document Incan archaeological sites in the Cusco region, the former capital of the Incan empire. After consulting with his Peruvian colleagues and some local informants, Bingham departed for a high ridge in the Urubamba Valley in search of a city called Vitcos, the lost stronghold of the last Incan ruler, who had fled the Spanish subjugation of the Incas in 1535. Bingham departed Cusco in search for the ruins of Vitcos. He subsequently made the ascent to Machu Picchu, being assisted by a local farmer; Bingham (2003: 182–183) was so convinced that nothing would be found that he had neglected to pack a lunch: Leaving the stream, we now struggled up the bank through dense jungle, and in a few minutes reached the bottom of a very precipitous slop. For an hour and twenty minutes we had a hard climb … the view was simply enchanting. Tremendous green precipices fell away to the white rapids of the Urubamba below … On all sides were rocky cliffs. Beyond them cloud-capped, snow-covered mountains rose thousands of feet above us. Even with such exuberance, Bingham was unprepared for the discovery of what lay ahead. Machu Picchu was an important and impressive site, and he set out to blaze a trail so that his supplies and equipment could be carried to the top. He then proceeded to draw a detailed map and record his findings. Despite being impressed, Bingham was not convinced that it was the lost city of Vitcos. Once finished at Machu Picchu, Bingham continued searching, eventually discovering two other major sites, including Vitcos itself. In subsequent years, Bingham returned to Machu Picchu to begin excavations. If this was not Vitcos, then what was the purpose of Machu Picchu, and who had built it?

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Despite the public excitement and international publicity of Bingham’s discovery, Machu Picchu was a city that was never completely lost in the first place. Bingham subsequently asserted that the city was actually a preIncan fortress, but this hypothesis was proved incorrect—it was actually a hidden mountain retreat for the Incan aristocracy rather than a major city. Yet there are very few ancient monuments that evoke the mystery and spirituality that the mountain-scape of Machu Picchu offers. Thousands of visitors climb the mountain trail even today, to behold the power and majesty of this lofty city in the clouds (Figure 2.25). Machu Picchu was built as a royal estate by the first Incan emperor to serve as a retreat for Incan royalty; a place for religious ceremonies, imperial administration, and feasting during the summer months (syntheses include Burger and Salazar 2004; Hyslop 1990; Magli 2010; Reinhard 2007; Wright and Zegarra 2000). It is one of the few sites that survived the Spanish conquest and the looting of the subsequent centuries, making it an excellent location to experience the architectural ingenuity of the Incan stone workers. It was a three-day journey (80 kilometers) and a thousand meter elevation descent by foot from the Incan capital of Cuzco, nestled like a condor’s nest between two tall mountain peaks. Machu Picchu’s location was special because of its sacred geography and association with god time (Reinhard 2007: 50). It was intimately integrated with the Andean mountain landscape and a set of mountain peaks that were considered to be ancestral deities. The nearby mountains of Salcantay and Ausangate were thought to be particularly important progenitors of all mountains, protectors of good weather, and givers of fertility. Salcantay had cosmological connotations as well, being associated with the Southern

Figure 2.25 Machu Picchu to the north. Source: Photo courtesy of Pattie Rechtman.

78 Time Cross and the celestial place of orientation of the universe. Machu Picchu also had excellent views of more sacred mountains, both to the east and west. The mountain of Huayna Picchu, which sits upon the ridge line of Machu Picchu and towers over the city, is similarly endowed with sacred power. The nearby snow-fed river that flows below the site, had sacred connotations, following the pathway of the sun’s daily trajectory. Clearly the particular location of Machu Picchu—nestled amongst sacred mountains, waters, and along the sun’s passage, served as a particularly potent sacred monument. No historical records exist regarding Machu Picchu’s architectural design. It was built sometime around 1450. Approximately 200 stone foundations built with exquisitely carved granite stones survive today (Figure 2.26). The stones were placed without mortar or dry-laid (ashlar). The granite quarry used to build Machu Picchu was on-site, so there was no need to transport the material across long distances or up slopes. The heavier stones weighed as much as 50 tons, and were hewn right out of the rock. Ropes were used to lift the stones, many of which had small carved grooves for attachment. Machu Picchu is renowned for the many terraces that surround the lower precincts of the site. Terracing serves to prevent erosion, increase soil collection, and grow agricultural crops. Maize and potatoes were grown here for its residents, as maize served a special role in religious ceremonies. Stairways connect the plazas, terraces, and houses, and were often very steep given the mountain terrain. The terraced nature of Machu Picchu seems ideal as a defensive fortress. Its high location, steep entryway, and large walls are all conducive for security. No evidence exists that Machu Picchu served such a function; the Incas had conquered the area and the site may have been on a mountain pilgrimage path. Moreover, many of the walls and buildings were

Figure 2.26 Stonework at Machu Picchu. Source: Photo courtesy of Pattie Rechtman.

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placed to facilitate water runoff rather than defense, and the outer walls were designed as an enclosing wall rather than a cordon to keep people out. The buildings of Machu Picchu are rectangular in shape although many walls are not laid out straight, accommodating the slightly irregular shape of the building stones. Approximately 150 structures were built, serving as domestic buildings that housed the permanent residents of Machu Picchu (Figure 2.27). House walls taper from bottom to top, and have rounded corners and L-shaped support elements. Each is one-storied, but had a steeply pitched roof to repel rainfall; the wood and thatch roofing material has long since decayed. The streets held a drainage system of small crisscrossing channels that still functions. The royal haven is a section of high-status houses located to the east of Machu Picchu’s central plaza, which probably served as residences for an Incan ruler and his traveling retinue. It consists of three contiguous elite walled compounds, each arranged around an open patio. The houses vary in layout and size, and they are connected by narrow stone staircases. Small shrines are located atop or within carved bedrock niches. All told, over 100 elite residents could have been accommodated in these three compounds (Figure 2.28). Approximately 30 of the buildings at Machu Picchu were used for ritual purposes (roughly 20%). After entering through the gate at Machu Picchu, the trail leads up to what has been called the Sacred Plaza, located on the far western end of the residential quarter (Figure 2.27). The Plaza is surrounded by terraces that appear to have been used to accommodate celebrants rather than grow food. It was paved with white sand, and contains three important

Figure 2.27 Schematic map of Machu Picchu showing the relevant architectural areas. Source: After Hyslop (1990).

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Figure 2.28 View to the north of the Royal Haven and Sacred Plaza at Machu Picchu. The Gate is located in the lower left corner of the photo. Source: Photo courtesy of Pattie Rechtman.

buildings: (1) the Intihuatana stone; (2) the Temple of the Three Windows; and (3) the Main Temple. The Intihuatana stone (“hitching post of the sun”) represents the centerpiece of the Plaza. It is a carved boulder on the west of the Sacred Plaza, relating to the earth and its associated supernatural forces. Similarly carved boulders of this type are found near Cuzco. The Intihuatana is carved in the shape of two of the nearby sacred peaks, depending upon which angle you gaze at it. It is well positioned for astronomical observations, and seems to have been used to track the yearly passage of the sun and to reckon the timing of when the winter solstice rituals would take place. The Temple of the Three Windows sits on the east side of the Sacred Plaza and was constructed with large polished rocks. It has three uniquely large windows that look eastward towards the mountains and the river below. Excavations indicate the presence of intentionally broken liquid storage vessels, suggesting water ceremonies were performed here. The Principal Temple is located on the north side of the plaza and possesses three walls on one side that are open to the plaza. It too was constructed with large stone blocks. The temple contains trapezoidal wall niches as well as a stone altar (Figure 2.27). The Temple of the Sun sits at the highest point of Machu Picchu and is a curved structure that encloses a rock outcrop carved in the shape of a feline, most likely a puma, which was an important royal totemic image. It faces eastward, and possesses carved features that align the building to the rising sun during the summer solstice. The Temple and its associated features were a symbol of Incan cosmological order. A cave located beneath the Temple is correspondingly linked to the Incan underworld, the place of emerging ancestors and sacred water.

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In addition to the many ceremonial buildings, there are another 16 carved stone features throughout Machu Picchu. Other caves are present at Machu Picchu as well. The Temple of the Moon is a cave located below the summit of Huyana Picchu, and its entrance gazes out towards the equinox setting point of the sun. Intimachay is another cave, this one located on the western side of Machu Picchu, and was a place to observe the December solstice sunrise. A large carved piece of bedrock at its entrance, the Condor Stone, was designed to admit the rays of the rising sun for a brief moment before and after the winter solstice. Machu Picchu also contains 11 double-jam doorways (a doorway within a doorway), used for restricting entrance into the elite residence and sacred areas and oriented to allow sunlight to enter. Machu Picchu was a place of sacred geography—aligned with mountain, river, sun, and cave. Its architecture indicates that this refuge was constructed along a strict, formal set of Incan cosmological and religious guidelines, where spiritual presence and cohabitation was favored and actively sought. These temples, rock shrines, and caves were locations where the various ancestral spirits, oracles, and gods could be routinely consulted and consorted with. The Temple of the Sun was adjacent to the residential space of the royal haven, this spatial link emphasizing the emperor’s connection to the sun, as both a descendant and representative on earth. Here the emperor’s attentions could concentrate upon sun worship and astronomical observation. The sacred buildings and royal residences are distinct compared to the more mundane houses and terraces of the permanent residents of Machu Picchu. This contrast between sacred and secular reveals the social divisions of the residents. The tombs at Machu Picchu reveal that most of those buried there were farmers, stonemasons, and crafters (including metalsmiths), obliged to move there to serve the Machu Picchu conclave. One of the important prerogatives of imperial rulership was the ability to coopt corvée labor in order to meet the demands needed to build sacred architecture. Although located upon a secluded ridge, the very remoteness of Machu Picchu added to its cosmological value when juxtaposed with the crowded and hectic city of Cuzco, the nearby capital and population center of the Incas. Cuzco had over 40,000 residents, with another 200,000 living in the surrounding area. It was strategically placed at a natural crossroad of routes that lead off to neighboring regions, and laid out in the shape of a puma. It contained important administration buildings, palaces, and temples, the most elaborate quarter housing the temple to the sun god. Cuzco was treated as a sacred site by the Incas from the onset, when the first Incan emperor consecrated it as the symbolic center of the Incan universe, imbuing it with sacred power. It hosted over three hundred sacred shrines and outcrops, places that encouraged the populace to commune with the spiritual world, emulating and reifying the role of the royalty to bridge the mortal and immortal worlds. This only increased the ceremonial potency of Machu Picchu, which was similarly built and imbued with cosmological symbols that made it an important pilgrimage site for the divine representatives upon this earth.

82 Time Machu Picchu was approached from the Inca heartland along the Inca Trail, a ceremonial journey leading through a number of settlements, rest areas, and shrines. It creates a journey that leads from the chaotic secular world to one that is sacred. The site was approached from the river below, passing agricultural terraces that led to the gateway. Unlike most Incan settlements, Machu Picchu was an enclosed space whose wall physically separated the sacred world from the outside. Once admitted, the pilgrim journeyed through a secular zone that served to disorient the visitor, who then approached the Sacred Plaza and the carved stone of the Intihuatana, placed upon its steep terrace. This sequence of movement represents a very specific regressive path from secular to sacred, from natural to supernatural, and from present to past—conveying to the pilgrim a memorialized sense of place that directly envelops and enfolds them into the Incan cosmology. This divine interplay was orchestrated and directed by a monumental space that facilitated a spiritual journey not easily obtained in Cuzco. Of all the monuments that tracked celestial time, Machu Picchu is perhaps the most impressive. It is literally nestled among the clouds between sacred mountains, an axis mundi for the wayfinding movements as various celestial events unfolded across the sky. The experience of “tying the sun” at the precise moment it touches the top of the Intihuatana stone was a fusion of sky with earth, cosmic with earthly, and life with death. It was a merger of the proximal present with the distal past, of mortal time with god time. In the darkened Andean sky the Incan elite could slip from mortal time into god time, and experience the omnipotence of the expansive universe around them. Time and space would become limitless and unbounded. The spatial and locational characteristics of Machu Picchu are impressive in typical monumental fashion. Despite its overpowering sense of space and time, it was an Incan elite (and now the tourist) that ultimately decides on what to take away from the horizon of meanings offered to them. Perhaps they assimilate nothing, allowing none of the proscriptive intent of Machu Picchu’s builders to override their personal experiences. Or perhaps they become joined with its symbolic and objectified dimensions to fully comprehend its ancient meanings. Hiram Bingham experienced such a rapturous juncture when he entered Machu Picchu’s portal without bringing his lunch. Such a merger is also still sought after by the many tourists and spiritual pilgrims who visit Machu Picchu today. They pursue a glimpse of a mysterious juncture that overrides their normal mortal existence.

Stone Mountain (god time) The governor of Virginia spoke to a hopeful crowd in attendance for the dedication of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in June of 1923. Stone Mountain, located on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, is the site of a commemorative monument meant to honor three heroes of the American Confederacy. Perched upon a platform on the cliff side, E. Lee Trinkle

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bellowed his opening remarks through a megaphone to an attentive audience on the ground below, and said “We shall have erected a monument which will outlive the centuries … our heroes caved in stone, will stand on guard—the custodians of imperishable glory, the sentinels of time” (Gallagher 2006: 188). He then dedicated the ceremonial chisels and passed them to the chief sculptor, the famous Gutzon Borglum who later carved the presidential busts on Mount Rushmore. Borglum lowered himself onto the sheer rock surface and began hammering on what was to become the largest high relief sculpture in the world. The crowd below cheered. Trinkle’s esteemed words regarding Stone Mountain, with its colossal granite façade is an example of how the kaleidoscope of monumental metaphoric representations and spatial-cognitive sequences operate. His aspiration for Stone Mountain was to create a monument that would contour time with such magnitude that it would convey important social meanings for generations to come. Nearly a century later, Stone Mountain and its carved Confederate Memorial has become a contested place of Southern Euro-White unity in the United States. Built as a monumental response to the ongoing civic memorialization of the northern Union states, it became part of a heated national debate regarding Confederate commemoration after a series of events between 2011 and 2017 that have linked the pursuit of white cultural unity with the promotion of white supremacy. Many communities in the American south, from New Orleans to Charlottesville, Virginia, are grappling with approximately 700 monuments dedicated in public spaces to the Confederacy. The issues of the debate revolve around the historical accuracy of these monuments, the political agenda of those who erected them, and the coopting of public space for commemoration by private groups. The nature of historical time has traditionally focused on the process of periodization, the categorizing of the past into discrete events or blocks of time, facilitating stable and convenient analyses of the past. However, historical time may also be explored by studying domains of knowledge, a network approach of relations that span space and time that, when combined with traditional methodologies such as the use of appropriate sources, develop a deeper awareness of the nature of knowledge production and historical structure (e.g., Jordheim 2012; Koselleck 2000, 2004; Oakeshott 1991; Wilson 1983). In this approach knowledge accusation happens both individually and collectively, and includes exposure to single events, repetitive occurrences, and long-term system changes. Any given domain of history is therefore complex and multilayered, homogeneous or linear, where historical time has temporal layers of different origins and durations, and operates in the past, present, and future. In this way, a simple historical analysis of Stone Mountain requires not only parsing the domain of heroic time associated with war commemoration in the United States, but understanding how commemorative monuments are contested heroic spaces operating within the fabric of historical time.

84 Time The most distinctive aspect of historical time in modern Western culture is the way we saturate ourselves with moments of commemoration—everything including the collectables of nostalgia, specific days of remembrance or dedication, and large commemorative locations such as museums and libraries. Even our recreation is embedded in commemoration—­battlefield reenactments, historic tours, zoological gardens, and historical theme parks. It is with clarity that historian Andreas Huyssen states: “the issue of remembrance and forgetting touches to the core of Western identity, however, multifaceted it may be” (Huyssen 1995: 251). Not only do modern Americans and Europeans welcome acts of commemoration, but we have also pioneered new forms within the last century, particularly those associated with tragedy, violence, and shame (e.g., battlefield monuments, Holocaust monuments, and fallen hero memorials). The domain of knowledge associated with monumental commemoration of tragedy is complex. The fledging United States was wary of commemorating any individual, even the venerable president and general George Washington. John Quincy Adams, as the 6th president of the United States, made this remark during the 22nd United States Congress in 1831: “Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medals. It bears the head of no man on a coin” (New York Times, March 14, 1875, Reviews, p. 5). Adams’ tone reflects the sentiments of the day; monuments were obsolete and a vestigial accoutrement of imperial European monarchies. However, patriotic monuments began to be constructed in earnest that were dedicated to the dead of the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812. One example of the commemoration of tragedy is the Fort Griswold’s Groton Battle Monument in Connecticut, constructed in 1840 (Figure 2.29). It is a simple, elegant, and sleek granite obelisk that stands 40 meters high, with a concise inscription at its base that reads: THIS MONUMENT was erected under the patronage of the state of Connecticut a.d. 1830, and in the 55th year of the independence of the U.S.A. IN MEMORY OF THE BRAVE PATRIOTS, who fell in the massacre at Fort Griswold near this spot on the 6th of Sept. a.d. 1781, when the British under the command of THE TRAITOR BENEDICT ARNOLD, burnt the towns of New London and Groton and spread desolation and woe throughout this region. The bold emphasis was placed by the dedicators to emphasize: commemoration, collective patriotism, and the treacherous acts of Benedict Arnold, former Continental Army general and friend of George Washington. The Groton Monument marks patriotism with a curious twist, by emphasizing

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Figure 2.29 The Groton Monument, Groton, Connecticut. Source: Photo © Jim M. Hollister.

a tragic event and calling out a traitor. The plaque could have easily named Colonel William Ledyard instead, the defending commander who was executed with his own saber after repulsing three separate attacks by the British. Instead, the Groton Monument marks a sanctified place of heroic struggle, deserving recognition because it ushers in a distinct phase of American (and European) monumentality associated with the historical time of tragedy.  The monumental commemoration of tragedy accelerated following the American Civil War (1861–1865), of which there is an astonishing body scholarly work (see for example Barton 2001; Foote 1997; Kattago 2001; Nelson and Olin 2003). The wreck, calamity, and loss of life during the Civil War were without parallel in the history of warfare; the mismatch of modern weapons and outdated military tactics led to significant bloodshed and death and, in turn, led to an astonishing number of civil war memorials. Some of the earliest monuments were erected upon the battlefields themselves. For example, the decisive battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is one of the most memorialized and monumentalized pieces of landscape in the world (Foote 1997: 122; Isbell 2006; LaFantasie 2008: 209), and includes the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery before the war was even over, marking an initial step in the sanctification of the battlefield.

86 Time The Soldier’s National Monument found there is a simple granite column with four white marble statues; allegorical interpretations of War, Peace, History, and Plenty. Another statue representing the Genius of Liberty sits atop of the column. It sites at the center of row upon row of tombstones, rippling outward like waves in the water from a fallen stone. Standing within this heroic landscape conveys a distinctive moment of historical time, a grand reminder of collective sacrifice and democracy. Other shrines and memorials began to appear at Gettysburg as veterans from both sides returned for reunions and commissioned and financed their own monuments to their fallen comrades (Figure 2.30). Over 900 monuments exist today: statues, plaques, columns, and obelisks. Over time, Gettysburg changed from a pristine field of national tragedy to a place for individual grieving, a place that was extremely personalized and intimate compared to earlier forms of collective commemoration. As Civil War veterans aged and passed on, Gettysburg began to serve more as a place for social reconciliation, where both Northerner and Southerner meet and honor mutual courage, a message that they themselves wanted to convey to future generations (rather than the disharmonic messages common in the Reconstructionist era). 

Figure 2.30 New York Monument, Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Source: Photo from Carol M. Highsmith’s America / Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-highsm-12471.

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As the Gettysburg battlefield reveals, there is a shift in how monumental metaphors of time are used, emphasizing the individual over the collective, accentuating personal grieving over public display, and no longer communicated only the “top-down” messages of official historical time. A new sense of freedom emerged regarding commemoration and memory as smaller commemorative societies, many formed by women activists, began to construct monuments (O’Leary 1999; Whites 2005). Take, for example, the DeKalb County Civil War Memorial, located in Sycamore, Illinois, one of countless monuments across the country that may be found in just about every town, large or small. The Memorial sits in the city’s most prominent public space, in the courtyard located in front of the county courthouse (there is no record of who designed or sculpted it). At its center is a 15 meter tall obelisk upon which sits a single Civil War soldier cast in copper, holding a saber in one hand and a flag in another (Figure 2.31). The base of the memorial is made of granite, and surmounted with two two-meter copper statues. On the right is a Union soldier, dressed in a long coat and cape and holding a rifle. On the left is a Confederate soldier, dressed in a brimmed hat and short jacket with a rifle. The observer must

Figure 2.31 The DeKalb Country Civil War Memorial, located in Sycamore, Illinois. Source: Author photo.

88 Time face the courthouse in order to see the front of the monument and read its dedicatory plaque: DEKALB COUNTY to the memory of the men who fought to preserve the union: “that the nation shall under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. Side plaques list the specific battlegrounds that the DeKalb soldiers participated in, and include more honorific slogans such as “Peace Restored” and “Slavery Abolished.” Built 32 years after the Civil War, the DeKalb monument reveals a spirit of reconciliation felt by local veterans who were advanced in age and sought to document the legacy of their courage and contribution to the collective notions of democracy. The presence of both Confederate and Union symbols speaks an individual (or regionally collective) desire for reconciliation, communicating metaphors of time that speak of the past, in the present, and to those in the future. Stone Mountain, on the other hand, communicates a very different view of Civil War historical time. Unlike those personalized memorials erected by Confederate veterans themselves directly following the war, Stone Mountain was one of hundreds of Confederate monuments erected in public squares and on courthouse lawns in the first two decades of the 20th century, and again in the 1960s (Figure 2.32). These monuments were

Figure 2.32 A 150-year timeline of public Confederate construction. Source: Data from Gunter and Kizzire (2006).

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erected because the southern states of the former Confederacy were allowed to tell their own story of their defeat in the Civil War, a movement called the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, endorsing the virtues of the antebellum South and describing a heroic defeat after a struggle against great odds. The Lost Cause not only glorifies Civil War defeat, but also the successful resistance to cultural integration of the post-war Reconstruction period when reactionary forces—including the white supremacist organization of the Ku Klux Klan—using violence and politics to restore white supremacy in the South. Because of this enriched and contested commemorative context, Stone Mountain serves as an excellent example for highlighting the way we make sense of monumental space using historical time, not only for Trinkle’s early 20th century dedicatory audience—but also for those who experience it today.  The Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial is now the centerpiece of the 3,200-acre Stone Mountain Park (syntheses include: Essex 2002; Freeman 1997; Hudson and Mirza 2011; Gallagher 2006; Zakos 2015; Figure 2.33). The first to call for the placing a monument upon Stone Mountain was Francis Richnor, a Confederate Civil War physician who wrote, “May we not mate the mountain and the man – the granite dome and the great Georgian? One in their grandeur!” in an 1869 verse honoring Alexander Stephens, the Georgian Vice President of the Confederacy (Freeman 1997: 55). During the flurry of cemetery and battlefield commemoration in the decades following the Civil War, the United Daughters of the Confederacy formed in 1894 with its primary charter to memorialize Confederate heroes. In 1912, C. Helen Plane, a stalwart 85-year-old war widow and member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, became president of the newly formed Stone Mountain Memorial Foundation and recruited Gutzon Borglum to the cause. Borglum was so impressed with the stone cliffs that he drafted a proposal to carve the Confederate general Robert E. Lee leading a veritable army of up to a thousand high-relief frieze figures of marching

Figure 2.33 Contemporary view to the south of Stone Mountain. Source: Google Earth.

90 Time soldiers; all facing east, all facing the rising sun. Beneath the army at the base of the escarpment, Borglum also proposed a 98-meter wide colonnaded hall that extended eighteen meters into the mountain. His timetable and budget was eight years and $250,000. Daunted by the cost, but captivated by the sweeping vision of Borglum, Plane and her association sought funding, which was not procured in sufficient quantities until 1923.  Helen Plume wanted to commemorate the revitalized Klu Klux Klan organization within the carved mural, since Stone Mountain had become the annual gathering place for the emboldened Klu Klux Klan leadership (Gallagher 2006: 182). Borglum in fact joined the Klan himself, but after completing the head of Lee, left the project to assume the Mount Rushmore commission because he had not been paid. Borglum’s carving was blasted from the cliff face, and a new design was begun; however, the project languished until 1958 when the State purchased the property and the Georgia Legislature underwrote its funding. The carving was finally completed and a memorial plaza was constructed at the base of the mountain, which included a reflecting pool and statuary. The park was opened in 1970, but when Stone Mountain was designated as a venue for the 1996 Summer Olympics, all symbolic and textual references to the Klan were removed. 

Figure 2.34 Stone Mountain Monument of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Source: Photo © John Rosemeyer.

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The final design was reduced from 700 to three figures (those of Jefferson Davis, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, Figure 2.34), and the memorial chamber was replaced by a smaller freestanding memorial hall with a large green and a commemorative walkway dedicated to the secession of the Confederate states from the Union. This walkway extends down both sides of the lawn and has 13 viewing terraces, commemorating each state that seceded (Figure 2.35). Along the walkway are two smaller memorial plazas, each containing a bronze statue named Valor and Sacrifice.5 Ironically, the purposes of the Confederate Memorial have become subsequently diffused. Stone Mountain Park now hosts four million visitors lured there for amusement rather than historical reflection, enticed by a set of added theme-park attractions that include historic buildings, a summit skyway, movie theater, golf course, and themed playground. The messages of racial conflict, Reconstructionist tensions, or the Lost Cause are muted or even replaced by the lure of commemorative nostalgia and consumerism (Gallagher 2006: 191). Most illustrative of this change is that, during summer and fall evenings, a digital laser light display (Figure 2.36) and an event encouraging visitors to picnic upon the Memorial Lawn, is projected

Figure 2.35 Plan view of the Memorial Lawn with the locations of the Valor and Sacrifice statues and the walkways that reveal flag terraces for thirteen states, eleven of which formally seceded. Source: Author drawing.

92 Time

Figure 2.36 The laser light spectacular at Stone Mountain. Source: Photo © Jimmy Baikovicius.

directly upon the relief of Jackson, Davis, and Lee (Zakos 2015). Instead of following proscribed metaphors of movement along the commemorative walkway, visitors now experience more hackneyed progress, accidently encountering a State dedicatory plaque as they cross the Lawn, hunting for food concessions or setting up their chairs and blankets prior to the laser show (Gallagher 2006: 188). Formerly an unabashed symbol of the Confederacy, the relief now serves as a backdrop for various superimposed images, including those of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; the figure being and paradoxically mentioned by King in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. He said, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.” So what does the contested space of the Stone Mountain Memorial mean in regards to the monumental spatial-cognitive metaphors of historical time? Stone Mountain has certainly become a montage of clashing prospective and retrospective memories (Figure 2.37). Prospectively, Stone Mountain was conceived as part of a coordinated response to the groundswell of memorial building by the northern Union states. It was built to sustain a burgeoning heroic cause, and rearrange historical time. It was a visual merger of mountain and sky, Lost Cause effigy and ageless stone, a concordance of

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Figure 2.37 The conceptual path of making and reading Stone Mountain. Source: Author drawing.

the proximal present with the distal past. As the Atlanta-Constitution (May 26, 1914, p. 8) observed: Here is a monument reared by nature herself … gazing forever across the ages with its story of one of the most remarkable events that ever illuminated a people’s history. … Certainly no cause, lost or living, or held in the crypts of memory, could have a monument boasting such commanding attributes. Stone Mountain blends the historical time of the American heroic past in a highly polarized fashion. Its meaning as a place of the Lost Cause is undergoing renegotiation, prompted by the addition of the tourist attractions. Instead of an unsullied Lost Cause historical time, visitors now experience a commodified historical experience, or no historical experience at all. Tourists represent the primary group that experience Stone Mountain, and their understanding of historical time varies based upon either a single exposure to Stone Mountain, repetitive exposure to this or other war memorials, or experience with the long term system changes of neo-Confederacy. This clash of memories will continue, as best stated by historian Victoria J. Gallagher (2006: 193): “without the acknowledgment and documentation of progress, of social change, of history and memory that it provides, Stone Mountain … instead would continue to be polarizing and polarized.” The palimpsest of spatial sequences and cognitive metaphors experienced at Stone Mountain ground social and economic consequences within physical space, creating social formations, and dislocating and rearranging particular

94 Time social messages. Similar to other monuments, Stone Mountain aggressively awes and inspires us with its size and complexity, yet is malleable in the way that it flaunts a horizon of distinct social processes. At times, this horizon fails to evoke any historical meanings at all, allowing our own personal lived experiences to overrule the proscriptive intent of its builders, or the added retrospective meanings more recently conceived. This horizon represents an interplay between the symbolic and objectified dimensions of memory and historical time that, at certain junctures, unite in momentary union. And such unions are powerful indeed.

Notes 1 From a late 7th century b.c. stele from Corcyra, Greece. Literally: σᾶµα τόδε Ἀρνιάδα· χαροπὸς τόνδ’ ὄλεσεν Ἄρες βαρνάµενον παρὰ ναυσὶν ἐπ’ Ἀραθθοιο ρhοϝαῖσι, πολλὸν ἀριστεύ{τ}οντα κατὰ στονόϝεσαν ἀϝυτάν. 2 Literally: “Aliquoties mortuus sum sed sic nunquam.” 3 Literally: “Her sputedlad seo gecpydraednes de.” 4 Utterance 600 para 1653. Literally: “tem de en ek o ek ha Merenr’a, ha kat ten ha mer pen em o ka, unen ka en Merenr’a im ef rudj en djet djet.” 5 Interestingly, statues of mounted soldiers, also called Valor and Sacrifice, frame the entrance to the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Arlington Country, Virginia. These statues were commissioned and sculpted by Leo Friedlander in 1929. Due to budget issues they were not cast or erected until 1951.

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Bandmann, Günter. 2005. Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Barrie, Thomas. 1996. Spiritual Path, Sacred Place. Boston: Shambhala. Barton, Craig. 2001. Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Bath, Joyce, and J. Stephen Athens. 1990. “Prehistoric social complexity on Pohnpei: The Saudeleur to Nahnmwarki transition.” In: Recent Advances in Micronesian Archaeology: Selected Papers from the Micronesian Archaeology Conference, September 9–12, 1987, edited by R. L. Hunter-Anderson, 275–290. Mangilao: University of Guam Press. Bernart, Luelen. 1977. The Book of Luelen, Translated by John L. Fischer, Saul H. Reisneberg, Margorie G. Whiting. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Bingham, Hiram. 2003 [1952]. Lost City of the INCAS. London: Phoenix. Bodel, John. 2001. “Epigraphy and the ancient historian.” In: Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions, edited by John Bodel, 38–39. London: Routledge. Boyle, L. E. 1955. “Oculus Sacerdotis” and some other works of William of Pagula.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5:81–110. Bradley, Richard. 1998. The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in the Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. London: Routledge. Burger, Richard L., and Lucy C. Salazar, eds. 2004. Machi Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Byron, George Gordon Byron. 1854. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. New edition. London: Murray. Carroll, Maureen. 2006. Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe, Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Carus, C. G. 1842. “The Nubian pyramids.” The Dialog 3:316–326. Chapelot, Jean, and Robert Fossier. 1985. The Village and House in the Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press. Colvin, H. 2000. “The origin of chantries.” Journal of Medieval History 26(2):163–173. Daniell, Christopher. 1997. Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550. London: Routledge. Daniell, Christopher. 2018. “Later medieval death and burial.” In: The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, edited by Christopher Gerrard, Alejandra Gutiérrez, 856–867. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deetz, James, and Edwin S. Dethlefsen. 1967. “Death’s head, cherub, urn and willow.” Natural History 76(4):29–37. Dobbin, Jay. 2011. Summoning the Powers Beyond: Traditional Religions in Micronesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Dodson, Aiden, and Sailma Ikram. 2008. The Tomb in Ancient Egypt. London: Thames and Hudson. Duncan-Jones, Richard. 1982. The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Effors, Bonnie. 2003. Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

96 Time Essex, J. 2002. “The ‘real south starts here’: Whiteness, the confederacy and commodification at Stone Mountain.” Southeastern Geographer 42(2):211–227. Faulkner, Raymond. 1969. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foote, Kenneth E. 1997. Shadowed Ground. Austin: University of Texas Press. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. 1986. “Of other spaces.” Diacritics 16(1):22–27. Freeman, David B. 1997. Carved in Stone: The History of Stone Mountain. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Froissart, Jean, and Geoffrey Brereton. 1968. Chronicles, Part One, Translated by Geoffrey Brereton. London: Penguin. Gallagher, Victoria J. 2006. “Displaying race: Cultural projection and public memory.” In: Rhetorics of Display, edited by Lawrence J. Prelli, 177–196. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gies, Frances, and Joseph Gies. 1990. Life in a Medieval Village. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Gunter, Booth, and Jammie Kizzire. 2016. Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy. Southern Poverty Law Center. Habenstein, Robert W., and William M. Lamers. 1955. The History of American Funeral Directing. Milwaukee: Bulfin. Hanlon, David L. 1988. Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890. Pacific Islands Monograph 5. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Hansen, Peter Allan. 1983. Carmina epigraphica graeca saeculorum VIII - V a.Chr.n, Texte und Kommentare. Berolini; Novi Eboraci: de Gruyter. Hartig, Kate V., and Kevin M. Dunn. 1998. “Roadside memorials: Interpreting new deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales.” Australian Geographical Studies 36(1):5–20. Hellum, Jennifer. 2007. The Pyramids. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Hinkel, Friedrich W. 2000. “The royal pyramids of Meroe. Architecture, construction and reconstruction of a sacred landscape.” Sudan & Nubia 4:1–24. Holloway, Julian. 2003. “Make-believe: Spiritual practice, embodiment, and sacred space.” Environment and Planning A 35(11):1961–1974. Hudson, Paul Stephen, and Lora Pond Mirza. 2011. Atlanta’s Stone Mountain: A Multicultural History. Charleston, SC: The History Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amenisa. New York: Routledge. Hyslop, John. 1990. Inka Settlement Planning. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ikram, Sailma. 2003. Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt. London: Longman. Isbell, Timothy T. 2006. Gettysburg: Sentinels of Stone. University Press of Mississippi. Jordheim, Helge. 2012. “Against periodization: Kosselleck’s theory of multiple temporalities.” History and Theory 51(2):151–171. Kattago, Siobhan. 2001. Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity. Westport, CT: Praeger. Kieckhefer, Richard. 2004. Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. 2008. Sacred Power, Sacred Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knott, Kim. 2005. The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. London: Equinox.

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Kolb, Michael J. 2012. “The genesis of monuments in island societies.” In: The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, edited by Michael E. Smith. London: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2000. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Translated by Todd Samuel Presner, Kirstin Behnke, Jobst Welge. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: One the Semantics of Historical Time, Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Kunhardt, Dorthey M. and Philip B. Kundhardt Jr. 1965. Twenty days. New York: Harper & Row. LaFantasie, Glenn W. 2008. Gettysburg Heroes: Perfect Soldiers, Hallowed Ground. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lehner, Mark. 1997. The Complete Pyramid. London: Thames and Hudson. Luciano, Dana. 2007. Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth Century America. New York: New York University Press. Magli, Giulio. 2010. “At the other end of the sun’s path: A new interpretation of Machi Picchu.” Nexus Network Journal 12(2):321–341. Markowitz, Yvonne, and Peter Lacovara. 1996. “The Ferlini treasure in archaeological perspective.” Jarce 33:1–9. McAnany, Patricia A. (Ed.). 2004. K’axob: Ritual, Work, and Family in an Ancient Maya Village (Vol. 22). Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. McCoy, Mark D., Helen A. Alderson, and Adam Thompson. 2015. “A new archaeological field survey of the site of Nan Madol, Pohnpei.” Rapa Nui Journal 29(1):5–22. Mendelssohn, Kurt. 1994. The Riddle of the Pyramids. Westport, CT: Praeger. Mercer, Samuel A. B. 1952. The Pyramid Texts. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Morgan, William N. 1988. Prehistoric Architecture in Micronesia. Austin: University of Texas Press. Morris, Ian. 1992. Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity, Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Louis P. 2008. The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Nelson, Robert S., and Margaret Rose Olin. 2003. Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oakeshott, Michael. 1991. On History and Other Essays. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. O’Leary, Cecilia Elizabeth. 1999. To Die for: The Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Paton, W. R., ed. 1917. The Greek Anthology: The Declamatory Epigrams, Vol. 3, book 9. Cambridge, MA: Loeb House. Rainbird, Paul. 1999. The Archaeology of Micronesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rainbird, Paul. 2007. The Archaeology of Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reinhard, Johan. 2007. Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Arcahaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Riesenberg, S. H. 1968. The Native Polity of Ponape. Vol. 10, Contributions to Anthropology. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press.

98 Time Roth, Ann Macy. 1993. “Social change in the fourth Dynasty: The spatial organization of pyramids, tombs, and cemeteries.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 30:33–55. Russell, Josiah C. 1972. Population in Europe. In C. M. Cipolla (Ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. I: The Middle Ages. Glasgow: Collins/Fontana. Salzman, Louis Francis. 1992. Building in England down to 1540: A Documentary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saul, Nigel. 2009. English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, Robert A. 2003. The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seikel, Katherine. 2011. “Mortuary contexts and social structure at Nan Madol, Pohnpei.” The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 6(3):442–460. Sharf, Frederic A. 1961. “Cemetery and American sculpture: Mount Auburn.” Art Quarterly 24(1):80–88. Sherlock, Peter. 2008. Monuments and Memory in Early England. Alterhsot, Hampshire: Ashgate. Shiner, Larry E. 1972. “Sacred space, profane space, human space.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40(4):425–436. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1987. To Take Place: Towards Theory in Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Stuart Tyson. 2003. Wretched Kush: Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt’s Nubian Empire. London: Routledge. Smith, Stuart Tyson, and Michele Buzon. 2014. “Identity, commemoration, and remembrance in colonial encounters: Burials at Tombos during the Egyptian New Kingdom Nubian empire and its aftermath.” In: Remembering and Commemorating the Dead: Recent Contributions in Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Analysis from the Ancient Near East, edited by Benjamin W. Porter, Alexis T. Boutin, 187–217. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Stalley, R. A. 1999. Early Medieval Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thursby, Jacqueline S. 2006. Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. 1978. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Knopf. Verner, Mirislov. 2001. The Pyramid: The Mystery Culture, and Science of Egypt’s Great Monuments. New York: Grove Press. Verner, Miroslav. 2013. Temple of the World: Sanctuaries, Cults, and Mysteries of Ancient Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Watkins, Rev. C. F. 1867. The Basilica and The Basilican Church of Brixworth. London: Rivingtons. Welty, Eurdora. 1998. One Writer’s Beginning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whites, LeeAnn. 2005. Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. New York: Macmillan. Williams, Howard. 2006. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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3

Movement

Giovanni Battista Belzoni lived an astonishing life. Luck had brought Belzoni to Egypt shortly after the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, where he became an explorer, opportunist, and acquisitor of Egyptian antiquities. He is known for his removal to England of the seven ton bust of Ramesses II, and being the first to penetrate one of the great pyramids of Giza (Belzoni 1820: 270–271), where he wrote: I walked slowly two or three paces, and then stood still to contemplate the place where I was. Whatever it might be, I certainly considered myself in the center of that pyramid, which from time immemorial had been the subject of the obscure conjectures of many hundred travelers, both ancient and modern. Belzoni wrote his memoirs and displayed his finds to considerable popular and critical acclaim in London (Fagan 1996: 75–78; Hume 2011); a time of revived popular interest in ancient Egypt that led to a frenzy called “Egyptomia,” a fascination with ancient Egyptian culture that was expressed in contemporary literature, architecture, visual art, even political discourse about national identity and race. While his rivals eventually forced him to flee Egypt for his life (and subsequently led to his untimely death while traveling to Timbuktu), Belzoni’s discoveries served to fuel the contemporary imagination and memory of a land of mystique, romance, and history. By modern standards his work would be considered tomb robbing, but such dubious undertakings were merely reflexive of the times and the long-standing demand (and therefore profit) for peddlers of ancient Egyptian artifacts (Figure 3.1). Following Belzoni’s monumental impulses, it seems natural to explore the second spatial-cognitive sequence, metaphors of movement. In conjunction

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Figure 3.1 Graffiti at the ruins of the Roman temple of Jupiter, Baalbek, Lebanon. Source: Author photo.

with time, a monument also mediates movement by spatially directing how people journey and interact together, actions that evoke the cognitive schema of source-path-goal. A funeral procession, entering a gateway, a pilgrimage—all orient and demark real and imagined places through movement that enable observers to “make sense” of a monument. Monumental movements, according to the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, create agevalue, the aura of nostalgia and authenticity that surrounds an object of maturity. He notes (1982: 32–33, 21): “Age-value manifests itself immediately through visual perception and appeals directly to our emotions,” and that “every human activity and every human fate of which we have evidence or testimony can without exception claim historical value.” Any given monumental space offers commentary about society, casting social ideals and principles onto the landscape in which they stand, transforming the private actions and behaviors of visitors into movements of the collective public. It is an assembled spatial story that creates collective narrative through three types of journeying: (1) encoding; (2) performance; and (3) way-finding. Encoding is the act of physical construction that captures and records a history. It is the rendering of meanings into stone, the construction

102 Movement of walls and other architectural elements that formalize movement in durable fashion. Encoding employs space in a very unique way to forge the consciousness and movements of the collective public. Performance includes the actions of public spectacle; the funeral processions, sacrificial rituals, and commemorative ceremonies that reconstruct spatial history (see (Bell 1992: 98–99; Connerton 1989; DeMarrais 2014; Gilibert 2011; Halbwachs 1980; Inomata and Coben 2006; Insoll 2009; Joyce 2005; Tringham 2000:131). The movement and space utilization of codified monuments enacts shared social practices that unify relationships, ideas, and values among people. The durable architecture and design continuity of a monument conveys a sense of permanence in the phenomenology of everyday life not found in other places. Wayfinding is movement that uses spatial information to orient and navigate the individual within and between places. It proceeds along paths of observation and integrates knowledge laterally rather than vertically, constructing spatial stories and forms of narrative understanding that proceed from a part to a whole (Ingold 2000: 229; Lefebvre 1991: 225; Tilley 1994: 28). Wayfinding includes such social actions as pilgrimages, journeying, and other motions in and around a monument, movements that convey meanings by crossing thresholds, experiencing geometric principles, or mapping relationships. The monuments discussed in this chapter each explicitly examine the three spatial-cognitive metaphors associated with movement. Although monumental metaphors of movement are closely associated with spatialcognitive sequences of time, my intent is to illustrate how six monuments best highlight the use of movement to convey social meanings. They are: (1) the National Mall of Washington D.C.; (2) the medieval Gothic Cathedral; (3) the ancient Forum Romanum; (4) the palaces of Minoan Greece; (5) the ancient Egyptian temple of Karnak; and (6) Stonehenge. The National Mall and the Roman Forum best highlight those monuments designed to implement movements of encoding, conveying meanings associated with civic identity. Both the Gothic Cathedral and the Minoan Palace created and adjudicated performance movements for the pilgrim and worshiper. Karnak and Stonehenge represent examples of monuments associated with wayfinding movements.

National Mall (encoding) Anthony Trollope was an English novelist of the Victorian era who, upon visiting Washington D.C, the capital of the United States, quipped, “I have much faith in the American character, but I cannot believe either in Washington city or in the Washington Monument. The boast made has been too loud, and the fulfillment yet accomplished has been too small!” (Trollope 1863: 20). He was expecting to be inspired by the capital of a nation whose influence was growing, similar to the magnificence of 19th century Berlin, London, or Paris. However, the District of Columbia had

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very modest beginnings. Its ceremonial center, the National Mall, had been largely ignored. In fact, the first federally commissioned monuments were the 40 milestones placed to establish the boundary of the 100-square-mile territory in 1793 (Figure 3.2). During Trollope’s day, the Mall served as a Civil War military camp and manufacturing site, complete with railroad tracks, barracks, and grazing animals. This was not the initial intent, and as the nation approached its centennial soon after Trollope’s visit, more thought was given to the Mall’s development. The Mall was designed as the commemorative heart of the nation, a long rectangular public space that separates both the executive and legislative branches of the government (Figure 3.3). Designed by engineer and architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the Mall was commissioned by President George Washington in 1791 to be the central axis of the capital city for the New Republic (syntheses regarding the National Mall include Brint and Salzman 1988; Gutheim and Lee 2006; Savage 2009). L’Enfant’s plan was to convey American egalitarian ideals using metaphors of encoded movement. He could do so easily because the city was designed from scratch, using topography and unspoiled contours of the land and waterways to determine the placement of important buildings.

Figure 3.2 Washington D.C. Boundary Stone Northwest Mile 7, placed in 1791– 1792 by Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker. Source: Author photo.

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Figure 3.3 National Mall, Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, Washington D.C. Source: Photo from Carol M. Highsmith’s America / Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-highsm-04448.

Rather than placing a private residence or palace at the city’s highest point (a typical design in Europe), he placed the Capitol Building there, home of the United States Congress and the seat of the legislative branch of the federal government. Capitol Hill was to serve as the city center, from which diagonal boulevards radiated outward, cutting across a grid system

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of smaller streets (Figure 3.4). These wide avenues facilitated easy transportation and provided views of important buildings and public squares from greater distances. The Mall, or “Grand Avenue,” was central to L’Enfant’s democratic concept, extending westward from the anchored Capitol building to a point directly south of the President’s White House, to be marked by a memorial to Washington. The Mall was to be “four hundred feet in breadth, and about a mile in length, bordered by gardens, ending in a slope from the houses on each side.” L’Enfant envisioned the Mall as an abundance of space that permitted the proper viewing of the surrounding monuments, and encoded pathways of movement that were unrestricted and open, offering spatial-cognitive notions of democracy and collective autonomy. By using the spatial anchors of Capitol Hill, the White House, and Washington’s memorial, L’Enfant’s plan was to encode a monumental place that created metaphorical underpinnings of public virtue using physical movements of substitution, casting social ideals and principles as being naturally true within a physical landscape in order to transform individual actions into movements of the collective public. Although the Mall’s green space was surveyed and laid out, it languished for decades due to lack of funding. As the nation approached its centennial at the end of the 19th century, more thought was given to the Mall’s development. The first edifice to be completed was the Washington Monument. Although finished in 1885, the plans to commemorate the nation’s most prominent Revolutionary War hero were initially announced in 1833, when the privately funded Washington National Monument Society was founded by influential citizens who believed a monument should be built at the federal capital. Robert Mills was the architect, a Free Mason who was also proficient in neoclassical design. An idea for a simple equestrian statue and sepulcher were rejected for a neo-Egyptian design that included a flat-topped obelisk surrounded by a 32 column circular colonnade, and a statue of Washington in a chariot. An array of 30 statues were to be

Figure 3.4 Plan view of Washington D.C. circa 1811 overlain upon a modern city map. Source: After Savage (2009: 28).

106 Movement displayed inside, each depicting a prominent Revolutionary War hero. The cornerstone for the monument was laid in 1848, but funding dwindled and the Civil War delayed construction further. The project resumed in 1876, but Mill’s original design was simplified to an unembellished obelisk with a pointed top. The Corps of Engineers completed the project, and the monument was dedicated in 1885, some 51 years after it was authorized. The simplicity of the Washington Monument succeeds as a cognitive place where a more elaborate style would fail. It is the axis of democratic power, standing between the White House and the Capitol, seats of the executive and representative branches, respectively. One may stand at its base and see both the White House, the seat of the executive branch, and the Capitol, the seat of the representative branch of power. At 180-meters tall, the Washington Monument is the tallest structure in Washington, beckoning onlookers to come close and decode the message: here is the center of memory, the location of struggle, the fulcrum of patriotism and sacrifice. The landscape about the monument becomes a lived place of meaning; the obelisk is the symbolic messenger that calls your attention. Following the construction of the Washington Monument in 1885, the congressional McMillan Commission enacted a series of city construction projects to upgrade the city to a standard worthy of its new international reputation. The Commission called for a reworking of L’Enfant’s original Mall plan to create a monumental core that included the Supreme Court Building, the Library of Congress, and other cultural buildings (see Figure 3.4). The railroad tracks were removed and the Mall was given a sense of symmetry and order. Sunken gardens were added near the Washington Monument to correct the off-center sight-line from the White House. Federal monuments were planned on the south axis to the founding fathers (later to be the Jefferson Memorial) and to the west on reclaimed swampland for Lincoln. The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922 after considerable debate regarding the westward expansion of the Mall (Figure 3.5). Similar to Captain Cook’s death marker, this memorial was placed in the city of Lincoln’s assassination rather than at his gravesite or where he gave his famous Gettysburg Address. Shedding the austere renditions of the obelisk, architect Henry Bacon adopted ideas from the now fashionable Beaux-Arts school and designed the memorial in full neoclassical glory. An imposing Colorado Yule marble sanctuary the size of a football field sits upon three courses of Massachusetts granite steps to inspire reverence. Thirty-six massive Doric-styled columns surround the building, each 14 meters high and more than eight meters in diameter. Inside the 30-meter tall sanctuary is a six-meter high sculpture of Lincoln that is as striking as the building itself, seated in a chair and gazing shrewdly eastward across a long reflecting pool toward the U.S. Capitol. Inscriptions of Lincoln’s second inaugural speech and Gettysburg address line the interior walls. But which of Lincoln’s remarkable roles is memorialized in the monument’s iconography: emancipator of slavery or savior of the Union? This was

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Figure 3.5 Ford Motor Co. Lincoln at Lincoln Memorial (circa 1922–1926). Source: Photo from the National Photo Company Collection / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-npcc-32136.

a debate his eulogizers struggled with because the post-war Reconstructionist period made Lincoln a controversial figure, and it was eventually decided that a revisionist emphasis would focus upon Lincoln’s efforts to rebuild a broken nation rather than on slavery and emancipation (Thomas 2002). The Memorial’s inscriptions and a somber statue give the impression that Lincoln was more concerned with issues of reconstruction rather than emancipation. No mention is made of his Emancipation Proclamation, and the only hint of Lincoln’s role as emancipator is a lone mural depicting the angel of truth freeing a slave. Thirty-six columns, each blazoned with a state name, surround the Memorial signifying the support for a vaulted roof of a united nation; of course 11 of these states had seceded from the union that Lincoln so fervently believed in. The only African-American to speak at the Memorial’s dedication was Robert R. Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor (see Figure 3.6). The sequences of time of Lincoln’s Memorial thus focuses on a retrospective message that downplayed certain meanings while materializing others. The last monumental anchor of the Mall landscape was dedicated in 1943: the Jefferson Memorial. Positioned on dredged up land to the south, it

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Figure 3.6 Dr. Moton, principal of the Tuskegee Institute at the Lincoln Memorial dedication. Source: Photo from the National Photo Company Collection / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-USZ62-99406.

completes the cross-shape of the Mall space centered upon the Washington Memorial. The Jefferson Memorial is located south, the Capitol Building is east, the White House is north, and the Lincoln Memorial is west. It was designed in the neoclassic Beaux-Arts style by John Russell Pope, who also designed the National Archives and the National Gallery. The McMillan Commission had proposed a circular Pantheon style structure to house the statues of important leaders, but when the project languished, President Franklin Roosevelt and Congressman John J. Boylan urged the project to refocus upon commemorating Jefferson. The Jefferson Memorial has a 29-meter high domed rotunda surrounded by Ionic columns and a front portico entrance (Figure 3.7). This circular colonnaded structural design is an adaptation of Jefferson’s own architectural drawings, and includes a Tennessee marble floor, a Georgian granite foundation, and Vermont marble columns. A six-meter bronze statue of Jefferson sits inside with a sculpture of the Declaration of Independence drafting committee. Quotations of Jefferson are carved into the walls. The total cost of the monument was over $3,000,000 and the entire structure weighs a massive 32,000 tons.

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Figure 3.7 Jefferson Memorial, aerial view, Washington, D.C. Source: Photo from Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress / Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-highsm-04693.

The Jefferson Memorial is unique because it emphasizes a large enclosed space, unlike the other monuments that center the observer upon the surrounding exterior landscape. Once inside, a visitor becomes isolated from the outside world and the smooth circular walls and arched dome draw attention towards the center of the Memorial, where the larger-than-life statue of Jefferson gazes down upon them. Diffused natural light enters through the open cella and does not distract the eye. The nature of place and the sequences of scale are clear, Jefferson is a larger-than-life leader worthy of commemoration and whose democratic achievements are clearly articulated in the inscribed words. Although the interior space of the Jefferson Memorial is the highlight, its exterior is also worthy of distinction. The extension of the Mall southward to the Jefferson Memorial solidified Jefferson into the pantheon of American heroes. The smooth Ionic columns, each with an eight-meter high podium, surround the building and offer an equally appealing view from any vantage point. Once the Jefferson Memorial was complete, there were no further Federal designs planned for the National Mall; the official history of national patriotism, which took an entire century to commit to stone, was now complete. The monumental landscape of the National Mall remained unchanged for 40 years until after the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was constructed in 1982 in a new and

110 Movement contemporary style, ushering in a distinctive phase of American monumental construction that focuses upon the privatization of commemoration (e.g., Bodnar 1993: 3; Griswold and Griswold 1986; Haas 1998; WagnerPacifici and Schwartz 1991). The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was given Congressional approval for placement in the Mall near the location of the Lincoln Memorial, and unlike the neoclassical complexity of the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments, architect Maya Ying Lin’s design hearkens back to the minimalist and elegant designs of the obelisk. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial consists of two black granite retaining walls that converge to form a wide V-shape some 75 meters long (Figure 3.8). Each wall tapers into the earth from its outer end, reaching three meters below the surface at its apex. One wall points to the Washington Memorial, the other to the Lincoln Memorial, designed to symbolize a wound that is closed and healing. Asian granite was deliberately chosen because of its reflective quality. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a popular tourist destination because it strikes a symbolic cord with the American public, and unlike other major monuments it communicates a very personalized experience of the past. When the visitor gazes upon the walls they simultaneously see their own reflection in the glassy granite walls together with the engraved names of over 58,000 soldiers killed or missing in action; a spatial-cognitive sequence of time that symbolically links the living to the deceased.

Figure 3.8 Vietnam War Memorial after a snow storm, Washington D.C. Source: Photo from Carol M. Highsmith’s America / Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-highsm-04896.

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The engraved names are listed chronologically rather than alphabetically, adding a sequential component to the monument’s temporal structuring. As a place, the Memorial does not disrupt the surrounding grounds, yet it intentionally merges the metal spaces of the architect and visitor with the physical space of the granite walls and nearby greenery. This personalizing experience encourages many visitors to leave mementos or offerings—notes, photographs, teddy bears, war medals, or alcohol libations. I have walked along the course of the Memorial, descending towards its center until only the reflective granite is visible. At the apex of the two walls, the sheer number of names immerses you, stretching back the way you came as well as forward. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial tacitly functions like a tombstone for thousands of soldiers who are mourned simultaneously. The success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is its link to an unpopular war still fresh at the time of its construction. It was built only six years after hostilities ended, unlike most war monuments that are constructed much later than the conflicts they commemorate, perhaps to foster national healing following the social fissures that the Vietnam War caused, or perhaps to redress those patriotic soldiers and their families who were publically scorned. I vividly recall as a boy meeting these well-dressed soldiers as they returned from Vietnam. My views of soldiery were tempered by my father, a veteran of World War II and vocal proponent for intervention. So I was perplexed when an arriving soldier removed medals from his chest and threw them down in anger as he departed the airport. I quickly ran to collect these discarded objects, a Vietnam War ribbon and a Bronze Star, not fully comprehending this young soldier’s dilemma until I was much older. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is also successful because it caters to a populace hungry for a more personal and private form of experience and expression. Uncomfortable with the formal edifices of hallowed patriots such as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, the genius of the Memorial is its ability to touch a diverse and broad audience by employing spatial-cognitive sequences of movement (and time) that subtly envelope the personal experience of the visitor as they confront the dead with the timeless American qualities of sacrifice and democracy. Other monuments have followed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, including the Signers of the Declaration of Independence Memorial (1984), the Korean War Memorial (1994), The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial (1997), the George Mason Memorial (2002), the National World War II Memorial (2004), and the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial (2014). All are unique in layout and execution; however, all signify successful struggles of citizens eager to transcribe a component of our country’s collective memory into materialized history. Other projects lacked the political clout to be placed upon the Mall and were built in a peripheral location within or nearby Washington D.C. For example, the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism was dedicated in 2000 to the 120,000 Japanese Americans interred during World War II. The monument is small and harmonious; a

112 Movement garden and pool with a bronze sculptured crane wrapped in barbed wire at its center, merging messages of suffrage and heroism, individuality and community. As a national memorial it was granted space in Washington D.C., but placed 200 meters outside the Mall, just north of the Capitol Building. Others who are unable to permanently memorialize themselves upon the National Mall include former U.S. presidents, those whose reputations must first stand the test of time before their true legacies are revealed. Unwilling to wait, they immediately enter the arena of memory in order to mediate their roles in history. And instead of building statues or obelisks, they construct multi-million dollar presidential libraries, usually placed far away from the political arena of Washington D.C., where their messages are less contested. These libraries are filled with the written documents about their executive decision-making, in the hopes of cementing their legacy firmly in the past (Hufbauer 2005). For example, Bill Clinton dedicated his presidential library in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, an impressive structure carefully designed to accentuate Clinton’s accomplishments as president while minimizing the troubles of his second presidential term when he was impeached. The focus of presidential legacy creates a strong bond among presidents, so much so that bipartisan animosity is set aside—both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were present at Clinton’s dedication ceremony. Since its inception, the National Mall has represented a contested monumental landscape. Originally designed as open space that encoded movement between three memorialized anchors, politically successful agents have sought to likewise immortalize their stories in stone. New monuments have slowly and generationally partitioned the Mall’s open space, altering the originally encoded movements and augmenting the original democratic narrative, even though such messages may be dictated by political negotiation or even controversy. As a monumental landscape that encodes spatial-cognitive metaphors of movement, the Mall reveals trends in national architectural style and social change that emphasized the slow privatization of American monuments, despite L’Enfant’s original egalitarian design of encoded movements.

Gothic Cathedral (encoding) Abbot Suger of St. Denis Monastery was an extraordinary figure in the history of medieval Europe. Being a shrewd religious patrician and politician, he pursued two ambitions: to strengthen the power of the king of France and to aggrandize his Abbey of St. Denis, the burial place of the French monarchs. It was Suger who initiated the first Gothic structure in 1114 when he began a rebuilding project of the choir for his abbey church, and who subsequently had the foresight to record a retrospective account of his ambitious intentions. He wrote: lest it displease the holy martyrs I undertook to enlarge and amplify the noble church consecrated by the Divine Hand, devoutly praying both in

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our chapter and in church that he who is beginning and end, Alpha and Omega, might join a good end with a good beginning by way of a sound middle, and that he might not exclude from the building of the temple a bloody man who wholeheartedly desired this building more than the treasures of Constantinople. (Suger and Panofsky 1946: 42–45)1 Suger’s words convey his passion for honoring God, and his earthly efforts in Gothic design helped initiate the “cathedral crusade,” the greatest and most ambitious medieval building campaign—equal in grandeur to the sanctioned military adventures bent upon regaining control of the Holy Land. His goal, together with the theologians and architects of his time, was to use architectural metaphors of encoded movement in order to convey a set of religious ideals, to create a set of cultural places that represented heaven on earth and to transform individual action and sacred practices into movements of divine providence. Between 1050 and 1350, hundreds of cathedrals were constructed in England, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Sicily, as well other parts of Europe (see Figure 3.9). This Late Middle Age was a time of fresh ideas and dynamic changes that departed from the dark times where much of Europe functioned with no knowledge of the past. This was a time that saw the revival of the Latin classical writings, the recovery of Greek and Arabic science and philosophy, the emergence of vernacular literature, and the beginnings of the Gothic style of art. In France alone, the wealthiest of

Figure 3.9 Ely Cathedral, England. Source: Photo © Gillian Thompson.

114 Movement medieval European nations, 80 cathedrals, 500 large churches, and thousands of smaller churches were built; the sum of which was greater than the quarried stone for all of Egypt’s ancient monuments. The cathedral was an important structure since the Roman era (a.d. 306–337). The name derives from the Latin word cathedra, meaning “seat” or “chair,” referring to the presence of the ruling seat or throne of the bishop, the religious leader of a large community called the dioceses. The cathedral housed sacred relics and was used for important acts of worship; but it also served as medieval town hall, market place, social promenade, and clerical residence. The cathedral was the largest and most significant building in the entire ­medieval community. The cathedral was similar in architectural design to that of the sacramental church discussed in Chapter 2: it faced east toward the rising sun and was divided into a western public nave and an eastern sacred chancel. However, its floor plan was more elaborate and geometrically regular, laid out in the shape of a cross with the north and south hall extensions being called transepts. In addition to the altar, the chancel held the choir, a place for clergy and choir to sit during mass. A large dome arched over the spot where all four halls intersect. The northern façade, associated with darkness and cold, was covered with artwork pertaining to the Old Testament Bible. The southern façade covered with New Testament depictions. The western façade, which faces the setting sun, is devoted to depictions of the Last Judgment. The Gothic style also included a heightened elaboration of sacred geometric symmetry; employing simple numerical ratios and proportions to not only ensure a cathedral’s structural stability, but validating the theological importance of mathematical relationships (von Simson 1989). Gothic stone sanctuaries exhibited geometric and numerical perfection that imparted a feeling of order and harmony to worshipers—properties befitting a place of God because they summoned the heavenly truths to the earthly world, enhanced discourse from God to man, and depicted humankind’s roles in the universe (Ball 2008: 57). The term “Gothic” was used by later Renaissance critics to denote the style’s lack of conformity to earlier Greek and Roman principles and thus named for a “barbarian” tribe that helped destroy the Roman Empire. The origin of the Gothic, or “French” style may be traced to the beginnings of the 12th century and continued until the end of the 16th century in some regions.2 The wealthy regions of France, England, and northern Italy constructed more Gothic buildings (Paris playing an especially central role). Gothic style emphasized the architectural elements of the flying buttress, pointed arch, and cross-ribbed vault, different designs compared to the earlier Romanesque style that relied upon massive round pillars, arched barrel vault, and capitals covered with intertwined foliage and beasts (Figure 3.10). These new elements created soaring interior spaces by displacing the weight of a building so that heavy masonry walls could be cut away and filled with vast cascades of stained glass. The weight of a roof was directly borne

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Figure 3.10 Isometric cross section of a Gothic cathedral. Source: After Frank and Crossley (2001: 42–43).

by intersecting ribbed vaults that transferred the load to point arch piers, which in turn conveyed the weight downward and outward to an exterior wall buttress. Gothic structures were built larger and taller than their Romanesque predecessors, and employed diffuse light as their primarily artistic embellishment that energized the geometric perfection of its intricate walls and towering vault, illuminating every corner and nave. The cathedral was no longer a latent architectural shell meant to hold pious art and ritual accoutrements; it became a place where the pilgrim conceptually blended a mortar-and-stone building with a lofty heavenly sanctuary (Figure 3.11). Theologians and their architects designed cathedrals to mirror heaven on earth, and according to musician William Mahrt, they employed a design of overlapping axial and radial spaces to do so (see Scott 2003: 161). Axial space dictated the movement of ritual liturgical processions from west to east, pausing at thresholds of relative sacredness to denote the sacred hierarchy. For example, at Canterbury Cathedral in England, one proceeds from the west entrance to the center of the east-west north-south axis. The first threshold is marked by a large central stair leading up to the choir screen. A second is marked by another stairway leading up to the throne of the Archbishop and the shrine of Thomas Becket. At the far eastern end is the most holy threshold, the entrance to the Trinity Chapel and the sacred tombs. For Palm Sunday procession at Salisbury Cathedral in England, the bishop followed by the assembled congregation would proceed from the central choir area into the central crossing of the cathedral, turn south and exit the building, proceed around it, and finally enter the west entrance to proceed back into the Choir area (Scott 2003: 167–169). The cathedral was also organized in a series of concentric radial spaces. The first and largest

Figure 3.11 The nave ceiling in Ely Cathedral, England. Source: Photo © Baz Richardson.

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of these were the fortress-like walls, meant to protect the cathedral from the outer world. Secondary spaces included the choir, presbytery, and bishop’s throne, elevated spaces walled in with stone. Other secondary spaces were smaller protected or enclosed chapels and ambulatories. Celebrants were directed by this set of overlapping spaces to common areas used for Mass or to hear and sing to the music, but they were spatially barred from the more holy and sacred portions of the cathedral, a technique that enhanced the sense of mystery surrounding the divine and assigned worshipers who were weary of their worldly toils to their proper places in relation to the divine. As a spatial-cognitive sequence of movement, cathedral construction was an important point of civic pride, a landmark of sacred faith, and a showpiece of community conviction for visitors and foreigners. Historian Robert Scott (2003: 134) notes two important aspects of encoded cathedral building: (1) architectural complexity; and (2) a lengthy construction sequence. Building a cathedral required a dedicated labor force and staggering quantities of raw material, much of it imported. The repetitive nature of Gothic architectural elements allowed for easy replacement of workers (stonemasons, metallurgists, glassworkers, and carpenters) and also assisted the instruction of assistants and new apprentices (McCague 2003). Tall cathedral spires marked the civic heart of the community the same way that modern skyscrapers dominate urban quarters today. Size was so important that newer rival cathedrals were built larger and larger; the overall length of English cathedrals increased over time while the interior height of French cathedrals soared. The cathedral employed time structures that followed the traditions of classical writers such as Cicero, Quintilian, Saint Augustine of Hippo, and the anonymous author in the Rhetorica ad Herennium who stated in 85 B.C. that “artificial memory consists of backgrounds and images” that directly facilitate mental visualization (Cicero 1954: III.xvi.29).3 As a place, a church or cathedral was a kaleidoscope of imagery such as architectural tropes, inscriptions, holy symbols, coats of arms, and friezes that, when taken as a whole, created cumulative memory. These images served as visual cues that assured memories would be interpretable and meaningful for the average illiterate peasant since medieval literacy rates were between 5 and 10 percent until the 12th or 13th century (Clancy 1979: 263). However, medieval architects rejected banal or mundane iconography because they were concerned that the memory in question would be quickly forgotten. They employed simulacra (singular is simulacrum), architectural detailing in the form of grotesque iconography such as misshapen animals and humans, gargoyles, baboons and monkeys, pagan green men, and lewd figures.4 Simulacra contrasted with the grandeur and orderliness of cathedral architecture so that the novelty and surprise of the “grotesque” would intensify the mental response of the viewer generating a powerful and perpetuating memory. Such “rough” ornaments contrasted with the serene surroundings of the divine, ruffling the sensibilities and offset the stately and noble statues

118 Movement of saints and kings. They broke the cathedral’s abstract space down into palpable segments more easily interpreted by an individual, creating a duality between beauty and grotesque and order and chaos, and conveying the notion that a cathedral was constructed by mortals even though it honors God (Figure 3.12).

Figure 3.12 Simulacra gargoyle atop Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. Source: Photo © Deanspic.

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Cathedrals were unique compared to other ancient or modern monuments because they were built over the course of multiple generations, the construction process averaging two centuries. Most monuments, including the great Pyramids of Giza, were usually constructed during a single generation, their builders keen on seeing and implementing the end product of their financial and laborious investment. Why was this process so drawn out? Much of the reason had to do with the unpredictable and harsh nature of medieval life. Bad weather, drought, famine, plague, war, and a lack of central financing all took their toll on local cash flow and caused delay.5 And delay meant unemployment that forced skilled laborers to migrate to other cities looking for work, work that could earn almost four times more than then the average worker (Ball 2008: 173–179).6 Scaffolding, the ignoble display of any building project, adorned the walls of cathedrals for decades at a time. When work resumed sections were often dismantled and begun again because of instability or exposure to the elements. The limited availability of stone building material was also a delaying factor. Tens of thousands of quarries were dug to provide stone. Finally, because a construction project relied so much upon the local labor pool of farmers, it was subject to the whims of the yearly agricultural cycle that required laborers to disperse during planting and harvesting seasons. The normal liturgical calendar, with Sabbaths and feast days, was filled with work-free holidays that caused delay. Only 66% of the potential warm-season labor days during the calendar year of 1253 would have been available for construction crews to actually work towards the completion of Westminster Abbey (Scott 2003: 136–137).7 Most cathedral designers never saw their masterpieces completed, an unprecedented phenomenon among architects, and Robert Scott argues that they were well aware of this fact and planned accordingly. Architects worked very hard to transmit their original fundamental design principles onto future builders, and since paper was a rarity and illiteracy and numeracy rampant, they encoded their design information as a set of intelligible templates and employed a modular building-block approach to planning (Scott 2003: 142). If the original plan was lost, a new architect could easily employ what was known about the Gothic theological design and about geometric patterning to develop a new or modified plan of action that would still be suitable in the eyes of Scholastic theologians and seamless in construction style. The worldly constraints of medieval life did not quell the ambitions of cathedral builders—what were a few centuries of human toil and financial uncertainty when set against spatially encoded movement within a heavenly enclave on earth? The Gothic cathedral is a remarkable example of how monuments are built by rival decentralized communities, serving as focal points that assured political, spiritual, and economic control. Each was built larger over time as territorial markers of rivalry and inter-group competition. It is astonishing that cathedral builders of the 12th century had very

120 Movement little prior architectural history to rely upon during their stylistic revolution because Dark Age churches were architecturally simple and straightforward in design.8 This architectural revolution was directly linked to the rise in Scholastic theology (Croddy 1999; cf. Panofksy 1957). Certainly the great philosophers of the time found aesthetic satisfaction in the tangible actions of Gothic design. Saint Thomas Aquinas (see Ucko 1988: 65) implied as much: God confers beauty on things in that he is the cause of consonance and clarity in everything. So we call a man beautiful on account of his being well proportioned in his dimensions and surroundings, and because of his having a clear and bright complexion.9 Consonance, dimension, brightness: all characteristics of Gothic architecture that guided medieval architects as they designed their grand sanctuaries that encoded heaven on earth.

Forum Romanum (performance) As the epicenter of the Roman Empire, the Forum Romanum was one of the most celebrated (and murderous) monumental landscapes of the ancient world. The Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus knew this, and in his comedic work entitled Curculio (The Weevil, or The Parasite) he offers an extremely insightful description of the Forum circa 200 b.c. He states, “in the lower Forum the good and well-to-do men walk, in the middle Forum by the canal there are merely the pretentious” (Curculio 475–476).10 Using the tropes of meta-theatre, Plautus directly surveys the environs around the theater for the audience, describing the Forum landscape and those statesmen and scoundrels who reside there—the politicians, prostitutes, hustlers, and lawbreakers. His comedy demonstrates that it is real people, through their actions and stories, who generate a palimpsest of meaning and lived spaces that any monumental landscape creates. As a combination bazaar, commercial block, tribunal court, processional route, electoral seat, gathering space, and ritual place, the spatial-cognitive metaphors of movement associated with performance played out in the Forum in malleable ways to create a broad vista of distinct social processes. Public spectacle was an integral part of life in the Roman world. A number of special-purpose public buildings were utilized for various competitive or scenic exhibitions, including amphitheaters, circuses, stadia, and theaters. Other displays—the aristocratic funerals, public feasts, and triumphal processions—took place in the Forum Romanum. The Forum offered particular value as a monumental place because of its historical importance. It was a place where architecture not only reinforced collective Roman values and institutional authority, but served as a place for sociopolitical self-aggrandizement by the Roman elite. Because of its socially interactive venue, the Forum adroitly merged place, memory, and collective social action.

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As with many monumental landscapes, the Roman Forum developed piecemeal over many centuries. The Forum was placed in a grassy valley prone to flooding; an area that separated the rival settlements of Romulus, the first king of Rome who resided upon the Palatine Hill, and that of Titus Tatius, who occupied the neighboring Capitoline Hill (Figure 3.13). The valley, originally a large proto-urban cemetery, was drained sometime in the 7th century b.c. with the building of a large drainage canal (eventually covered and named the cloaca maxima) that emptied into the nearby Tiber River. The driest area was the northern part of the valley, and was designated as the comitium, an open-air civic meeting space. Adjacent to this space the Roman Senate House, or the curia, was constructed (Figure 3.14). Little is known about its earliest construction, and the surviving building dates to 29 b.c. and is visible today largely because it was converted into a Christian church. Deliberate landfilling continued into the 6th century b.c. in order to increase the size and usable area of the Forum. The Forum was a natural location for some of the most important early temples of the Republican period, including the Temple of Saturn, which was first constructed in 498 b.c., and then successively rebuilt in 42 b.c., and in the 4th century a.d. (Figure 3.15). A set of Ionic columns still stand from the last iteration of the temple, and hold up a pediment inscribed with the

Figure 3.13 The location of the Forum Romanum is between the Capitoline and Palatine hills. Source: After Logorio (1773).

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Figure 3.14 Panoramic view of the Roman Forum (circa 1909). Source: Photo by the Notman Photo Co., from Panoramic Photograph Collection / Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division / PAN FOR GEOG - Italy no. 4 (F size) [P&P].

Figure 3.15 Isometric view of the temple of Saturn in the Forum Romanum. Source: After Brint and Salzman (1988: 4).

words: “the senate and people of Rome has restore what fire consumed.”11 Inside the temple was a Greek-style cella god house that contained a large veiled statue of the god, holding a grain-harvesting scythe. This statue was carved from wood and filled with oil. Its legs were bound with wool leggings that were only removed on December 17, the holy day of Saturn, the god of agriculture. Because agriculture was fundamental to the wealth of the city, the Temple of Saturn was the repository for the state treasury, which was located beneath the stairs under the high podium. It also contained the bronze tablets upon which Roman law was inscribed. Another important Forum construction was the Temple of Castor and Pollux, dedicated in 484 b.c. to the twin gods of Gemini who had aided the Romans at the Battle of Lake Regillus. The battle marked the founding of the Roman Republic and the end of Roman monarchy with the ouster of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome. Castor and Pollux materialized as equestrian warriors who fought with the Romans upon the

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battlefield, and then reappeared in the Forum after the battle to water their horses. The Temple of Castor and Pollux marks the spot of their second earthly transfiguration. It was built as an octagon with eleven Corinthian columns per side. The cella god house was paved with mosaics, and the podium measured 30 by 50 meters and was accessed by two stairways. The Via Sacra, or Sacred Way was the main street of the city and passed through the Forum as it ran between the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus upon the Capitoline Hill and the Roman Coliseum. This road was part of the traditional path followed by the Roman Triumph (triumphus), the processional civic ceremony held to publically celebrate and sanctify a successful military general who had won a victory or war in the service of the state. In the 5th century b.c., the road was supported by a footing to protect it from erosion, and by the 1st century a.d. it was paved and lined with colonnades. And, as Plautus so astutely documented, it served as the unique backdrop for the civic triumphs and religious festivals, but also the many activities and ill-doings undertaken by the daily throng that assembled to barter, converse, gamble, prostitute, and seek justice. The round Temple of Vesta was located along the Sacred Way, marking a holy spot of formative Rome dedicated to the goddess Vesta. Instead of housing a cult statue in the cella, it had a hearth that held the sacred eternal flame of the people of Rome and relics of the archaic state. The King’s House, or regia, was a wedge-shaped building adjacent to the Temple of Vesta and housed the ritual spaces associated with the kings of Rome, and later, the high priest of the Roman state religion. The 6th century b.c. phase of this building was elaborately decorated with terracotta. Both the King’s House and the Temple of Vesta began as ancient structures and were remodeled on multiple occasions. The final significant restoration of the Temple of Vesta occurred in a.d. 191. By the 2nd and 1st centuries b.c., the Forum was transformed by additional monumental construction that was tied to its growing success as a regional power (Figure 3.16). These constructions represent a shift in

Figure 3.16 Isometric views of the Forum Romanum circa 168 b.c. and a.d. 203. Source: After Brint and Salzman (1988: 4).

124 Movement emphasis from civic and ritual sanctity to the commemoration and aggrandizement of those who had achieved great accomplishments in military and public careers. The first of such monuments was the Victory Column of Gaius Duilius (columna rostrata) that recognized the general who defeated the Carthaginians at the naval battle of Mylae in 260 b.c. The column was fitted with the bronze rams and anchors of captured ships, and became a favored location for giving public speeches. This period also saw the rise of the triumphal archway (fornix). An archway was a stone structure containing one or more passageways that spanned a road. It was crowned with a flat entablature or roof, and usually decorated with statues, sculpted reliefs, and inscriptions. While used to honor victorious generals, they could also be built for other civic events such as the founding of a new colony or the death of an imperial family member. The earliest arch built in the Forum (called the fornix Fabianus) was dedicated in 121 b.c. along the Sacred Way to commemorate Quintus Fabius Allobrogicus. The earliest basilica, a unique Roman building style (and the archetype for the medieval sacramental church, see Chapter 2), were introduced to the Forum at this time, the first being built by Marcus Portius Cato in 184 b.c. The basilica was a large civic or imperial columnar hall, designed with a longitudinal nave for seating and side aisles with an apse on the end. It was a well-lit interior space that served many functions, from law courts to places of commerce, and for entertainment. The Basilica Porcia served as tribunal offices for legal proceedings. Three other basilicas were built soon after, including the Basilica Aemelia, whose foundations remain today. This building was restored in 55–34 b.c. with the addition of a row of shops for moneychangers, and was eventually destroyed in the Visigoth sack of Rome in 410. During the 1st century b.c., the Forum was significantly renovated and expanded; the cost of remodeling paid for by the spoils of war as the Empire expanded. Most of these changes coincided with the rise of first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus (27 b.c.–a.d. 14). Augustus constructed a temple in the honor of his adoptive uncle, Gaius Julius Caesar, in the center of the Forum. The location of this temple, called the Temple of Divus Julius, is significant. It marks the spot upon which, after a brief funeral procession, Caesar’s body was burned on a funeral pyre in front of the King’s House, the office he served as High Priest of Rome. While the concept of deification of important Roman figures was not unknown during the Roman Republic, the deification of emperors, starting with Caesar, marks an important shift in how individual social prestige became intricately linked to imperial rule (Chalupa 2007), and thus shifted both the notions of traditional Roman beliefs and the function of monumental architecture. This concept of Roman apotheosis became a powerful tool for creating the social prestige so necessary for imperial rule. Only the rubble fill of the temple remains today (most of the marble façade was looted for the construction of St. Peter’s during the Renaissance),

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and so most of what we know about the temple comes from coin images. The temple measured 27 meters by 30 meters, and the podium was approximately 5 meters high. It possessed a niche, altar, and a set of eight columns in front of the podium. Today there is a small recess with a large eroded stone, believed to be the remains of the original circular altar upon which Caesar’s body was cremated. The body of Augustus lay in state here in a.d. 14. The temple housed a second commemorative rostra (Rostra ad divi Iuli), similarly decorated with bronze rams from ships captured at the battle of Actium. The temple was destroyed by fired and eventually remodeled. In addition to restoring many of the Republican era existing buildings, Augustus also added commemorative projects that aggrandized his own achievements, in particular the Arch of Augustus and the Porticus of Caius and Lucius (honoring his grandsons). During the following centuries of imperial rule, significant economic and judicial business was transferred away from the Forum to new, larger and more extravagant spaces (such as Trajan’s Forum building in a.d. 110), although this did not eliminate the role of the Forum as the symbolic and dramatic center of Rome (for example, the emperor Galba was knocked out of his litter and decapitated here by a rival in a.d. 69). By the Imperial period the Forum had become so crowded with new public buildings that the remaining open area had been reduced to approximately 130 by 50 meters (Figure 3.16). Because of this, additional forum space was added to the north of the Forum Romanum by Julius Caesar (46 b.c.), Augustus (2 b.c.), Vespasian (a.d. 75), Domitian (a.d. 97), and Trajan (a.d. 113). These included additional temples and basilica. Unlike the simple and haphazard layout of the Forum Romanum, these new fora employed concentric circle geometry that integrated the space around a sacred center (Wightman 1997). This period also saw the rise of public libraries that, like many of the Roman monumental amenities of the time, were funded by the spoils of war (Edwards and Greg 2003: 14). While previous places of learning were located in the houses of great men, Caesar had planned a library for the city before his death, with Augustus building one upon the Palatine Hill. A large library was incorporated in the forum addition built by Trajan. While new imperial fora help alleviate the judicial and economic space requirements for the capitol of a vast empire, the Forum Romanum still remained the symbolic epicenter of the Roman cosmos. The Forum Romanum was a monument to the state; the imperial fora were monuments that aggrandized individual emperors. The emblematic importance of the Forum necessitated that successive emperors maintain the existing structures. The Temple of Antoninus Pius and his wife Faustina was added in 141, followed in 203 by the white marble Arch of Septimius Severus, placed near the old Comitium. This arch remains today as one of the most prominent (and intact) monuments of the Forum. It sits on higher ground than the ancient level of the lower Forum, and was approached by steps. The Arch is 25 meters wide by 23 meters

126 Movement high, and is 12 meters deep. It possesses a highly decorated central archway with lateral openings to two side archways. Winged Victories were carved in relief in the spandrels between composite columns. Atop sat statues of Severus and his two sons upon a four-horse chariot being escorted by legionnaires. By the end of the 3rd century a.d., after nearly 900 years of building and renovation, the Forum resembled a cluttered landscape of honorific memorials, similar to a crowded cemetery. A total of 60% of emperors (36 of 60) who ruled between the 1st and 4th centuries a.d. were deified; altars and temples being consecrated in their memory, many of them placed in the Forum itself (Edwards and Greg 2003: 201; Price 1987). These structures and monuments created a panoramic spatial backdrop, with easily identifiable honorific associations, more suited to carefully regulate imperial performances rather than civic or democratic actions. The Forum had become a place of memory for the various performances—such things as political assemblies, triumphal and funeral gatherings, and entertainment or sporting events. The Forum cemented these memories with every visit by citizen or foreigner, guiding the behavioral responses of these visitors by creating meaning in the present moment; allowing performance activities to simultaneously coexist with the events of Roman history. A major fire in 284 required significant restoration and reorganization of the Forum. The destruction caused by this fire rendered the government dysfunctional: senators could not gather in the Curia and judicial courts could not convene in the damaged basilica. The emperors Diocletian and Maximian initiated a project to reverse the Forum’s disrepair, rebuilding the Augustan Rostra, the Senate House, the Basilica Julia, and refurbishing the Temple of Saturn and the Temple of Vesta. However, activities in the Forum had gradually become more and more diluted (Favro 1988). The space itself was small for ruling a city that may have neared a million residents, let alone a large empire. Senate deliberations in the Curia no longer carried significant weight unless endorsed by the emperor. Most commercial activities occurred in other portions of the city. Important tribunal courts occurred in the imperial fora. The Forum now served more of a reflective place of memory, much in the way of a Roman museum of history, rather than its original function as a place of contemporary action. By the 4th century a.d., Rome was ruled by absentee emperors who resided in rival cities, leaving the hollowed Roman monuments with no imperial sponsor. The final addition was the Bascilica Maxentius, built by Constantine the Great in the early part of the century. By 330, the administrative center of the Roman world was moved to Constantinople. Practical concerns still necessitated the upkeep of the public buildings and state monuments, and so the Roman patriarchs and aristocrats took it upon themselves to sponsor individual civic monuments or public structures in order to project the appearance of a well-run city, even as the Forum and many other portions of Rome began to experience population decline and urban decay

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(Kalas 2015). As the fortunes of the city waned, and Theodosius I ordered the shuttering of all pagan temples in 394, the Forum monuments were slowly cannibalized for building materials and its open spaces were repurposed or used as rubbish dumps. While the Forum remained as the working seat of government ended in the 6th century b.c., it retained a fascinating post-antique role as a dumping ground and cattle field (campo vaccino) surrounded by medieval Christian churches, eventually serving as a source of building materials for the resurgence of the Renaissance city. Even as a functioning civic space of decision-making, the Forum served as a spiritual, geographic, and cognitive landmark, encouraging pilgrimages, visitations, and processions—spatial-cognitive sequences of movement. One of the most important functions of the Forum, since the time of Romulus the first king, was to serve as the culminating venue for the celebratory military triumphs (Beard 2007; Ostenberg et al., 2015). Begun outside the west gates of the city, a victorious general would enter the city through the Porta Triumphalis and proceed around the Palatine Hill in counterclockwise fashion. The general, dressed in purple and riding in an ornate chariot, was followed by a raucous entourage that consisted of musicians, captives, and war plunderers. The procession would then progress down the Sacred Way through the Forum, mount the Capitoline Hill, and end at the Temple of Jupiter, both the physical summit and the symbolic pinnacle of Rome. Rowdy celebration would then commence back down in the Forum. The route of the triumphal procession followed a circumambulating path, moving progressively closer to the sacred center, progressing from the outside to the inside, crossing sanctified thresholds such as the city walls or through triumphal arches, proceeding along the Sacred Way lined with the most hallowed of Roman monuments, eventually terminated at the sanctum sanctorum of Saturn’s Temple. The Roman funeral spectacles (Bodel 1999; Favro and Johanson 2010; cf. Waterfield 2014: 35–37) were also important spatial-cognitive sequences of performative movement. Ancient accounts document the importance of an aristocratic funeral procession through the city to the Forum Romanum. Like the Triumph (which they mimicked), they entered along the Sacred Way and crossed the open plaza to the rostra, where the deceased was put on display. It was here that an heir gave a public eulogy, encircled by members of the cortege who wore ancestor masks faced the assembled crowd. While the entire routes of such funeral processions were not known, they most likely weaved among side-streets to lengthen the duration of the procession and increase the impact of the ceremonial pomp. Imperial funerals, on the other hand, were iconic and magnificent spectacles because such a death marked a change in state leadership. They included influential spectators and accoutrements from throughout the empire, a parade, and multiple eulogies that honored the deceased as well as validated imperial succession. The body of the deceased was publicly enshrined and often represented symbolically rather than actually included. Funerals, similar to any processual

128 Movement sequences of movement, illustrate how the Romans choreographed their processions to spatially sequence sequences of movement and time in order to preserve and transmit social memory. The Forum served as a place that orchestrated human activity, providing the spatial panorama necessary for histories to be constructed and reconstructed. As a monumental landscape, the Forum Romanum possesses certain functional similarities to other monumental landscapes that served as political and cultural epicenters. However, unlike the broad and lofty panoramic landscapes of the National Mall, the Forum was a relatively small and messy place, packed with mementos, conveying the same sense of familiarity that one might experience when visiting someone’s well-lived-in home. This sense of familiarity is what Plautus was able convey so very well in his dramatic comedy 2,200 years ago, a spatial experience that creates a high degree of intimacy in regards to scale (Brint and Renee Salzman 1988). Those who visit the ruins today often become bewildered by its closeness, complexity, and disarray. Few buildings have remained intact, and it requires a proper amount of time and patience to make sense of the space itself (Figure 3.17). Often the attention span wanes, and it becomes easy to quickly move on to neighboring attractions (such as the Coliseum) that are less baffling and functionally complex. Such a space requires adequate context that the modern visitor lacks. However, for ancient Romans, the Forum Romanum began as a practical performative space used by the citizenry of a rising city state. As the physical center of government relocated to the palace

Figure 3.17 The Forum Romanum as a tourist venue. Source: Author photo.

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of the emperor upon the Palatine Hill, the Forum became an honorific place filled with commemorative monuments that aggrandized individuals. This honorific function was maintained over time, through imperial and later aristocratic expense, in order to properly preserve historical and cultural continuity that placed Rome at the center of the civilized world.

Minoan palace (performance) The earliest description of the island of Crete and its people come to us from the Greek poet Homer, who in the 8th century b.c. wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer gave us the legend of King Minos, who was the powerful ruler that governed a mighty seaborne empire from the city of Knossos, home of the Labyrinth and its Minotaur. He said: Krete is a lovely island in the midst of the wine-dark sea with its soil circled by water. No one can count them, the people who live there— ninety cities in all now! … Knossos is there, the greatest city where Minos ruled from the age of nine. (Homer 2004: 19.172–178)12 Modern archaeology has now fleshed out our understanding of ancient Crete to an unprecedented degree, much of it undertaken by Sir Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. Evans began excavating Knossos in 1900, and his discoveries were magnificent, yielding most of what we know today about the earliest civilization in Greece: Minoan culture and its fabled palaces mentioned in Greek mythology. Knossos was but one of a series of monumental and labyrinthine structures that were dubbed “palaces” (syntheses include Driessen et al. 2002; Graham 1987; Hägg and Marinatos 1987; Hamilakis 2002; Kolb 2004, 2012, 2014; MacGillivray 2000; Manning 1994; Patton 1996; Rehak and Younger 1998; Renfrew 1972; Watrous 1994). The exact function of these “palaces” remains obscure and debated, although they present a tantalizing mystery regarding the society of Middle to Late Bronze Age Crete (ca. 2200–1200 b.c.). It was during this period that the “Minoan culture” flourished; so named for the King Minos mentioned in Homeric legend. The Minoans were the Mediterranean’s first large scale complex society, implementing such key innovations as political centralization, organized government, literacy and record keeping, specialization of labor, and massproduced trade goods. A key concept in defining the nature of these palaces is how they use architecture to generate metaphors of movement, particularly those of performance. The Minoan palaces, similar to other palaces in history are characterized by complex architectural layouts, with entryways, courtyards, internal divisions, and room blocks. This architectural template is hierarchical, and building elements are asymmetrically ordered to visually

130 Movement communicate the formal and symbolic roles they represent, as well as to influence human cognitive perception. They also exert a certain degree of control over the movements of those who enter and utilize these spaces; intentionally laid out in a multifaceted manner in order to impress and awe. While the design of palaces exhibits great variety, they generally employ architectural mechanics that encourage sequential movement towards places of power or performances of ceremony (Meyers 2013). In this way, palaces become performance structures that organize space into theatrical focal points of social action, their layouts influencing movement and communicating meanings. The construction of such environments and the activities that occur within them affect these meanings upon the bodies and memory of participants. The origins of Minoan palatial architecture remain unclear, and may represent a merging of local architectural traits with ideas of monumentality from ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. Certainly palatial culture was quite distinctive from Egypt, Mesopotamia, or the Greek mainland—the labyrinthine architecture and an emphasis on naturalistic rather than militaristic iconography suggest a bold departure from other societies of the time. The obvious architectural forerunner of the Minoan palaces was the tholos vaulted tomb (Branigan 1993; Goodison 2001; Murphy 1998; Watrous 1994). Vaulted tombs or houses are common on a number of Mediterranean islands, including Sardinia, Corsica, Pantelleria, and the Balearics (Kolb 2014). For example, on the central Mediterranean island of Pantelleria, over 50 communal tombs called sesi were constructed during the first half of the 2nd millennium b.c. using stacked lava rock. Each sesi had ground-level passages that led to burial chambers, used by the villagers from the nearby Bronze Age village of Mursia. Most average ten meters in diameter; however, the prestigious sesi grande was 20 meters in diameter and had twelve passage chambers (Figure 3.18). On Crete during the 3rd millennium b.c. tholos tombs became quite large, averaging over 1,000 square meters and often constructed with adjacent enclosed courts and auxiliary rooms built against the circular wall near the entrance (Figure 3.19). Drinking paraphernalia, statues, and altars have been found in some of the room annexes suggesting that these adjacent rooms were used for worship tied to the dead. Neighboring tombs were often utilized simultaneously, signifying multiple parallel social groups such as families, clans, or political factions that provided the proper social organization necessary for the eventual foundation construction of the Minoan palaces. Trade contact with Egypt and Mesopotamia could have likewise roused these groups to create a series of administrative and religious “palaces” that followed their own culturally distinctive designs. The chronology of construction for these palaces is long and complex.13 Four classical labyrinthine palaces were first constructed around 1900 b.c.; many were rebuilt or heavily modified circa 1720 b.c., and all sustained significant damage with the violent Thera eruption circa 1470 b.c., which

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Figure 3.18 The sesi grande of the island of Pantelleria, Italy. Source: Author photo.

Figure 3.19 Isometric view of the tholos tomb at Moni Odigitria, Crete. Source: After Myers and Cadogan (1992).

also crippled Minoan influence in the Aegean. The Mycenaean civilization, centered on the mainland of Greece, filled the political and economic void left by the Minoans. Most of the palaces were eventually abandoned (Driessen and Macdonald 1997), coinciding with a shift back to the use of megalithic tombs (Castleden 2005: 98–101). The four classical labyrinthine palaces are: Knossos (13,000 square meters), followed by Mallia (7,600 square meters), Phaistos (65,000 square

132 Movement meters), Zakros (2,800 square meters). They were constructed using cutstone masonry, recessed façades, and stylistic embellishments such as engraved decoration, painted stucco, veneering, and clay ornamentation. Each palace was a multi-story building consisting of a series of recessed and projecting rectilinear architectural units, giving the entire structure an irregular shape and a labyrinthine appearance (Figure 3.20). Vertical pillars included a startling variety of forms, often clustered in particular combinations. A foreign visitor would be impressed by both the sheer bulk of the building as well as its architectural variety. These palaces were located on the coast and in the interior, at places thought to have religious significance and/or provide easy access to the sea. Most share prominent architectural features such as: (1) a central court; (2) a paved western plaza/entrance; (3) west-side sunken cult rooms; (4) storage magazines and grain silos; (5) clusters of similar room/hall elements; (6) large second-floor reception halls; and (7) an auditorium. The most prominent of these features is the rectangular central court. This court represents the most distinguishing feature of a Minoan palace, adding an important public quality to this monument type. The courts of all the palaces are oriented slightly east of a north–south axis, and their dimensions are 2:1 in size proportion (3 of 4 courts are 50 by 25 meters in size). This similarity of form may have provided optimal sunlight exposure, recognized sacred mountains and caves, or faced certain rooms along the west side to the rising sun (Shaw 1973). The exact function of these courts was probably for performance, arenas for exclusionary rituals that only served the wealthy, such as ritual sacrifice or ceremonial games, or perhaps they hosted public rituals such as feasting, dancing, astronomical observation, or ceremonial displays. Minoan art and miniature frescoes suggest a variety of scenarios (Figure 3.21), in particular the legendary performance of the Minoan bull leaping games as well as group dancing (Davis 1987; Sipahi 2001; Younger 1995). The courts were large enough to accommodate major

Figure 3.20 Isometric view of the palace at Knossos facing north. Source: After Evans (1921).

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Figure 3.21 Bull-leaping (Toreador fresco), from the palace at Knossos, (circa 1450 b.c.), Archaeological Museum, Heraklion. Source: Scala / Art Resource, NY / © Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports Archaeological Receipts Fund.

segments of the population at a single performative event, suggesting more inclusive rituals. For example, the central court at Knossos could have held 5,435 people, equivalent to about one quarter of the total estimated population of Neopalatial Knossos (Gesell 1987; Whitelaw 2001).14 A second spacious paved plaza was located on the western side of the palaces at Knossos, Mallia, and Phaistos, containing raised stone walkways crisscrossing the paved court at various angles (Davis 1987; Marinatos 1987). At Knossos this western plaza contains other features, such as circular pits and small raised altars. It is possible that the western plaza was the formal approach and entrance to the palace with the walkways being used as processional routes. This area may have also been associated with a “sacred grove,” as depicted in a fresco found at Knossos. The fresco depicts at least two trees, a walkway, and a public gathering that includes representation of female participants and male and female observers. Knossos and Phaistos contain a third sort of public area: a small open area accessed by shallow steps on either side, thought to be an auditorium or theater. At Knossos, the auditorium is located at the northwest corner of the palace, while at Phaistos it is on the north end of the western plaza. The steps are believed to be too shallow to accommodate a seated audience. No similar structure is preserved at either Mallia or Zakros. Another prominent feature of these palaces is the cult rooms known as “pillar crypts,” sunken rooms with single or double pillars. These pillars frequently bear carved mason insignia, particularly the double-axe, a prominent Minoan cult symbol, and at least 14 pillar crypts identified contained

134 Movement double axe engravings and/or pyramidal stone stands for mounting double axes or other cult emblems. Most of these cult rooms are closely associated with storage magazines (see below); although at both Knossos and Mallia these crypts may be found on the ground floor west of the central court. In fact, cult rooms take up most of the western face of the central court at Knossos, including prominent rooms such as the Temple Repositories, Tripartite Shrine, and the Throne Room complex identified and named by Arthur Evans. A similar arrangement of rooms may have been present at Mallia, while some of the odd rooms along the west side of court at Phaistos may also have served religious functions. Cult paraphernalia was stored in rooms west of the central court at Zakros as well. A large proportion of the total ground floor area of a palace was devoted to storage magazines. These long and narrow rooms were located in the west and north wings. At Knossos, Mallia, and Phaistos, the magazines form the external west façade of the palace, a carefully built wall characterized by major projections and recesses that correspond to groups or “blocks” of magazines. Mallia has the largest proportion of magazines, while Zakros has the smallest. These magazines, commonly contained pithoi, which were large clay storage jars often one meter tall (Christakis 1999). Typical storage items probably included grain, wine, olive oil, textiles, and smaller pottery vessels. In addition to the magazines, large semi-subterranean grain silos were also used. These cylindrical structures were rubble-built and lined with plaster on the interior side. Three are preserved at Knossos, built over older houses and then filled in with debris from later collapse. Eight shallow silos are preserved at Mallia, in two rows of four, and surrounded by a wall. At all three of the main palaces these silos were placed in prominent locations outside the west façade in or near the west plaza, suggesting they served an important ritual or symbolic function as well as a practical one. Another notable feature of Minoan architecture is a series of functionally equivalent architectural units that give the palace its maze-like appearance. These units, dubbed “Minoan halls,” consist of two unequally sized rectangular rooms. These rooms were separated by a row of pillars and a set of piers in which a retractable door was set, serving as an effective means of permitting or restricting the access of movement, air, or light. A light well was located at one end of the partition along the side of the hall. Some halls also include a third, more private room that contains a short flight of doglegged stairs leading to a toilet and a “lustral basin.” The basin typically has gypsum veneering and fresco decoration. Its function has been interpreted as a place for ritual initiation, purification, symbolic descent into the earth, or simple bathing. The Minoan hall was probably multi-functional, depending on specific need or the time of day or season. Suggested functions include general living space, meeting area, or ceremonial space. At Knossos, a large multi-storied monumental staircase was used to gain access to the Minoan halls. A stairway fresco depicts a ritual procession, suggesting these halls were the endpoint of important rituals or economic transactions. In

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several instances, these halls are located near small rooms containing tablet or sealing archives, suggesting they may have been used as a meeting place for bureaucratic record keepers. Certainly literacy was a specialized skill tied to ritual use, and so there would have been a need to practice record keeping in a controlled and restricted setting. Archaeological evidence for the presence of a large reception hall is also present at all of the major palaces. They were originally situated above the western storage magazines, except at Zakros where the hall was placed on the ground floor directly west of the central court. Residual evidence of these halls from the three main palaces include the presence of western stairways leading over the magazines, architectural collapse from above the magazines, and the presence of regularly spaced support piers in the magazines themselves. The similar spatial layout of these palaces indicates a profound sense of Minoan place-making that was tied to performative movement. The main courtyard, with its 2:1 numerical ratio, served as the primary destination for visitors. Its internally bounded location helped to exert control over performance activities such as dancing and bull-leaping; exterior access was vague and constrained, while interior axial paths to and from the courtyard were circuitous and indirect. Similarly, the western plazas appear to have possessed performative importance as a processional entrance. The repeated clusters of storage facilities, with their adjoining ritual altars or receptacles, suggest a strong palatial role in merging ideology and economy as goods were moved to and from silos ceremoniously before cult images of axes, trees, and pillars. The repeated use of palatial room/hall architectural complexes, where record keeping was practiced in a controlled and restricted setting, further embellished the Minoan lived space of sacred trade. The linking of ritual and economic movements emphasized a strong palatial role in long-distance maritime trade and exchange. But simultaneously the nature of controlled exchange at these palaces must have also bolstered the social and ideological stature of local elites, artistically reinforced by the magnificent frescos. Obtaining long distance prestige goods enhanced social distinctions among private individuals who controlled the exportation of grains and oil, a common phenomenon during the rapid social changes experienced in the east Mediterranean during the 2nd millennium b.c. (increasing population, more intensive farming, Near Eastern contact, and the rise of metallurgy). Prestige goods such ivory, lapis-lazuli, and amber arrived from such far-away places as Egypt, Afghanistan, and Scandinavia. The activities associated with the tribute storage and management were properly executed in a distinct and appropriate collective atmosphere that served to maximize the prestige of its ruling elite. The spatial-cognitive metaphors of performative movement were enhanced by metaphors of scale. The sheer size of these palaces dwarfed all other structures at the time; their peculiar labyrinthine design served to spatially envelop a visitor in order to transform reality. Once inside, a visitor

136 Movement becomes isolated from the outside world by the many angular corridors and passageways. Their attention would be drawn to the cordoned off public plazas, and the large frescos of important leaders that gaze down upon them. Palaces were also designed to orchestrate the distinct metaphor of interaction through movements as well; the restrictive interaction between elite and commoner, priestess and worshiper. The diverse set of palatial functions, the public spaces and processional ways, the decentralized use of space, and the lack of elite spaces, were all specifically implemented to direct movements that orchestrated collective meaning.

Karnak (wayfinding) Bakenkhonsu, son of Ipui and high-priest of Amun-Re, chronicled his labor on behalf of his glorious king, Ramesses II, by writing, “I erected therein obelisks of granite, their points nearing the sky” (Nims 1971: 108). He did so at the juncture of completing the East Temple of Amun-Re around 1,000 b.c., located in the city of Thebes, in Upper Egypt, some 600 kilometers upstream from Giza along the Nile River, and well over a thousand years after the heyday of the pyramid builders (Figure 3.22). By the time

Figure 3.22 Fallen obelisk at Karnak (circa 1856). Source: Photo by Frank Mason Good, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-ppmsca-04544.

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High-Priest Bakenkhonsu recorded his inscription, pyramids had gone out of fashion as the premiere symbolic representation of pharonic power (see Chapter 2). They were too costly, too laborious, and too appealing for tomb robbers bent on profiteering. The obelisk, a tall sleek shaft of granite with a pyramidal-shaped top, had become the no-less-worthy, but significantly less costly, replacement for the pyramid. Obelisks were usually erected in pairs in front of important Egyptian buildings or burials. The earliest such granite obelisk is the 21-meter tall, 120 metric ton red granite Obelisk of Senusret I of the 12th Dynasty. The fact that obelisks stretched upward towards the sun was a point that Bekenkhonsu was sure to chronicle. It served a similar symbolic role as the pyramid, a representation of primeval hill reaching skywards towards the sun, a fusion of the earthly and divine, a religion and kingship. It was an architectural design symbolizing royal prerogative, and because they connoted symbols of power, they were transported, reproduced, and displayed at other times and places later in history (Barnes 2004; Curl 2005; Curran et al. 2009; and Habachi 1984). As high-priest, Bekenkhonsu’s architectural elaboration employed metaphors of wayfinding movement in order to orient and navigate visitors at an important ritual place. Wayfinding encourages the integration of knowledge laterally rather than vertically, constructing spatial stories and forms of narrative understanding that proceed from a part to a whole. Architectural anchors or landmarks, such as royal obelisks, improved the ability of a visitor to form a coherent mental image or map of a sacred Egyptian place. They are used as memorable features of a space to assist wayfinding, orienting, marking distinct areas, and identifying points where wayfinding decisions are made. Each successful navigation of a monument improves the formation of a coherent mental map of a conceived space, converting it and the information that it contains into a lived space for the visitor. Wayfinding engages fundamentally different meanings of the collective than with encoding or performance, encouraging spatial movement that is acted out and imaginable rather than read, and creating localities or spatial nodes to which attention is drawn through movement. The location for Bakenkhonsu’s obelisks was at the sacred site of Karnak on the outskirts of Thebes (Figure 3.23). Thebes (or Waset), was nothing more than a sleepy village when the Great Pyramids were built; however, by Bakenkhonsu’s time, it had risen to prominence after its rulers were responsible for reunifying Egypt during the Middle Kingdom. The city ultimately became the political and religious center of Egypt during the New Kingdom, some 800 years after the monumental heyday at Giza. For this reason Karnak was built there, its ancient name being ipet-isu, or “the most select of places” (in-depth analyses include: Barrie 1996; Blyth 2006; Monderson 2007; Nims 1971; Schwaller De Lubicz 1999). Bakenkhonsu was the highpriest of Amun-Re, the patron deity of Thebes that rose to national prominence as Thebes rose from a sleepy village to the national capital of a unified Egypt. The god Amun (meaning “hidden one”) had been merged with Re,

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Figure 3.23 Plan view of Karnak. Source: After Blyth (2006: 2).

the powerful sun god of Lower Egypt, into the potent form of Amun-Re, the “King of Gods.” When success and wealth graced the rulers of Egypt they in turn bequeathing lavish gifts to Amun-Re, building (or remodeling) the temples, obelisks, and statues at Karnak. At its height of influence and power, the priestly estate of Amun-Re boasted over 80,000 priests and employees, nearly 2,400 square kilometers of agricultural fields, over 400 gardens, and 83 sailing ships and barges. Karnak is a temple complex; a massive wall of sunbaked brick encircled over 25 hectares of sacred space (enough area to enclose ten cathedrals the size of Saint Peter’s Basilica). It was considered to be an abode of the Egyptian gods and served as a major pilgrimage destination for nearly 2,000 years. The primary temple, measuring 550 by 400 meters in size, precinct at Karnak was dedicated to Amun-Re. This precinct is architecturally impressive due to its sheer scale and breadth of execution. Another precinct is dedicated to the god Mut, and a third dedicated to the god Montu. These other precincts are older and were not expanded during the New Kingdom. The Temple of Amenhotep IV, dedicated to the god Aten, is mostly in ruins. Other small temples and sanctuaries were added at various times. The precinct of Amun-Re was constructed in phases, the oldest portion of the site being the Middle Kingdom Court that was fronted by a large Pylon or gateway. Later additions were not added until the beginning of the 18th Dynasty, when two new Pylon entryways and the Hypostyle Hall

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was added (originally with a wooden ceiling). Additional building phases expanded the precinct west with additional Pylons and courtyards. The result was a long axial processional way that stretched from the Middle Kingdom Court at the interior of the precinct, westward through a total of six Pylon entryways, the Hypostyle Hall, and a 50 meter long “Way of the Rams,” an avenue of 20 symmetrically arranged pairs of sandstone sphinxes with lion bodies surmounted with ram heads. The Avenue was built by Bakenkhonsu on behalf of Ramesses II, but later claimed by another ruler. It was not uncommon for a ruler to appropriate and rededicate the works of a predecessor, particularly if they were a rival. Unlike the rapid nature of the pyramid-building process, Karnak has a lengthy, timeless building history. Begun during the Middle Kingdom, the construction and remodeling at the Precinct of Amun-Re continued through to Ptolemaic times. Approximately 30 different rulers had building programs, which resulted in a scale and complexity unmatched in other Egyptian building projects and perhaps equaling that of Mons Vaticanus (see Chapter 4). The earliest known building phase at the Karnak complex occurred in the 11th Dynasty, coinciding with rise of Thebes, and Senurset I built the first significant structures during the 12th Dynasty: the White Chapel and Middle Kingdom Court. Subsequent rulers added various buildings, shrines, pylons, and chapels to the Karnak monumental landscape, although there was a hiatus of construction during the unstable years of the Second Intermediate Period (circa 1650–1550 b.c.). The Karnak Complex underwent significant expansion during the 18th Dynasty, a golden age of imperial expansion, military campaigns, strong foreign trade, and the re-establishment of royal prerogative (Figure 3.24). This resulted in substantial royal income being bestowed upon the temple complex and its priestly class (Badawy 1966: 9; Bard 2007: 216). Even an interlude of economic malaise, when the ruler Akhenaten attempted to erode the status of priestly influence, did not diminish the formitable

Figure 3.24 Isometric view of the Temple of Amun-Re. Source: After Blyth (2006: 2).

140 Movement influence the Complex and its priestly class exerted upon Egyptian society and its economy (Shaw 2000; Bard 2007). During the Third Intermediate period, Shoshenq I of the 22nd Dynasty was able to reassert royalty authority and build significantly on the Amun-Re Precinct, but his successors were less successful. During the subsequent periods of stability, instability, and foreign influence, a few Egyptian rulers had the wealth and wherewithal to build at Karnak, including the Ptolemaics at the end of the 1st millennium b.c. The Ptolemies were supporters of the Egyptian temple hierarchy, hybridizing both Greek and Egyptian culture and gods. Some left their mark at places like Karnak. By the time of Roman rule, the tradition of royal building at Karnak ceased, concurrent with the abandonment of royal documentation using the hieroglyphic writing system. In sum, the nature of Egyptian history during the lifespan of Karnak was one of punctuated political and economic consolidation. The phases of royal control (or lack thereof) exhibited distinct oscillations of centralization and devolution over time. The cycles of prosperity and disorder, followed by reconsolidation are evident in the architectural buildings at Karnak. Figure 3.25 is a graph representing the volume of stone invested into construction at Karnak over time (these data were collected and analyzed by my colleagues Megan Drennan, Willeke Wendrich, and Diane Favro). The stone volume (cubic meters) of architectural structures serves as an excellent proxy for labor energetics that was invested in Karnak construction.

Figure 3.25 Construction volume totals of pharaohs grouped by century. Source: After Drennan and Kolb (2018).

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The rulers Thutmose III and Horemheb, both of the 18th Dynasty, were responsible for the largest of the Karnak building projects, even though both were relatively ordinary when placed amongst the list of powerful 18th Dynasty kings and queens. What is revealing is that while both of these rulers were less notable, they both ascended to kings following very highly celebrated and renowned rulers. Thutmose III rose to the throne after his stepmother Hatshepsut, a queen whose rule was not well accepted and perhaps considered by some as being illegitimate. In the rush to create a legacy of his own, Thutmose III undertook some ambitious military campaigns, brought a tremendous amount of wealth into the country, and expanded Karnak in a noteworthy way. Horemheb was a similarly inconsequential ruler, but ascended the kingship shortly after the demise of Akhenaten, the king who failed to eradicate the Amun-Re priestly religious bureaucracy. It was under Horemheb’s reign that Karnak and its priesthood was returned to its former prominent role. The reparation and expansion of the Karnak Precinct was an integral component of his legacy. These labor data over time also confirm a pattern of early labor efflorescence followed by cyclical decline. It is not uncommon for monumental construction patterns to be most prolific during a society’s formative years, when bureaucratic institutions are taking shape and quickly gaining influence. Although Egyptian civilization had already been in existence for 1,000 years, the greatest efforts at Karnak coincide with the beginning of the New Kingdom, a period of reformation, new forms of architectural expression, and general prosperity. For the most part, the Third Intermediate Period and Late Period were characterized by minimal building, and the small resurgence of architectural investment occurred during the Ptolemaic Period (around 150 b.c.) when Egyptian temples were used to hybridize the Greek and Egyptian iconography and ideology. A final observation regarding Karnak diachronic construction is positively correlated with military conquest. During periods of internal conflict, or when there was little military action at all, building at Karnak was minimal. Conversely, those rulers who undertook offensive military campaigns had larger building phases. Perhaps it is as simple as the fact that the financial tribute collected during a successful military campaign improved the general economy and thus the priestly hierarchy. It is more likely that this relationship was cause by the social aggrandizement of rulers. Because the religious role of Egyptian kings was less influential by the New Kingdom, they instead sought ideological glorification by financing religious construction, which formally codified their role as benefactors. This, in turn, would likely inspire confidence in their rulership, guarantee their legacy, and immortalize them in history. The spatial-cognitive metaphors of wayfinding movement at the Amun-Re Precinct may be experienced today by the casual visitor. The scale and size of these gigantic stones and columns demand attention, saturating the tourist

142 Movement with scalar and temporal metaphors that are impossible to ignore, even if the average tourist cannot fully comprehend its full context as an ancient Egyptian ritual place. Imagine the full effect of an intact Precinct by an ancient religious pilgrim well versed in Egyptian religion. The entire precinct employed a set of metaphorical spatial-cognitive sequences using enclosed architectural spaces and a repertoire of Egyptian design elements such as massive pylons and gateways, colonnaded courtyards, bas-relief murals, guardian colossi, obelisks, and recumbent sphinxes. A visitor would begin their pilgrimage to the precinct via the Way of the Rams, pass through Pylon I (Figure 3.26) into a large colonnaded courtyard, and then enter the Hypostyle Hall via Pylon II. The Hypostyle Hall was the most impressive feature of the precinct, a court covering approximately 5,000 square meters in area, and containing 134 massive ten-meter tall columns. The megalithic lintels that rest atop these columns each weigh 64 metric tons. The northern side of the hall is decorated in raised relief, the southern side in sunk relief. The outer walls depict scenes of battle, the ruler Seti I on the north and Ramesses II on the south, two important benefactors of Karnak. Numerous gods are depicted as well, but they mostly document and detail the exploits of these two kings.

Figure 3.26 The first pylon (circa 1856). Source: Photo by Frank Mason Good, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-ppmsca-04544.

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The Hypostyle hall was a particularly effective wayfaring anchor, further enhanced with temporal and scalar spatial-cognitive metaphors to enhance its presence. The columns of the Hypostyle hall were designed and painted to represent tall papyrus stalks complete with capitals that imitated the feathery blossoms of flowers. The monumental scale and geometrical proportion of these columns would have subsumed the pilgrim, eradicating any associative meanings they may have brought with them from the outside world, and imposing their own structural significance by engulfing the viewer with their sheer physical presence. Geometrical proportion would convey specific ideas of scale. As the visitor moved from the bright outside world into the darkness of the Hall, their concept of time would be altered and mediated by sequences of time. The colossal columns parsed the incoming sunlight from the roofline clerestory windows into long shafts of brilliance that pierced the gloomy and dark hall, revealing snippets of colorful scenes of past kings undertaking grand deeds and cavorting with the gods (Figure 3.27). The Hall as a place would effectively rupture and subsume the individual and force them to contemplate the Egyptian universe. The Precinct of Amun-Re was not a place for static contemplation, but one of ritualized wayfaring movement. Spatial-cognitive sequences of

Figure 3.27 Shadows upon the columns of the Hypostyle Hall at the Temple of Amun-Re. Source: Photo courtesy of Stuart Tyson Smith.

144 Movement movement would come into play as one progressed along the west-to-east axial pathway. The multiple gateways created a series of thresholds that had to be crossed and experienced in order to enter the hidden sanctuary of Amun-Re. The subsequent courtyards and hallways forced the pilgrim to experience the compression of space, from large to gradually smaller spaces, from open sky to progressively lower roof-lines, from bright sunlight to increasingly darker surroundings. The inner sanctuary would have been the smallest of spaces, along with additional sequences of scale that reinforced this transition, a representation of a primordial time and place. It was at the Precinct of Amun-Re that the annual Feast of Opet was held. This fertility ceremony commemorated the mystical marriage of Amun-Re with his wife Mut, where their effigy statues (along with that of their godly offspring Khonsu) were escorted from the Precinct to Amun-Re’s harem at the nearby Temple of Luxor by boat. As they proceeded, the various shrines and sanctuaries would be filled with offerings. At the conclusion of the Luxor ceremonies, the effigies would be returned to Karnak in order to reenact the coronation ceremonies of the king. This ceremony employed multiple sequences of time and movement that spatially sequenced social memories from the present to the past (as well as the past to the present), shaping collective thought of the cosmos and universe. Karnak shared a similar function and construction pattern as the medieval cathedral. It architecturally facilitated a ritual journey through various stages of heightened sanctity as a pilgrim moved toward the sanctum of the temple. A mythological narrative unfolded naturally in a linear and legible way using space and architecture to explain time and meaning. Similar to the cathedral, Karnak was also built and expanded over the course of multiple generations, unlike most monuments that were often built by a single generation, their owners keen on seeing the return on their industrious investment. When High-Priest Bakenkhonsu raised his sky-reaching obelisks to honor Ramses II, he invoked the architectural principles of dimension, consonance, and spatial contrast. These timeless principles guided generations of builders at Karnak as they created the grandest of sanctuaries for navigating within and between times present and primordial.

Stonehenge (wayfinding) An unknown Saxon, ruminating upon the west lands of Wiltshire during the 8th century, wrote: Fate has shattered the wondrous, mighty stone. The city is broken, the work of giants has perished. The top parts have fallen, the high rocks tumbled, the beams are bereaved, the mortar has failed, broken holes provide no shelter from the storms; the old ones are eaten away. The worldly craftsmen, now decayed, now departed, are held in the clutch of the earth; they have rested in the grip of the grave while a hundred

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generations of their nation have passed away. Only the wall, lichencovered and stained red, has outlived one kingdom after another, and remains standing against the storms, its high curves fallen. (Davis 2014)15 This narrative is an early medieval wayfinding account that attempted to describe and negotiate an ancient place, possibly the Roman city of Bath, but potentially the colossal stone façade of Stonehenge that rises out of the chalky flats of Salisbury Plains. It is not unlike the words of William Wordsworth, the 18th-century poet, who rested one night in 1794 beneath the large stone uprights of Stonehenge (Figure 3.28), and had frightening visions of human sacrifices. He wrote (1864: 56): “Pile of Stonehenge! So proud to hint yet keep thy secrets, though that lov’st to stand and hear the Plain resounding to the whirlwind’s sweep, inmate of lonesome Nature’s endless year.” Both of these intimate encounters, Saxon reflection and poetic rhyme, represent how the spatial-cognitive metaphors of wayfinding communicate to us from the distant past. Yet how exactly could these two pilgrims make sense of such an ancient monument—let alone the nearly 1,000,000 Stonehenge visitors who try to do the same today—when its builders are long dead? Wayfinding encourages the integration of knowledge laterally rather than vertically,

Figure 3.28 Stonehenge, Salisbury, England (circa 1890). Source: Photo from the Photochrom Collection / Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division / LC-DIG-ppmsc-08828.

146 Movement so that an account from a Saxon prince could be intelligible to us today, and may closely align with the original intent of its builders. The intention of any builder is to enhance used experience through sensorial qualities, architectural anchors, and spatial hierarchies that choreograph a sequence of spatial movements. All facilitate cognitive orientation and a place with identifying wayfinding points to form a coherent mental image or map of a sacred place. Stonehenge has been extensively mapped, excavated, and studied in the modern era (e.g., Atkinson 1979; Bender 1998; Cleal et al. 1995; Exon et al. 2000; Johnson 2008; North 1996; Pitts 2000; Ruggles 1999; Sims 2006; Thomas 1999). The monument was constructed in a series of stages beginning over five millennia ago, built in concentric rings of stone uprights, all within a bank-and-ditch circle called a henge. Stonehenge has pathways radiating from it to nearby barrow tombs, and a ditch-and-bank procession way (the Avenue) approaching it from the northeast. The 104 meter long ditch is 1.5 meters deep and surrounds four stone alignments: (1) the outer Sarcen Ring; (2) the bluestone ring; (3) the trilithon horseshoe; and (4) the bluestone horseshoe. The outer Sarcen Ring is a circle measuring 35.5 meters in diameter. Much of it has collapsed, but it was originally thirty 20-ton uprights and topped with a ring of lintel stones. Each Sarcen sandstone block was smoothed and shaped to maintain a gentle curved appearance and to lock the lintels in place on top. The bluestone ring is older and was comprised of 60 rhyolite bluestones averaging 0.75 meters high. The trilithon horseshoe consists of five arched lintel triads of larger Sarcen stones facing northeast. The trilithon is a common architectural feature in Neolithic tombs of the time, a physical entranceway that signified an earthly/heavenly doorway or bridge. The bluestone horseshoe stands within the Trilithons, and opens northeast as well. An unworked stone block called the Heel Stone (there were originally two) stands in the center of the avenue, 78 meters northeast of Stonehenge’s center point. Stonehenge represents an impressive engineering feat for its time, but its original function is unknown since it was abandoned for over 2,000 years and remodeled frequently over the centuries. Scholars generally agree Stonehenge served as a celestial observatory to track lunar and solar alignments, probably in the context of sacred ritual (Figure 3.29). The Neolithic was a critical time for Atlantic Europe, as mobile hunter-gathering switched to a more complex lifestyle of pastoralism, cereal cropping, and foraging. New material culture appears—pottery storage vessels, polished stone foodprocessing tools, and large stone monuments—indicators of a dramatically changing world that archaeologist Alistair Whittle describes (1996: 261) as focused upon “a strong sense of seasonal time, fixity of place, a celebration of the local, and an abstract collectivized sense of an ancestral past.” Henge monuments are a new symbolic motif that emphasized community and collectivism in both real and ancestral time, becoming arenas for revealing the heavens, where stone uprights encircling the horizon and framing

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Figure 3.29 Isometric map of Stonehenge with the sun setting at winter solstice. Source: After Hawkins (1965: 41).

the skyline and demarking the movement of celestial bodies (Bradley 1998). A henge delineates the physical characteristics of the local landscape at the same time it communicates spatial-cognitive sequences to the observer. Scholars debate whether Stonehenge was used to track primarily solar or lunar movements. Its stones accentuate and “frame” both solstice and lunar standstill moments—when the sun or moon reaches an endpoint in its celestial trajectory and then seemingly “stands still” before it arcs back.16 As an observatory, Stonehenge conceptually blended two important places of the ancient Neolithic world of southern England: the first is an absolute space consisting of the visible physical cosmos; the second is the abstract space of Neolithic life that included the social or spiritual cosmos. The physical cosmos consisted of the earth, moon, and sun; important celestial bodies that permeated all aspects of rudimentary Neolithic life. The social cosmos, from what archaeologists have pieced together, imbued the earth with meanings of fertility and nature, the sun with associations of energy and growth, and the moon with connotations of seasonal order and rhythm. These two spaces were integrated together into a cultural place by the builders of Stonehenge (Figure 3.30); an emergent architectural analog that linked the earth to the sky, and the physical realm to the spiritual realm. As real and omnipotent this monument was when it was freshly constructed, it was merely a representative model of a Neolithic blended space, a partially diminished representation understood by Neolithic pilgrims. And what does Stonehenge’s original representation say to the modern visitor? The only frames of lexical reference that we possess are what can be intuited from the tumbled old stones. Stonehenge still communicates to us but with a variant message; a place for our modern views of the past, or religion, or social reproduction, or material construction. What sort of spatial-cognitive sequences does Stonehenge evoke? Well, first and foremost, Stonehenge as a monument conveys important spatialcognitive metaphors of wayfinding movement. It was a major geographic

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Figure 3.30 The physical and social spaces of Stonehenge. Source: Author drawing.

and cognitive landmark during the Neolithic that was visible for miles around and, as any prominent modern landmark today, Stonehenge encouraged pilgrimage. The procession way, called the Avenue, was built to bring traveling pilgrims from the Avon River to the southeast. Scholars speculate that large processions, probably synchronized with key rituals or festivals, proceed up the Avon River by boat, and then on to Stonehenge by foot. A dedicated explorer is still able to walk part of this old road today from river to henge, and experience the spatial-cognitive sequences of movement that approaching Stonehenge evokes. Looming larger as one walks closer, the size and permanency of the large monoliths speak to the pilgrim. The Avenue approaches the monument uphill from the northeast, and at its end one stands exactly level with the monument standing beside the Heel Stone. Each circular ring envelopes the pilgrim further into its expansive interior as the pilgrim walks to the center of the henge. It is unlike any private house or village—it is grand, airy, communal, and public. The upright stones communicate movement as well—creating mental images of ancient workers striving in labor. Its center vantage allows the pilgrim to fully juxtapose public with private; an encompassing circularity with the distinctly private spaces view at a distance, family tombs, houses, or villages (Thomas 1999: 60).17 And much like a physical map, viewing the surrounding topography became movement itself. The stable and immovable upright stones oriented visitors to the surrounding hills and tombs, and to the moving celestial bodies. The spaciousness of its interior accommodated a great number of participants who would have jointly experienced this shared movement. Stonehenge is proof of the increasingly public nature of Neolithic seasonal rituals used to observe the movements of the sun and moon.

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Spatial-cognitive metaphors of time served to reinforce those of movement. Stonehenge is a montage of clashing prospective and retrospective memories. As part of the new Neolithic symbolic motif, Stonehenge emphasized community and collectivism in both real and ancestral time. Many stone circles such as Stonehenge were built to sustain a new order, places of collective memory, and rearranged time. The experience of watching the sunset at Stonehenge was a visual merger of the sky with the earth, and of life with death, as the sun hovered over the ancestral land, a concurrence of the proximal present with the distal past (Figure 3.31). As archaeologists Joshua Pollard and Clive Ruggles (2001: 87) observe: “In one form or another, Stonehenge always embodied notions of time—both of time past and continuity—in a world of punctuated social change.” Stonehenge was a place where time literally stood still, in the way that solar and lunar standstill events were observed. A modern equivalent might be the immersive visit made to a traditional planetarium, complete with a star-filled dome and a narrator’s soothing voice. In the darkened dome we comprehend the celestial movements that incessantly swirl all around us—we slip into a Newtonian frame of mind, feeling insignificant and small as our existence blurs with the expansive

Figure 3.31 The conceptual path of making and reading ancient Stonehenge. Source: Author drawing.

150 Movement universe around us. Time and space become limitless even as we remain physically grounded to the axial point of our reclining chair. The afterglow, once the lights come on and we get up to leave, is a feeling of awe and discovery of our extraordinary place within the universe around us.18 For the ancient star-gazer, Stonehenge was a potent axis that evoked spatial-cognitive sequences of time. As archaeologist Julian Thomas (1999: 54) conjectures, the experience of watching the sunset from an ancestral monument: depended upon the momentary coincidence of chalk from the earth, the descending sun, the dead in their barrow and the surrounding forest. This does not indicate any scientific observation of the heavens, so much as a perceived unity of earth and sky, life and death, past and present, all being referenced to bring more and more emphasis on to particular spaces and places. This would tend to heighten the significance of whatever transactions and performances took place … [at a place such as Stonehenge]. At the same time it would also limit access to these spaces in terms of both direction and timing, and would contribute to the way in which the space was experienced by promoting the impression that it stood at an axial point of an integrated cosmos. Stonehenge was a spatial locus that generated collective prospective memories about the surrounding universe, incorporating moment with memory, physical time with otherworld time. As Alasdair Whittle (1996: 261) notes: A sense of sacred beginnings made time seem endless … The living and the dead were linked in a collectivity of shared existence … This kind of belief may lie at the heart of what we choose to call the Neolithic way of life. Stonehenge also blends retrospective memories as one of the world’s most contested monumental landscapes (Bender 1998; Blain and Robert 2007: 79–80). Its meaning and place in society has been renegotiated since the Middle Ages, when the Anglo-Saxons renamed the Celtic name of Gôr y Cewri to Stan Hencg, using it as a public execution ground in the seventh or eighth century a.d. (the Old English word “hencg” means hanging or gibbet). Medieval Christians appropriated Stonehenge because it was a pagan structure associated with devilry and magic, building a religious house that may have destroyed parts of the monument. Today, modern pagan druids treat Stonehenge as a place of worship, even though archaeological knowledge suggests ancient druids never worshipped there at all. Pagans represent one of many modern groups vying to construct retrospective memories of the site; others include new age religionists, English Heritage and National Trust preservationists, and tourists. Regarding spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale, Stonehenge was a colossal undertaking, built without precedent during the Neolithic. It was constructed

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over 1,500 years in three major phases requiring a total of 267,500 labordays of effort (Labor-days are calculated at ten hours of labor per day: Castleden 1993: 254–255). The first phase was the outer circular ditch, dug with picks and antlers, and built using over 10,000 labor-days. The second phase included a cluster of postholes placed inside the ditch, perhaps for the construction of a timber structure. All the stones were placed during the third phase (2280–1930 b.c.), the bluestones first, followed by the laboriously shaped Sarcen stones with lintels. Labor estimates for these 350 years are a whopping 150,000 labor-days, suggesting 7,500 labor-days for 20 people, or about 22 labor-days per year. The raising of the lintels alone required 900 labor-days for 20 people, or about 3 labor-days per year for 350 years. Stonehenge’s latitude is unusual because it is where solar and lunar events are observed at right angles to one another (Hill 2008: 11). Built further north or south and that would not be so. The axis of the site was shifted three degrees to align it with the midsummer rising sun and the midwinter setting sun. Such a large structure as Stonehenge likewise has to be physically experienced to understand its full meaning of scale, much as Wordsworth did that fateful night, or as Christopher Tilley (2009: 66–97) describes: The area in the immediate vicinity of Stonehenge is ambiguously delimited. It is not located on a well-defined ridge or spur, of which there are many in the surrounding landscape … There is absolutely no drama with regard to its location. The drama and theatrical power of the monument seem to derive entirely from the sheer size and height of the stones, and without these the place would long since have been forgotten … As one approaches Stonehenge walking along the final part of the Avenue from the northeast, arrival at the monument takes the form of an ascending pathway … [After the final phase of construction] for a person standing in the central space of the monument, the outside world is completely screened off, and no barrows may be seen … the landscape was effectively shut out from the interior. Tilley makes an important observation: that spatial-cognitive sequences of scale blend with those of movement. As one walks closer and closer to Stonehenge, following the path of the rising sun, the immensity and perfection of the site is apparent as it becomes a larger and more prominent feature upon the western horizon. This wayfinding movement towards Stonehenge placed the structure in the Neolithic universe. Once inside the inner ring of stones, the interior takes the scale of the exaggerated, becoming a lived space, minimizing the observer, prohibiting the vision of the outside landscape, disassociated bodily perspective. The exterior landscape lay hidden beyond the uprights, while its interior space mimicked the nearby landscape including Beacon Hill Ridge to the east—symbolically interacting with the landscape. This interior world enveloped the observer with its contours of meaning (Figure 3.30).

152 Movement Stonehenge is one of the world’s most ancient monuments, yet it is still decipherable to us as wayfinding observers even today, particularly if we dissect the spatial-cognitive sequences it was designed to employ. A monument is an extension of culture, both a physical entity upon the landscape and a mental manifestation inside our head. It consists of metaphors of time, movement, and scale that create and extend abstract culture, ground social and economic consequences within a physical space, and create and rearrange social meanings.

Notes 1 Literally: “ad augmentandum et amplificandum nobile manuque divina consecratum monasterium, virorum sapientium consilio, religiosorum multorum precibus, ne Deo sanctisque Martyribus displicerat adjutus, hoc ipsum incipere aggrediebar; tam in capitulo nostro quam in ecclesia divinae supplicans pietati, ut qui initium est et finis, id est alpha et omega, bono initio bonum finem salvo medio concopularet, ne virum sanguinum ab aedificio templi refutarei, qui hoc ipsum toto animo magis quam Contantinopolitanas gazas obtinere praeoptaret.” 2 Gothic architecture is broken down into the Early (1120–1250), High (1250– 1400), and Late (1400–1500) periods. Different sub-styles are also present in different regions. The change from late Gothic to Renaissance style is somewhat difficult to discern, but with the Renaissance came a general admiration for the simplicity of classical antiquity again that ultimately led to the abandonment of Gothic design features, which were deemed both overly complex and barbarous. 3 Rhetorica ad Herennium III.xvi.29: “Constat igitur artificiosa memoria ex locis et imaginibus.” Moreover Cicero (Oratore II.LXXXVI.354) writes thirty years later that places are used “like wax tablets and symbols in lieu of letters [atque ut locis pro cera, simulacris pro literis].” Quintilian notes 150 years later [Institutio Oratoria XI.2.20]: “as soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits are demanded from their custodians, as the sight of each recalls the respective details [“cum est repetenda memoria, incipient ab initio loca haec recensere, et quod cuique crediderunt reposcunt, ut eorum imagine admonentur].” Medieval scholars such as Albertus Magnus of the thirteenth century perpetuated this ancient formula of conjoining place and memory as a standard design practice for cathedral architects. 4 The Latin term simulacrum means “likeness” or “similarity.” Simulacra designs included misshapen animals and humans, gargoyles, baboons and monkeys, pagan green men, and lewd figures. They adorned carved pillars, vaulted arches, corbelled ceilings, massive capitals, choir stalls, small alcoves, and wall façades. Architectural detailing was important because the large size of a cathedral often obscured smaller architectural details or contextual features. Detailing drew attention to specific minutiae of the architectural design, features that held specific meanings or memories. Each simulacrum was placed in a unique location, dormant until a viewer or religious pilgrim happened upon it, at which time the icon drew attention to or “revealed” a specific memory associated with it. 5 Cathedral funding relied on a local income derived from taxes, tithes, donations, and loans, all ultimately deriving from agricultural production, which could itself be highly unpredictable from year to year. The lack of a formal banking system made it difficult for a cathedral chapter to obtain any stable or sustainable cash flow. Money lending was usually undertaken with Jewish moneylenders

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because usury was a Christian sin. If debts became unmanageable, indulgences were exchanged for debt release. 6 Stones were hewn by stonemasons using the saw, hammer, and chisel; and much of Europe’s limestone was harder than that used by the ancient Egyptians for the Great Pyramids. Paris itself sits upon a maze of old quarry tunnels used to provide the raw material for the construction of most of its large buildings, including Notre-Dame. They of course had to be transported to the construction site, either by cart or by raft, after which masons carved specified designs using two-dimensional wooden templates. Often hundreds of templates were required for a single cathedral. To set stones in place, mortar was prepared from crushed chalk (calcium carbonate) baked into quicklime (calcium oxide). Quicklime was them mixed with water and sand to create mortar putty that was so caustic it required the stone-layers to wear gloves. Although drying slowly, quicklime, unlike today’s cement, was less rigid and readily accommodated block strain or movement without cracking. 7 Two-thirds of any given construction crew were made up of local unskilled peasant labor who sought some sort of supplemental family income. Most commuted from their homes, while some were migrant laborers who had to be boarded, particularly the skilled artisans. The average work day was demanding; requiring over twelve hours of labor a day during the summer, and about eight hours during the winter. Local landowners, who controlled the tenant laborers that commonly made up the cathedral work force, thus played a significant role in the political organization of cathedral-building projects of the era. 8 The principles and methods of the ancients were mostly forgotten, except for some sparse hints found in the works of Vitruvius’ De Architectura. Perhaps because of this very vacuum, they were able to initiate an entirely new school of design upon which to pin their economic and spiritual hopes upon. 9 Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus c. 4, l. 5, n. 339: Literally: “Deus tradit pulchritudinem in quantum est causa conscientiae et caritatis in omnibus; sic enim hominem pulchrum dicimus, propter decentem proportion in quantitate et in situ et propter hoc quod habet clarum et nitidum colorem.” 10 From the Curculio 475–476, written by Plautus. Literally: In foro infumo boni homines atque dites ambulant, in medio propter canlem, ibi ostentatores meri. 11 Literally:“Senatus Populusque Romanus incendio consumptum restituit.” This inscription is still visible today for those who visit the ruins. 12 Literally: Κρήτη τις γαῖ᾽ ἔστι, μέσῳ ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ, καλὴ καὶ πίειρα, περίρρυτος:  ἐν δ᾽ ἄνθρωποι πολλοί, ἀπειρέσιοι, καὶ ἐννήκοντα πόληες. ἄλλη δ᾽ ἄλλων γλῶσσα μ εμιγμένη: ἐν μὲν Ἀχαιοί, ἐν δ᾽ Ἐτεόκρητες μεγαλήτορες, ἐν δὲ Κύδωνες, Δωριέες τε  τριχάϊκες δῖοί τε Πελασγοί. τῇσι δ᾽ ἐνὶ Κνωσός, μεγάλη πόλις, ἔνθα τε Μίνως 13 Major time periods include: (1) Pre-palatial Period—EM I-MM IA (ca. 3100– 1900 b.c.); (2) Protopalatial (or Old Palace) Period—MM IB-MM IIB (ca. 1900–1720 b.c.); (3) Neopalatial (or New Palace) Period—MM IIIA-LM IB (circa 1720–1470 b.c.); and the (4) Post-palatial Period – LM II – IIIC (circa 1470–1050 b.c.). 14 For example, the central court at Knossos was large enough to have held up to 5,435 people, assuming 2 and 0.2 square meters per person, equivalent to about one quarter of the total estimated population of Neopalatial Knossos (14,000– 18,000 individuals). 15 Graeme Davis disputes the association of The Ruin with the Roman city of Bath, first made by Heinrich Leo in 1865 and continued by subsequent translators who adjusted their translation accordingly (e.g. Hamer 1970: 25–27). 16 Popular belief has long held that Stonehenge’s primary viewing axis was from inside the circles’ center at the Altar Stone, and that when facing northeast

154 Movement towards the Avenue on summer solstice morning the sun appears to rise directly over the Heel Stone. See Atkinson (1979: 93–97). This observation, according to the recent work (Pitts 2000: 135; North 1996; Ruggles 1999; Sims 2006), is coincidental to Stonehenge’s primary viewing axis outside the henge at the Heel Stone and looking southwest towards the Altar Stone on winter solstice evening to mark the setting sun. When looking at the tapered sarsen stones into the inner horseshoe from the Heel Stone, Stonehenge appears to be almost a solid block of stone that frames the setting sun between the grand trilithon uprights as it sets upon the Altar stone (Pitts 2000: 135). Moreover, when walking the last 78 meters to the circles from the Heel Stone at winter solstice sunset a “standstill” illusion is created that freezes the setting sun in place (thus delaying the sunset for the observer) as slowing rising eye of the observer counteracts the sinking motion of the setting sun. A second important observation that may be made from the Heel Stone is that of the setting moon at minor southern standstill within the Grand Trilithon window, when the moon’s setting is stopped short of its full range. The importance of lunar observations is further strengthened by the fact that the Aubrey Holes, a ring of 56 pits that predates the bluestones may be symbolically and/or astronomically linked to the 28-day lunar cycle. The symbolism of 56 is explicitly documented by the Greek historian Plutarch, who associated the number to the ancient god of Typhon/Seth, identified as the shadow of the Earth that covers the Moon during lunar eclipses (Johnson 2008: 259–260). The exact function of the Aubrey Holes is still under debate. 17 Thomas argues that the concentric division of henge monuments and evidence of circular processions within henges suggests a more nuanced dichotomy of simple inside-outside division of space (and therefore movement) than we are currently able to discern. 18 The gulf that exists between humans and the cosmos today was not so pronounced in the ancient world. The effects of Copernicus’ discovery that the universe does not revolve around the earth have left the modern world struggling to find a place of significance in the cosmic order. For a uniquely modern terra-centric view see the work of the Cold Dark Matter theorist Joel Primack (Primack and Abrams 2006).

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4

Scale

A lingering childhood memory nagged at the naturalist Loren Eiseley, well into his adulthood years. He wrote (1971: 227): sometimes the place is lost in the years behind us. Or sometimes it is a thing of air, a kind of vaporous distortion above a heap of rubble … We cling to a time and place because without them man is lost, not only man but life. This is why the voices, real or unreal, which speak … are voices out of nowhere whose only reality lies in their ability to stir the memory. Eiseley’s memory was about planting a tree with his father, and it was so forceful that it drove him to return to his childhood home some 60 years later. After journeying a thousand miles, Eiseley was shocked to find that in fact the tree he had planted was long gone, uprooted as a sapling shortly after he moved away. The sapling, present only in his mind, had continued to grow into a mature shade tree worthy of a visitation. Eiseley’s story highlights a peculiar paradox of the human condition: the way we easily blur the past with the present. The human ability to remember is certainly one of our most impressive cognitive triumphs. Our collective memories drive us—they dictate how we think, how we act, and who we are. However, our memories may also be inaccurate or even hopelessly flawed. They often merge with other cognitive functions such as imagination, dreaming, and hallucination. For Eiseley, the melancholy of feeling lost in time is very real. Our minds can become out of touch, caught in a static and permanent loop, frozen within a changing world. His reflections shrewdly articulate how it feels to be emotionally stimulated by memory. He states: It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other

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things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it. (Eiseley 1957: 179–180) Similar to Eiseley’s childhood mental map of his childhood, a monument that is “big” or “gigantic” is likewise as powerful because it stimulates meanings that are grandiose and communal, subsuming the observer and obliterating normal spatial perception. It employs spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale that serve as a perceptive framework to compare and contrast the size of a monument relative to other things, either our own human body or other architectural structures. While spatially anchored to the present, it beckons to us from the past, beckoning with its sublime bigness. Spatially, we relate to a giant monument the same way we experience the landscape that surrounds us. Just as we journey around and through the expansiveness of the natural environment, we similarly move through the bigness of a monument. The spaces and architectural contours of the gigantic monument astonish and confront the viewer with an inspirational display of scale, shaping ordinary context into extraordinary practice (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 The colossal Stone of the Pregnant Woman at Baalbek, Lebanon (circa 1890); it is the largest cut stone in the world, measuring over twenty meters long and weighing one thousand metric tons. Source: Polychrom Print Collection / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / LC-DIG-ppmsca-02651.

162 Scale A gigantic monument stimulates feelings of awe, defined as the emotion that arises when one encounters something so strikingly vast that it provokes a need to update one’s mental schemas (Keltner and Haidt 2003; Rudd et al. 2012). Awe is part of the natural human defense response cascade, stimulating hyper-vigilance, focusing the attention on the immediate and present moment. Awe does not occur only with rare transcendental occurrences, but also with everyday spatial surroundings or unfolding events. Perceptual vastness of the rare or the mundane confers self-perception in relation to a larger framework, expanded mental structures to conceptually integrate a new blended mental space or mental map. This creates new ways to think, process, and understand. Moreover, feeling awe, or the “power of apprehension” (Derrida 1987: 126), makes us experience time differently, lengthening or slowing temporal processing because of our focus on the immediate present. Thus experiencing metaphors of scale contributes to a reconfiguring of our sense of time by immersing us in the present moment. This chapter explicitly examines the spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale. Although monumental metaphors of scale cannot be fully disentangled from the other spatial-cognitive metaphors of time and movement, they are some of the most foundational and essential parts of making sense of any monumental encounter. Six monumental types are discussed: (1) Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; (2) Mons Vaticanus; (3) the Greek Sanctuary; (4) the Great Pyramids of Giza; (5) Borobudur; and (6) the giant monoliths of Rapa Nui. These examples exemplify the splendid yet deceptive nature of monumental scale. Each possess subjective value that is magnified by bigness. Each is embellished and sublime enough to offer us exaggerated meanings. Similar to the roles that metaphors of time and movement play in monumental construction and use, scale delves into the core aspects of our cognitive capabilities in order to shape ordinary context into extraordinary practice. Each of these six monuments is uniquely inspiring. As a whole, the pyramids at Giza represent one of the most awe-inspiring edifices ever constructed; one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, which had remained to be the tallest structure in the world for nearly 4,000 years. Similar in age value and mystique is the Greek Sanctuary, a sacred space reserved for the worship of the gods, many becoming highly developed architectural complexes. The 9th century Borobudur monument was one of the largest Buddhist temples every constructed, and shaped in the form of a pinnacled holy mountain. The giant monoliths of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, represent one of the most mysterious and most isolated landscapes in the world. Mons Vaticanus, with its impressive Basilica, was the most costly of all monuments, and served as a symbolic landscape of the Holy See of Rome for 1,000 years. The final monument presented here, and the first under discussion, is a monument that is yet-to-be: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Designed to be the largest monumental landscape in the world (1,083 hectares), the WIPP monument will be filled with structures not meant to

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commemorate, but instead to demark and devalue an environmental hazard. These six examples, taken from disparate times and places, are indicative of the human monumental impulse—our desire to commemorate exceptional memories of people and events—a longing that has remained undiminished over the ages.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant The proposed inscription upon a not-yet-built death marker is to state: These structures mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes and hazardous materials. Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything with the rocks or water in this area. Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10,000 years. (John Hart and P.A. Associates 2004: 41) This death marker is not meant to commemorate the location and memory of heroic events, but rather one meant to be a prospective warning of place that contains future hazard and potential death. This monument has yet-to-be; it is a monument conceptualized and designed for marking an underground storage faculty for nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive transuranic waste at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The WIPP monument offers interesting testimony about how monuments are conceived and built, especially one that is a peculiarity of modern times, a structure filled with metaphors of devalued warning, a tombstone of environmental hazard. It is planned to be a monument that covers 1,089 hectares, larger than any other monumental landscape and over six times greater larger than the Giza Plateau with the great pyramids (see Giza, this chapter), employing spatialcognitive metaphors of scale to create awe and wonder. Located in the Chihuahuan Desert east of Carlsbad in New Mexico, the WIPP facility has a 600-meter deep cavern used to contain over 800,000 large steel drums of nuclear waste shipped from power plants across the United States. The waste includes solid and liquid elements of radioactive uranium and plutonium that are lethal in very small doses, and that have an astonishing half-life of nearly 2,000,000 years. Moreover, plutonium is a highly trans-locatable particle, capable of seeping into surrounding soil or groundwater, or forming a high-pressure gas that can migrate upward through cracks and crevices in the earth. The disposal storage rooms have been carved out of the Permian Salt Formation and are meant to slowly expand inward, creating leak-proof seals around the barrel and thus preventing trans-location. The caverns facility will be completely full and permanently sealed in 2030, at which time the WIPP monument will be erected and the site abandoned. The monument is supposed to last to the year 12,030, when the level of radioactive danger drops to acceptable probabilities.

164 Scale The WIPP facility is under the charge of the U.S. Department of Energy and managed by Washington TRU Solutions. Its construction was authorized under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982 that prioritized the creation of underground waste storage facilities to mitigate environmental hazards. After scientific study and considerable pressure from individual states that resisted the nuclear waste facilities, Congress mandated the creation of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a facility for commercial radioactive waste and WIPP as the repository of military waste. The implementation and operation of the WIPP facility has been a transparent process that includes both government and private partners. WIPP operates a website and outreach information center in Carlsbad that includes an informational exhibit and a brief documentary on the project (http://www.wipp.energy. gov, accessed August 6, 2018). Free 250,000,000-year-old salt samples excavated from the caverns are also made available for visitors. The design process of the WIPP monument has also been a transparent process that consulted a host of designers and planners. Although mandated as a governmental “top-down” version of official history, the WHIP monument was designed from the “bottom-up” by a democratic committee of experts. Much has been written concerning the WIPP monument because its design is controversial (Bryan-Wilson 2003; Van Wyck 2004). How do we design a monument to communicate spatial-cognitive metaphors of meaning for 10,000 years, or over 500 generations, twice the age of Stonehenge? How might cultures and languages differ by then? How do we prevent them from inhabiting, digging, or mining the surrounding landscape of WIPP? In 1991, a government-appointed “expert-judgment” panel of anthropologists, archaeologists, artists, astronomers, linguists, and engineers were first to answer these questions and to blueprint an appropriate site marker. The panel formed into two 11-member teams to develop recommendations for a monument consisting of a system of permanent, passive markers. Their final report was published in April, 1992 (Trauth et al., 1993). The most unequivocal provision in their report was that we as a society have a moral imperative to construct a monument atop the WIPP facility that includes multiple levels of messages that should not mislead or frighten, off-site archives, and durable materials. The 2004 revised blueprint (Hart and P.A. Associates 2004) for the monument includes an 850 by 700-meter earthen berm or rampart around the site (Figure 4.2). It is to be 30 meters wide and 10 meters high, having a volume of 930,000 cubic meters of earth. Its soil will contain a configuration of special radar-reflective and magnetic metal objects meant to produce distinctive radar and magnetic signatures. Forty-eight granite monoliths will be erected along two perimeters, one just inside the berm, and the other along the perimeter of a 10.3 square kilometer buffer zone (Figure 4.3). Each monolith with be constructed of durable concrete some 20 tons in volume, and contain the above inscribed epitaph in seven different languages. At the center a granite information center will be built, with more engraved

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Figure 4.2 Schematic drawing of the WIPP permanent marker (not to scale). Source: Hart and Associates (2004: 14).

Figure 4.3 An aerial view of the WIPP facility with a 3.3 × 3.3 kilometer isometric overlay of the monument’s berm and buffer zone, Carlsbad, New Mexico. Source: Google Maps.

warnings, some in script, others using pictorial images, which include the current solar calendar year documented in astronomical/star chart images that reveal north celestial pole migration. Two subterranean solid granite archive rooms will contain the same inscribed warnings, one being placed beneath the berm itself and another outside the berm, five meters below ground surface. Small four-centimeter warning discs will be buried all over

166 Scale the site at different depths, each containing a warning message in a different language. These disks will be made of granite, clay, and aluminum. Finally, extensive records about the WIPP facility will be distributed in archives all over the world, including such information as its location, design, content, and hazards. This is information that is not to be stored anywhere on the site itself. Unable to predict how a monument may be interpreted in the future, the panel concluded the existing plan must implement two key components: an architectural form of “sheer enormity” equal to the Pyramids of Egypt, and visual signs that employ a “universal ‘natural language’ of forms” (Trauth et al. 1993: F24–F25, F39). After scouring the archaeological record for suitable plans, they recommended the adoption of the “Stonehenge model” since it has the best probability for longevity; a series of upright monolithic stones arranged in a circle. The use of the colossal to mark nuclear waste is a highly debatable point since it intentionally creates meaning by using metaphors of scale to draw an observer closer and envelope them. Stonehenge, for example, is a sacred site meant to draw visitors to its center (and still does today), and it is not a devalued site at all. Any enclosed arrangement of monoliths clearly centers attention onto a specific location, one that could be very enticing to the viewer; a beacon to visit or dig. I would argue a linear or random pattern of monoliths would server better to not focus attention. A number of WIPP advisors strongly disagreed with the panel’s conclusion regarding the use of “enormous” or spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale. Physicist Gregory Benford stated in 2006 that “Any monument would become a tourist attraction” and that “No marker” is a more viable strategy (Piller 2006; Van Wyck 2004: 28). An unmarked site would indeed be unseen and hopefully undiscovered and, as far as nuclear waste is concerned, might prove to be the safest alternative. The ancient Egyptians eventually saw that the ideas of secrecy and monumentally collide: after centuries of burying their revered leaders in highly visible burial pyramids or cemetery complexes that were repeatedly looted, they began the practice of hiding the elite tombs underground in the Valley of the Kings. However, by virtue of the mandates given by the Environmental Protection Agency to properly permanently mark disposal sites, the strategy of secrecy must be jettisoned. The rectangular berm is another interesting choice. As a large continuous wall, the berm encloses space and communicates a meaning of uniqueness by cordoning off a locality (even if it is devalued). Two other berm design choices were rejected in lieu of the rectangular. One was a variant of the radioactive image, a trefoil design of mounds. The second was a collage of “menacing earthworks,” a series of oddly shaped and ugly mounds. Both the trefoil and menacing earthworks designs are unusual and therefore more likely to communicate danger; in fact, one of the panel teams chose the menacing earthworks as a suitable metaphor for communicating the ideas of destruction, instability, and poison. Yet menacing earthworks was rejected because of cost inefficiency (Environmental Protection Agency 1996); it

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required almost double the amount of earth to be moved (1,400,000 cubic meters). Greater priority was placed upon the textual and pictorial inscriptions than the architectural style of the monument. The panel adopted three logos for communicating caution and repulsion: (1) the “skull and crossbones” (recommended by scientist Carl Sagan); (2) the image of a human face displaying horror or revulsion, similar to the “Mr. Yuk” faces printed on household chemical bottles to warn children of danger; and (3) the modern symbol for radioactivity, the trefoil lines radiating out from a center circle. The meanings of such icons however, change—the swastika has had both positive and negative meanings over time, while the skull and crossbones has changed from “poison” or “danger” to a children’s fancy for “pirates.” Ironically, the panel rejected the logo of human stick-figures, even though stick-figure iconography is universally comprehensible and has been so since the Stone Age, when they were drawn on cave walls. The WIPP monument is a remarkable example of a state-ordained attempt to custom design the future using monumental construction. This attempt makes the very real assumption that future cultures will be far less technologically capable than the present day, or that they will have at least changed so much that our present culture will have little meaning. We would not have to bother with such communicative design if a future society possesses a level of technology equal to or greater than our own, for they could easily ascertain the meanings of the relics found at the WIPP site, much in the way that modern scholars have deciphered the past cultures and languages in ancient Egypt, Sumeria, or Mesoamerica and have been able to decipher their “extinct” inscriptions. The WIPP monument may be a Rosetta Stone of future times, where the visual and textual information inscribed on the monoliths or tokens could be used to decipher any one of the seven languages that may become “lost” or “extinct.” However, the key to the Egyptian Rosetta Stone was that ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were accompanied by more modern languages (Greek and Demotic) that could still be read and understood by scholars. If the WIPP monument is to become a future Rosetta Stone then some society in the near future must update the inscriptions so that we future linguists might link it to the past. Space will be left on the monolith markers just for this purpose: future inscriptions in future languages—hopefully. Another assumption of the WIPP planning process is that the concept of permanence planned for the various architectural and visual components of the WIPP monument defies any rational consideration of what “permanent” really is. It is difficult to mentally conceive of a quarter of a million years as the time necessary to degrade plutonium waste, let alone imagine how a human-built object could withstand the test of so much time. The planners adopted the arbitrary limit of permanence as 10,000 years, assuming that if any monument lasts that long then it might probabilistically endure much longer, and that “messages will be updated to current languages” at some

168 Scale future date (Hart and P.A. Associates 2004: 20). We hope that future societies understand astronomy enough to read the monument’s time-elapsed celestial pictograms, or even find such pictograms actually preserved and legible. The WIPP story illustrates how to materially commemorate a future event rather than a past event. All monuments actually do so in a fashion, dictating how to project prospective meanings as far into the future as possible. They act as a sign that actively creates memory and meaning. But unlike those monuments at the National Mall that commemorate our mythological origins and spirit (critical meanings for state function), or even the humble tombstones marking the graves of our explorer forbearers, the devalued nature of the WIPP monument inverts the meanings of monumentality in lurid fashion. It draws our attention away from the issue that nuclear waste is not our problem, but a dilemma for those in the future. It makes assertions of danger without value and fails to praise anything, even though it employs an architectural idiom usually reserved for praise and value. While monuments decrying tragedy or at least death are no stranger to American history, they at least convey a murky link between glory and tragedy. The WIPP monument serves as an anti-monument of sorts (Erőss 2017; Stevens et al., 2012; Strakosch 2010), offering no prospective meanings of glory, leaving both the monument and the devalued desert landscape that it marks entirely to the whims of the retrospective meanings of the future. The opposing axiom to Raphael Samuel’s (1994: 429) observation that “the past is a play thing of the present” might instead become the future is the play thing of the present once 2030 arrives and the WIPP monument is abandoned by the present generation.

Mons Vaticanus Pope Nicolas V had great ambitions according to his secretary and biographer Giannozzo Manetti. According to Manetti, in 1450 the Pope “had two soaring ideas, the Renaissance of the world by learning and the turning of the eyes of Christendom to a Vatican which should outshine in magnificence the Palatine of the Emperors” (Scotti 2007: 20). Nicolas ruled a Roman Church during difficult times in the 15th century: suffering the fall of Constantinople to the Ottman Turks, subduing the last of the French antipopes, and reasserting papal rights over bishoprics and benefices. He sought to make Rome the home of literature and art, and designed plans for rebuilding the ancient St. Peter’s Basilica in the hopes of revitalizing the glories of the papacy. The efforts of Nicolas V illustrate the changing nature of monumentalization for a thousand years of the symbolic landscape of the Holy See of Rome, also known as the Vatican. The Holy See is the ecclesiastical heart of the modern Catholic Church and was the political center of the medieval Roman Church. See is a term that originates from the Latin word sedes, meaning “seat,” while the word Vatican comes from

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an ancient Latin term (mons vaticanus) meaning “hill of prophecy” (Gellius 1927: 247–248). The area now refers to the low hill containing St. Peter’s Basilica, the Apostolic Palace, the Sistine Chapel, and the Vatican Gardens. It was the capitol of the Papal States that ruled central Italy from the 8th century through the mid-19th century, and became Vatican City during the Lateran Treaties with Italy in 1929. The Vatican has a unique early history. It lay outside the walls of ancient Rome, near a marsh on the east bank of the Tiber River between Monte Mario and Janiculum (Figure 4.4). The Via Cornelia ran westward from the Tiber River toward the Vatican Hill where the Circus of Nero stood (Figure 4.5), an arena used for stated-sponsored martyrdoms of Christians in the first century (Lanciani 1967: 127). The Circus was important because Saint Peter was crucified at its center, near an ancient Egyptian obelisk that now sits in the middle of Saint Peter’s Square in front of the modern Basilica (Curl 2005). North of the Circus along the slope of Vatican hill was a pagan and Christian cemetery, where Saint Peter was buried. The tomb is now under the floor of the modern Basilica close to a foundation pylon for the great sculptured bronze canopy, known as Saint Peter’s baldachin, built during the 17th century by Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644). The tomb location was corroborated by archaeological excavations in the 1950s and 1960s (Guarducci 1960; De Marco 1964). A great basilica was constructed over Saint Peter’s tomb in the 4th century (Bowersock 2005: 5–16), most likely built by the Emperor Constans (337–350). Its walls were 36 meters tall; the north foundations being embedded into the hillside of Mons Vaticanus while the south wing foundations were approximately eight meters above the ground (Figure 4.6). The older cemetery lay hidden beneath the basilica except for the tomb of Saint Peter, which was encased in bronze and designed to protrude above the floor near the central apse. The south wing foundations reused the three northern walls

Figure 4.4 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 139. Source: Author drawing.

Figure 4.5 The circus of Nero and the Tomb of Hadrian in the distance, map of ancient Rome. Source: Logorio (1773, Plate V) / Rose Library, Emory University.

Figure 4.6 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 900. Source: Author drawing.

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Figure 4.7 Isometric drawing of the old basilica overlain upon the Circus Nero. Source: After McKinnerick et al. (2013: 28).

of the adjoining Nero’s Circus that originally supported the spectator seats along the south side of Via Cornelia (Figure 4.7). Flanking the 100-meterlong nave on both sides were two rows of 22 tightly-spaced columns, each column different in shape and color than the other because they were spoila, cannibalized from a variety of buildings and ruins around Rome. According to the 19th century archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani (1967: 127): Grimaldi says that he could not find two capitals or two bases alike. He says also that the architraves and friezes differed from one intercolumniation to another, and that some of them were inscribed with the names and praises of Titus, Trajan, Gallienus, and others. On each side of the first gateway, at the foot of the steps, were two granite columns, with composite capitals, representing the bust of the emperor Hadrian framed in acanthus leaves. The original dimensions of the Basilica were haphazard because the tomb of Saint Peter did not correspond exactly with the axis of the nave, and was a number of centimeters off the center of the apse to the south. Saint Peter was unique among basilicas of its time because of its spacious transept that extended north and south along its west end. At both ends of the transept there were three arches that led into chambers projecting north and south beyond the main walls of the basilica. An older “baldachin” canopy sat over the altar, supported by large twisted columns. The main entrance was enclosed by a large colonnaded atrium common to traditional Roman public buildings. This atrium was entered by three bronze gateways in front of the Fountain of Symmachus (added at the end of the 5th century). The construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica by Constantine and Constans upon an obscure cemetery on the outskirts of the city gave Rome a new religious and civic focal point. The Basilica was a unique place of worship

172 Scale because it was a martyria, a church built upon a vast cemetery. Even the celebration of Christian Mass was subordinated to the memorial of Saint Peter the martyr and the large-scale veneration of his tomb. Ancestor/death cults were not unknown to pagan Rome, but the veneration of Christian martyrs was a new phenomenon (Holloway 2004: 82–84). Veneration, such as continuous religious worship and festive celebration, allowed pilgrims to simultaneously experience meaning with the events of the distant past. Rather than praying for ancestral intervention in the physical world, pilgrims instead received extraordinary divine grace by being in close proximity to the tomb of the most important Christian martyr. Although Saint Peter’s Basilica began as a relatively unimportant martyria, the architecture of Mons Vatincanus eventually became the template for the sacramental church. Over the following centuries the Basilica would grow with chapels, altars, oratories, eventually becoming the church of the Holy See and the spiritual center for Christianity as it stood mostly unaltered for 1,200 years. Such spatial-cognitive metaphors of sacred time were monumentally inscribed, altering history as Saint Peter’s became the primary pilgrimage church in Rome. Continuous religious worship and commemoration activity at Peter’s grave site personally cemented such memories with each pilgrim, giving meaning in the present moment and stimulating pious behavioral responses; the actions of active practice simultaneously coexist with the events of the distant past. A papal residence was built in the 5th century by Pope Symmachus (498– 514) and over the next two centuries it expanded along the north side of the basilica (Marder 1997: 31–34). It was not a permanent residence because at that time the pope was itinerant, moving between palaces as the leader of a burgeoning Papal State. The entirety of Mons Vaticanus was eventually acquired by the Holy See through land purchase, and surrounded by the Great Leonine Wall constructed by Leo IV (847–855) after a Saracen fleet sailed up the Tiber River and looted Rome (Voci 1992). The wall contained 44 towers and three gates, and ran to the fortified Mausoleum of Hadrian along the Tiber River (later to become the papal refuge of Castel Sant’Angelo in the 13th century, see Figure 4.8). By the end of the 13th century the papal residence expanded uphill to the Apostolic Palace, just north of the portico of St. Peter’s (Figure 4.9). Few of the palatial buildings were residential; the remainder housed ecclesiastical, management, and science offices. Pope Nicholas III (1277–1280) expanded the palatial grounds to its present day size, building a fortified residence with angled towers, reinforced walls, and expanded battlements. The Pasetto Wall was built at this time, allowing quick passage from the core of the Vatican to the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo, and the Great Chapel, a fortified hall with a crenellated roof that the Papal Court used for assemblies and crowning new popes (Grundmann 1998; Richardson 2007: 49). The Apostolic Palace was eventually abandoned for 72 years when the papacy moved to France in the early 14th century. When Pope Urban V (1362–1370) returned the Holy

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Figure 4.8 Castel Sant’Angelo today, a remodel of Hadrian’s Tomb. Source: Author photo.

Figure 4.9 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 1350. Source: Author drawing.

See to Rome the traditional papal residence at the Lateran Palace in Rome had been destroyed by fire and the Apostolic Palace had fallen into disrepair because of lack of use. The Apostolic Palace was refurbished, enlarged, and fortified, becoming the permanent residence of the Holy See in the 15th century. The threestory Great Chapel was eventually converted into the Sistine Chapel in

174 Scale the 1470s, set to the dimensions of the rectangular Temple Solomon in Jerusalem. Although the architecture of the Sistine Chapel was ordinary, its interior walls were destined to become covered with some of the most famous paintings in history, culminating with Michelangelo’s work on the Book of Genesis ceiling motifs and the Last Judgment mural decorating the back wall of the chancel. The chapel’s cost was exorbitant, approximating 3,000 ducats in 1541, or about $445,000 today using the relative price index, or $5.5 million using average earnings (MeasuringWorth.Com, accessed August 2018).1 Plans to rebuild the increasingly dilapidated Basilica were in place by the end of the 15th century (Figure 4.10). Much has been written regarding the architecture of the new basilica (e.g., Boorsch 1983; Tronzo 2005), so I will summarize here. Pope Nicolas V (1447–1455) was the first to consider rebuilding plans, and began cannibalizing stone from the ruins of Nero’s Coliseum for the new project. Pope Julius II (1503–1513) eventually made the decision to demolish the old basilica and replace it with a new one (Figure 4.11). Architect Donato Bramante designed a building shaped as a Greek cross, with a high dome that would create a lofty open space, inspired by the circular Parthenon temple of Rome (Figure 4.12). Michelangelo eventually redesigned Bramante’s dome as a parabola rather than a true hemisphere, 42 meters in diameter and 120 meters high, the tallest dome in the world. The four support

Figure 4.10 Design for the Basilica of St. Peter’s in 1514. Source: Etching by Antonio da Labacco and Antonio da Sangallo / Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (1565: Vol. 3, Plate 22) / Rogers Fund, Transferred from the Library, 1941 / Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0 1.0 Universal.

Figure 4.11 Monumental construction phases of Mons Vaticanus in Rome circa a.d. 1667. Source: Author drawing.

Figure 4.12 The Vatican in 1565. Source: Etching by Jacob Binck / Speculum Romanae Magnificentia (1565: vol. 3, Plate 72 / Rogers Fund, Transferred from the Library, 1941 / Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0 1.0 Universal.

176 Scale piers of the dome were to be 18 meters across with paired Corinthian columns that buttressed the outward thrust of the dome’s weight. Michelangelo blurred the geometric angles of Bramante’s design by thickening the external masonry and filling the interior corners with small vestries and stairwells, creating a continuous wall-surface of folded or fractured angles that softens and masks the many right angles necessary for architectural support. The front façade is 116 meters wide by 53 meters high, topped with 13 statues. The intellectual motives for a new church were based upon the Humanism of the Renaissance, a period of eager economic and intellectual development, gradual but widespread educational reform, a significant resurgence of learning based on classical Greek and Roman sources, and significant developments in art and architecture. This was an intellectual, social, and political revolution best known for its artistic and architectural contributors such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Religious architecture saw a more forceful interpretation of the human element in building for “God’s Glory.” As architectural historian Jeanne Halgren Kilde (2008: 108) notes: While the Gothic might illicit fear and trembling on the part of an illiterate worshipper, the urban classical-inspired churches of the renaissance Italy were more likely to elicit awe and/or admiration for the power of the clergy and the lay patrons whose wealth made the buildings possible and provided the foundation of their service to God. Thus the new St. Peter’s Basilica, while evoking the age-old piety associated with St. Peter’s martyria, also communicated messages of religious hierarchy by encouraging new forms of religious participation; celebrants now fully able to comprehend the symbolic meanings of both church and Mass and, more importantly, financial donors eager to cover the costs of construction. The construction of Saint Peter’s Square in the mid-17th century further emphasized this new Humanist participatory metaphor. The Square was the inspiration of architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who inherited an existing obelisk and fountain in the area and incorporated them into his new public square. He employed the Baroque architectural style, emphasizing symmetry, proportion, regularity, and employing orderly arrangements of columns, semicircular arches, hemispherical domes, and niches. The inspiration was classical geometrical forms that emphasized spaciousness and visual complexity, and similar to the realist Baroque artisans, their ideas grew out of the intellectualism of the Renaissance seeking to celebrate human creativity and ingenuity on a grand scale. The obelisk was moved there a century earlier to align with the new façade of Saint Peter’s, taken from its original location in the Circus of Nero where it had stood in mute testament to the martyrdom of St. Peter for over a millennia (Figure 4.13). On September 28, 1586, after months of demolishing buildings and building a large wooden crane, carriage, and sled way, the 25-meter-high, 300-metric-ton stone obelisk was slowly raised

Figure 4.13 The transportation of the Vatican Obelisk to its new location. Source: Drawing by Fontana (1590) / Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0 1.0 Universal.

178 Scale and moved a distance of 250 meters with a 10-meter drop in elevation (Parsons 1968: 155–167; Dibner 1950: 61). The job required 907 laborers, 70 winches, and 145 horses. A prepatory Mass was said and Pope Sixtus V (1586–1590) ordering that no one was to utter a single word during the operation on pain of death. A gallows stood nearby as warning. A large crowd watched as the obelisk was lifted and hung precariously above the ground after ropes suddenly gave way. Amidst the dreadful silence a lone voiced broke the papal order and yelling out “Wet the falls” (or water the ropes). The advice was swiftly heeded and the obelisk begin move again as the moist ropes tightened their grip. The man who dared break the papal edict was a sailor named Bresca from the village of Bordighera. For such quick thinking, the sailor’s home village was granted the privilege of providing the palm leaves used at the Basilica’s yearly Palm Sunday Mass. The total cost of this feat, considered to be one of the marvels of Renaissance engineering, was 37,975 ducats. This is the equivalent of approximately $3,000,000 today using the relative price index, or $41.3 million using average earnings (MeasuringWorth. Com, accessed August 2018).2 In contrast, the 2005 cost of returning the Axum Obelisk seized by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from Ethiopia in 1937 was $450 million. Instead of placing the obelisk at the center of a large rectangular or trapezoidal plaza which would have demolished a number of important Vatican buildings, Bernini created two sections, a trapezoidal portion nearest the basilica that narrows as it fans out from the façade, and a huge elliptical circus that gently slopes downwards to the obelisk at its center. Both areas were framed by a colonnade of doubled pairs of columns supporting an entablature. The far western end of the plaza remained open to allow visitors to view Saint Peter’s as they approached, creating two colonnaded arms stretching out to invite celebrants, reiterating their important role in worship. Bernini’s design is entirely Baroque in concept. Where Bramante and Michelangelo conceived of a church that stood in independent isolation, Bernini integrated the entire Vatican complex as an expansive element within the urban landscape, creating a metropolitan processional gateway, much in the same fashion as the longitudinal nave created a processional axis within the earlier medieval basilica (Kilde 2008: 108). Such movements are enhanced by spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale that exaggerate experience and reify memory. Papal effigy tombs, the most opulent of Christian burials (Mann 2003; Reardon 2004: 269–271), were also strategically placed inside Saint Peter’s Basilica (55 tombs are found there, out of over 100 total known papal tombs, out of 265 deceased popes). For example the monument of Pope Paul III (Paiolo Farnese, 1534–1549), who in 1547 commissioned Michelangelo to complete St. Peter’s, is located to the left of the Altar of the Chair (Gregorovius 1895: 153–154). A contemplative bronze statue of the Pope crowns a pyramidal monument with a sarcophagus with two marble

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figures, one carved in portraiture of the Pope’s mother as the virtue Wisdom (Figure 4.14). Two additional statues, those of Mercy and Abundance, were not transferred from the old Basilica because of a lack of space. The cost of this monument was 24,000 Roman scudi, or approximately £6,000. This is the equivalent of $920,000 today using the relative price index, or $12.1 million using average earnings (measuringworth.com, accessed August 2018). This was an exorbitant cost, as noted in a recorded epitaph (Reardon 2004: 186) elsewhere in Rome: “In this tome there lies, a greedy and rapacious

Figure 4.14 Tomb of Pope Paul III. Source: Author photo.

180 Scale vulture. That was Paiolo Farnese, who never gave but only took. Pray for him, poor thing: he dies of indigestion.” Papal preference was of course to be buried in St. Peter’s because of its spatial proximity to divine influence, the same reason why the medieval noble sought out burial within a church (Kilde 2008: 34–35). As the figurative and literal “Rock of the Church,” the martyria of Saint Peter’s was a highly symbolic space of special reverence, used in similar ways by both dying popes and the multitudes who visit the Basilica daily. The Renaissance era construction of the new St. Peter’s Basilica came to a close after a period of 176 years of building (1450–1626). According to architect Carlo Fontana (1694), who was commissioned to by the Holy See to produce an account of the construction story, the exterior structure was a marvel of engineering, dwarfing all other religious structures of the time and large enough to contain both the Paris cathedral of Notre Dame and the Hagia Sophia of Istanbul (Figure 4.15). The interior was exquisitely detailed by artisans with mosaics and gilding, covered by a dome that exceeded the next largest dome of its time, the Roman Pantheon. A total of twenty-seven popes oversaw the construction of the new basilica. But the cost of construction was staggering: a total of 46,800,052 ducats were spent before Bernini put on his finishing touches. This is the equivalent of $2.6 billion using the relative price index, or a staggering $45.5 billion using average earnings (MeasuringWorth.Com, accessed August 2018). This averages to $252.8 million a year, making Saint Peter’s one of the most expensive buildings

Figure 4.15 Saint Peter’s Basilica and Square today. Source: Author photo.

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ever built. The annual income of the Holy See in 1517 was 320,000 ducats a year or $658.2 million in today’s economy. Thus the popes spent 38% of their yearly budget on St. Peters, an amount that would have caused a cash liquidity problem requiring large sums to be borrowed from bankers, secular princes, and Jewish moneylenders. The extravagance of Saint Peter’s Basilica and the entire Baroque architectural revolution it heralded laid the Holy See open to criticism and prompted an eventual reversal of fortune. The excesses of successive popes, the displays of wealth of the religious hierarchy, and the lavishness of their sumptuous churches, all paid for through the sale of indulgences and the catering to wealthy benefactors, would become the call to arms for doctrinal critics such as John Wycliffe, Johannes Hus, and Martin Luther (Kilde 2008: 111–114; Manchester 1992). What began as an effort of internal reform eventually exploded into the doctrinal separation of rival Protestant Churches in the 16th century, a backlash against the Roman hierarchy, the seizing of Roman assets, and the eventual iconoclasm and vandalism of church property. Nevertheless, Mons Vaticanus remains an important monumental landscape for metaphors of scale at the epicenter of a reformed Catholic Church that earlier medieval popes could have scarcely imagined. So was the new St. Peter’s Basilica of Mons Vaticanus—a crowning achievement of Renaissance monumentality—worth the economic, social, and spiritual cost of fracturing the Christian world? Perhaps such changes were inevitable as Humanism, literacy, and education gripped a population eager to judge the world for itself. However, such opulence and hierarchy fueled another unintended consequence—the exodus of immigrants eager for a fresh start in the colonial New World. These immigrants, breaking free of the old religious establishments, developed new and fresh monumental forms, including the death marker in America already discussed in Chapter 2—a Reformation of Monumentality that in many ways represented a wave of simplification and egalitarian ideals—and rightly so. The ability and desire for the rich accoutrements of European commemoration were strategically impractical for European and African settlers, not only due to the lack of wealth of the average immigrant, but also because of a desire to create a chasm of social separation from European hierarchy and ideology. In being able to freely choose which events to best convey memory and meaning, American immigrants emphasized ideologies of democracy and secularism, forgetting or ignoring the storied but ingrained histories of social and ideological dependence. Thus the past returns full circle to the present.

Greek Sanctuary The Athenians decided to consult the Oracle of Delphi in 480 b.c. when Xerxes, the son of Darius of Persia, invaded Greece in order to finish the task that his father began. They received the following prophecy from the Pythia, the mouthpiece of the god Apollo: “Now your statues are standing

182 Scale and pouring sweat. They shiver with dread. The black blood drips from the highest rooftops. They have seen the necessity of evil. Get out, get out of my sanctum and drown your spirits in woe” (Broad 2006: 56). With great consternation that their doom was at hand, the Athenians sought a second consultation. This time the oracle told them that “a wall of wood alone shall be uncaptured, a boon to you and your children.” Interpreting this prophecy as a reference to the Athenian fleet of wooden ships, they evacuated the city of Athens and defeated the Persians in a naval battle at Salamis. Greek Sanctuaries, such as Delphi, were sacred spaces where the divine and human world merged and communication between the two realms could exist. Early sanctuaries were nothing more than a natural cave or spring associated with the spirits and powers of nature, and perhaps where a simple flat-rocked altar was erected. However, after the four murky centuries that followed the end of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilization, Greek city-states began to fund the construction of monumental buildings such as temples and treasuries by the 9th century b.c. These natural sanctuaries were transformed into architectural landscapes that employed spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale to communicate meanings of social and spiritual power. The earliest sanctuary architecture were temples that had modestly-sized stone foundations and mud brick walls reinforced by wooden posts (Rhodes 1995: 7–10). The superstructure included wooden pillars and an entryway. Architecturally, these early temples began to exhibit the stylistic principles that were to dictate the development of Greek temples for centuries, and by the 7th century b.c. the scale of temple foundations increased dramatically to over 30 meters in length. These structures remained relatively narrow however because it was technically difficult to construct a roof over any larger foundation. The central structure of the temple, called the naos or cella (ναός), was the cult repository that became surrounded by columns and a roof canopy. Columned porticos now surrounded the temple on all four sides, and represented an entirely new architectural design that permitted the structure to appear the same from all directions. Stone temples became commonplace by the 7th century b.c., and it is during this period that the essential architectural elements become more standardized. Two specific architectural styles developed: Doric and Ionic. These were two architectural orders named by the Greeks themselves to describe their belief that the each style was inherited from the architectural traditions of different ethnic groups (the Dorians and Ionians), and best characterized by its column and its three parts: the base, the body, and the capital top. Doric style was used primarily in mainland Greece and spread westward in the Mediterranean among the various Greek colonies there. The Doric style was more formal and austere, and best identified by a fluted or grooved column design that sat directly upon the floor and topped by a smooth capital stone. The superstructure supported by the columns, called an entablature, contained an eave with triglyph and sculptured decorations, and a tiled roof. Doric temple proportions were generally thick-columned and angular, but

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over the centuries the design became sleek and more slender. The Ionic style originated in the territories of Ionia in western Turkey and a number of the Aegean islands. The Ionic style was more relaxed and decorative, and characterized by a taller column sandwiched between a decorated base and capitol stone at the top, and an entablature decorated with a continuous frieze sculpture. An Ionic column also possessed a slight bulge at the top so that it would not appear to become narrower as it rose from the ground; instead the bulge gave the optical illusion that the entire length of the column was straight and uniform. The Ionic style began in the 6th century b.c., and coincides with other developments, including the use of a double-colonnaded style that contrasted the earlier single-column Doric style. The double colonnade with its two rows of outer columns was later imitated throughout the Greek world. Overall, the development of the Ionic style represented a natural evolutionary stage away from the earlier bulky Doric design to a more refined, harmonious, and airy esthetic appearance; from simple architectural planning to a more strict, mathematically complex design. Temples were meant to be freestanding and viewed from all sides with special consideration given to the surrounding landscape (Figure 4.16).

Figure 4.16 Ruins of the temple of Poseidon, Cape Sunio, Greece. Source: Photo courtesy of Amiee Genova / Ephorate of Antiquities of Eastern Attica / © Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports Archaeological Receipts Fund.

184 Scale Similar to the medieval cathedral, the Greek temple made use of geometric regularity to impart a feeling of order and harmony to worshipers. The basic proportions of a temple were determined by the numeric relationship of columns, both on the front/back and on the two long sides. The preference of Greek architects was the ratio of n:2n+1, resulting in typical configurations of 6 by 13 columns, or in the case of the Parthenon in Athens, 8 by 17 columns. Temple dimensions varied, but could reach 100 by 50 meters with columns as tall as 20 meters. The distance between the columns was often the defining unit of measurement used to set the proportions of other design elements, such as column height and column distance. Each temple was elaborately colored and decorated. Columns were painted white, while stone decorations on the superstructure were elaborately painted using blue and red. Sculptured reliefs and ornaments were painted in detail, including shading. Battle scenes were a common Ionic theme, but other peaceful depictions were employed, particularly godly assemblies or processions. The roofs were tiled and crowned by ornaments, originally elaborately painted clay disks, but eventually sculpted figures placed on the corners and ridges of the roof. Heroes and deities were depicted, as well as mythological animals such as sphinxes and griffins. Functionally, these early temples were sanctuaries; repositories for a sacred god image. The elaborate external design of columns and superstructure served to stress the dignity of the naos god house, which was usually very simple in style. Most temples faced eastward and the rising sun, which provided the only light into the god house and the god statue there through its front door. The cult statue depicted the god and was greater than life size. It was usually built with a wooden frame, around which gold leaf and ivory were attached to form skin and clothing. Decorative details included precious stones and glass. Statues were intentionally impressive, and represented an important display of wealth and technical artistry. The statues required constant maintenance and upkeep. The statue was oriented towards an altar, placed axially before the temple. The god house itself was entered only rarely and by priests or special individuals. Votive offerings were usually placed in the god house, giving it a storeroom-like quality. As a metaphor of interaction, the Greek sacred temple played a unique role of dividing private and public space, much in the same way as the medieval cathedral, emphasizing complex relationships through movement. A god house was a place where mortals might visit and explore so that their prayers and propitiations might be heard. Mortals could then immerse themselves into two key relationships: the connection between the dead to the living and the link between the divine to the mortal (Thomas 2008: 166–168; Rhodes 1995: 6–8). The Greek sanctuary temple therefore served as a physical space that bridged the mortal and immortal worlds and facilitated human communication with the gods. No monument better exemplifies these metaphors of movement than the Sacred Way and sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. Any modern tourist today

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can easily understand why Delphi, with its stark natural beauty and scenic views, was considered the center of the ancient Greek world. As a mountaintop site outside any major city, Delphi was the location of Apollo’s principle oracle and therefore an important pilgrimage destination. The murky origins of Delphi lie deep within the heart of Greek mythology, and represent a story of divine struggle. Topography and landscape retained a powerful presence in the Greek world, and the dramatic mountain location of Delphi made a forceful comment regarding the perpetual struggle between human will and the wildness of nature, and the importance role that Apollo played in this contest. Usually such spots were reserved for earth goddesses such as Hera or Demeter or the all-powerful Zeus, but this particular location symbolized the significance and power of Apollo. By the 7th century b.c., Delphi had emerged as the most popular sanctuary in all of ancient Greece (Parke 1967; Emerson 2007). Pilgrims from every social stratum and all corners of the known world climbed the slopes of Mount Parnassus to ask for guidance from the sacred priestess called the Pythia, who entered a trance and spoke prophesies received directly from Apollo himself3 (Broad 2006; Hale et al., 2003). Originally, she was a young female virgin only available for consultation on the seventh day of the Greek month of Bysios. By the 6th century, two additional priestesses were employed to expanded audiences to one day each month for nine months of the year in order to meet an enormous surge in demand for oracular services. Plutarch noted that the number of petitioners was so immense that there was “difficulty in keeping the assembly in order because of the vast numbers” (Plutarch 1936: 414b). Delphi was built upon an ancient sacred site, a holy place for a thousand years, and remodeled numerous times. A wooden temple was erected in the 8th century b.c., while most of the existing stonework was constructed between the 6th and 4th century b.c. The site included a mountain pathway lined with monuments, and a large stone walled complex which included a temple, theater, and stadium. Delphi was the location for numerous ritual events, including the four-year cycle Pythian Games, established to honor Apollo’s slaying of the python, followed by his self-imposed penance by exile as a shepherd. Entry into the sacred complex was through a large gateway, leading the pilgrim to the Castalia Spring, a source of water used for ablution and ritual purification. The street proceeded up a winding path to the temple, called the Sacred Way (Ἱερὰ Ὁδός), that was lined with various monuments and treasuries dedicated by different city-states to commemorate numerous battles and other accomplishments (Figure 4.17). Near the gateway, along the first segment of the path, the surrounding markers were small and densely packed, placed haphazardly as if they were a crowd of people waiting before the temple (Scully 1979: 112). Each structure represents a very specific past event in the life of the site, a unique pilgrimage and outcome that conveys to the present visitor a memorialized sense of place by enfolding them with spatial-cognitive metaphors of sacred

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Figure 4.17 Scaled model of the Sacred Way at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi (circa 200 b.c.), Delphi Archaeological Museum, Greece. Source: Author photo / Delphi Archaeological Museum / © Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports Archaeological Receipts Fund.

time. Successive segments of the path passed by larger and more architecturally complex monuments, parsing the way into a series of discreet spaces that would have interrupted the line-of-sight to the top, encouraging a pilgrim to fully focus their attention on each monument, allowing them to consider and ponder past events and their meanings without distraction. The first such structure is the Siphnian Treasury, built in 530 b.c. to house the lavish gifts and offerings presented to the Delphic priesthood. The city of Siphnos earned considerable wealth from mining, and often sought numerous Pythian prophecies. The structure measured nine by six meters in size, possessed thick walls and no windows, and was constructed completely in marble with Ionic decoration that included a porch and cella house. Continuing forward, the ancient pilgrim would have turned a corner to continue their ascension, to be immediately confronted by one of the most prominent buildings along the way, the Athenian Treasury (Figure 4.18). This treasury was built around 500 b.c., shortly after the battle of Marathon when Athens defeated Persia. The building stood seven by ten meters in size, and was constructed from cut stone and Parian marble. It was placed upon a high foundation, and constructed obliquely rather than axially with the street so as to always appear three dimensional. It had a miniature Doric style entrance and placed in a strategic location that allowed it to be viewed from just about anywhere within the sanctuary. This building likewise held the many gifts bequeathed by a wealthy and thankful city. The Sacred Way continues uphill, and was segmented by additional monuments of sacred significance, all the while affording the pilgrim shifting

Figure 4.18 The Athenian Treasury at Delphi, Greece. Source: Author photo / Delphi Archaeological Museum / © Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports Archaeological Receipts Fund.

188 Scale views of the Temple of Apollo, which appears to hover above the pathway perched upon its polygonal foundation. Next along this route is a 90-meter foundation wall of a temple constructed with enormous polygonal stones. This wall is unique because it bears approximately 1,000 inscriptions, some colored in red pigment to highlight them and make them easier to read. All are proclamations, most regarding the freeing of slaves, with others meant to eulogize or honor individuals. These inscriptions date considerably later than the larger and more elaborate treasuries (none are earlier than the end of the 3rd century b.c., and suggest a shift in practice where common folk insisted upon memoralizing their own lives. The Sacred Way eventually reaches the level of the temple, turning sharply to present the full Doric façade of its entrance, framed by the surrounding mountains. The temple measured 22 by 58 meters and held 38 Doric columns that stood ten meters high. It was first constructed in the 7th century b.c., but was remodeled multiple times before it was deconstructed in the name of Christianity in a.d. 390 by the Roman emperor Theodosius I. The temple faced east, and there was a ramp that led up into the dark interior and the cella god house, the seat of the oracle. Beyond the temple, the Sacred Way continues a short ways higher, terminating at the theater and stadium, where the Pythian Games were held every three years. The Sacred Way at Delphi served to recreate a journey from the chaotic secular world to that of the sacred (Barrie 1996: 178–180). It began with a rudimentary simple monument and sculpture that was laid out in an irregular fashion, and culminated with the epitome of Greek monumental design: temple, theater, and arena. The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi was a monumental landscape, where each of the monuments and treasuries stood uniquely alone, conveying individual events, yet were collectively linked by the Sacred Way to form a cohesive experience that culminated in the divine. The interplay between human and god was orchestrated and directed by a monumental space that facilitated a spiritual journey not easily attained by simply visiting a local shrine or temple. The gem of all Greek sanctuaries was of course the Parthenon in Athens, the most holy of temples dedicated to the goddess Athena Parthenos (Rhodes 1995). The word Parthenon (παρθενών) means “virgin’s apartments,” and the temple’s primary function was to shelter the monumental chryselephantine statue of Athena, constructed from gold and ivory, and to house the treasury of the city. It was completed after 15 years of construction in 432 b.c., when the Athenian Empire was at the height of its power as chief city of the Delian league. The Parthenon sits at a prominent location upon the heights of the Acropolis of Athens, distinctly visible for many kilometers away. It was constructed using white Pentelic marble during the rule of Pericles. It was built in the Doric style temple, an enclosed cella god house surrounded with a peristyle façade of columns, 8 in the front and 17 columns on its sides, conforming to a ratio of 9:4 (Figure 4.19). The columns stood up a four-stepped

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Figure 4.19 Schematic and isometric views of the temple of Athena Parthenos (Parthenon) in Athens. Source: Author drawing.

foundation of limestone. The base dimensions of the Parthenon were seventy by 31 meters. The god house was 30 by 19 meters with internal colonnades to support the roof. It was unusually large so that it could accommodate the 12-meter-high statue of Athena. Each temple column was two meters in diameter and ten meters tall. The entire structure had 46 outer pillars and 23 inner pillars in total. The roof was covered with large overlapping marble tiles. The construction cost of the Parthenon was 469 silver talents (Stanier 1953), about 31 talents a year. This total represents approximately 12,190 kilograms (429,950 ounces) of raw silver, or approximately $13.8 million today if based on the price of silver in 2015. The annual gross income of the city at the time was 1,000 talents. Regarding spatial-cognitive metaphors of wayfinding movement, Greek temples such as the Parthenon were designed to be viewed only from the exterior. Worshipers never entered the temple sanctum; veneration was conducted outside the temple and celebrants would only glimpse the mystical interior spaces through open doors at certain special events. The Parthenon was built so as to allow an aesthetic view as visitors approached the structure. Upon entering the monumental gateway of the Acropolis, a visitor would be treated to a majestic scene of the western and northern sides of the Parthenon in a three-quarters view. The exterior of the Parthenon was richly decorated with 92 high-relief sculptures depicting scenes from Greek mythology carved above the exterior colonnade. An additional relief upon the upper portion of the walls of the god house depicted the Panathenaic festival. Triangular pediment sculptures at either end contained full statues representing the birth of Athena and her contest with the God Poseidon. As the visitor approached closer, the details of the external sculptured reliefs would become decipherable while the internal reliefs would be tantalizingly visible, peering from the gaps between columns. The whole event offered a discretely smooth movement from secular to sacred; exterior view, portico

190 Scale reliefs, and culminating with a glimpse of the interior apartment of the chryselephantine statue of Athena. This dichotomous inside–outside division of temple space, while encouraging metaphors of wayfinding movement, perhaps downplayed spatialcognitive sequences of celestial time. It may have been that use of ancient Ionic or Doric stylistic designs, born in the hazy mist of the semi-mythological past, compressed the past with the present (Rhodes 1995: 8–9). More effective, I would argue, were the burial tombs or transitory paths surrounding such temples, such as the Sacred Way of Dephi where time was collapsed by contemplating successive memorialized cues regarding the Pithian oracle. Yet the inside–outside division of temple space served as a place that created a critical connection between the Greeks and their gods (the container schema). The interior sanctum served as a locus of divine inspiration and was juxtaposed with the outer earthly exterior confines that serviced the activities of ritual, worship, and festival. This divinity was housed in a gigantic structure of scale, geometry and proportion that distinguished it from the “profane” outside world, a structure that stood self-supported and self-contained. It was no latent architectural shell meant to hold pious statuary and offerings; it became a place of divine residence, where visiting worshippers could conceptually blend a stone-cut god-house with a lofty heavenly sanctuary. The god image faced outward to the east towards the rising sun and an eager congregation. The more devoted the worshipers, the greater the interplay between earthly practice and the divine, and the better the chances of winning divine favor and safeguarding the prosperity and safety of the community.

Giza There is perhaps no better place to ponder the spatial cognitive metaphors of scale than at the Giza Plateau, where the greatest of all Egyptian pyramids were constructed. A visitor here cannot help but be amazed at one of the most impressive and enduring monumental landscapes ever constructed. The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was certainly impressed, as he followed the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar by invading Egypt. Voicing his awe in an inspiring speech in 1798 to his invading army, he thundered: “Soldiers, forty centuries of history are looking down on you” (Rose 1902).4 While Napoleon’s effort against British interests ultimately ended in defeat in 1802, his incursion into Egypt laid the foundations for a new discipline: Egyptology. The French expedition included 167 scholars and specialists that included surveyors, artists, and engineers; all charged with administering this new French province. Recording and surveying the ancient Egyptian monuments was an important role, and the resulting artwork and documentation served to ignite the Egyptomania that swept through European and American culture; influencing modern art, architecture, fashion, design, and even religion (Figure 4.20).

Figure 4.20 Napoleon before the pyramids (1895). Source: Drawing by Eugene Grasset, the Century Company / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / reproduction number LC-USZ62-76866.

192 Scale Giza today is a busy place, located a few kilometers south of metropolitan Cairo, and a mere 300 meters from the last houses in Cairo’s southernmost suburb. A limestone cliff still demarks the sandy desert plateau from the Nile floodplain. In ancient times the Giza Plateau was considerably more remote, located some eight kilometers from the political and population center of Memphis. The ancient name for Giza was imentet (“the West”) or kher neter (“the necropolis”), and it was the beginning of the vast western desert sands that were imagined by the ancient Egyptians to be the land of the dead. Giza was one of many Egyptian cemeteries used throughout the centuries, but took on a special relevancy because it became the final resting place of the powerful 4th Dynasty rulers during the middle of the 3rd millennium b.c. Three massive pyramids were constructed, surrounded by a multitude of temples, causeways, lesser pyramids, and tombs for minor members of the royal family, the nobility, and the priests. Although much of the original context might now be lost in time, the spatial layout of Giza suggests that a broad and profound set of place-making occurred here, where gigantic houses of the dead became tied to metaphors of lived space. Similar to the Mons Vaticanus, or the Greek Sanctuary, the use of metaphors of scale and geometric regularity served to impart a feeling of order and harmony to those who worked, worshipped, and were buried there. The plateau consists of an outcrop of limestone formation that extends two kilometers from the east to west and one kilometer from the north to the south (approximately 170 hectares). Upon this formation is where the massive pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure—father, son, and grandson—were built. The southeast corners of all three of these great pyramids are aligned to 43° east of true north, along a line that sits at the same level of the Mokkatam bedrock formation, assuring that all three pyramids were more or less built at the same elevation. The meaning of this angle off of true north has been long lost—perhaps the orientation was purely function, or perhaps it had some cosmological relationship to the nearby sacred site of Heliopolis or pointed southwest in the direction of the early royal cemetery at Abydos. Whatever the reason, it is apparent that north–south and east–west cardinality was architecturally important to the builders of Khufu’s Pyramid, as well as those of the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure, since both of these structures follow the same alignment. In ancient times the plateau was guarded on its eastern edge by the Great Sphinx, sitting near a stone quarry used for construction projects and carved from a rock outcrop that remained (Figure 4.21). The head of the Sphinx seems to be situated at the same level as the ancient ground surface. At the foot of the plateau, southeast of the Great Sphinx was an ancient harbor where the many river boats traversing the Nile carried building materials, workers, and worshippers. Further south lay an ancient town and cemetery of the pyramid builders, where the laborers who constructed the necropolis of Giza lived, worked, and were also laid to rest. Access roads connected the harbor and settlement to the plateau. Over the course of a century, Giza

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Figure 4.21 The Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza (circa 1867). Source: Photo by Maison Bonfils / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division / reproduction number LC-DIG-ppmsca-03955.

would grow with tombs, temples, and shrines and become a critical spiritual center for the ancient Egyptians. When pyramid construction first began at Giza on Khufu’s Pyramid, the largest of the Giza tombs, one of the initial tasks was to measure and then excavate the local bedrock to provide the firmest possible foundation bed for the pyramid (Figure 4.22). The Giza plateau was particularly suitable because of its solid bedrock, locally available limestone, and proximity to the ancient settlement of Memphis. Approximately 7,000 workers cleared the loose stone and exposed a rock ridge that was later incorporated into the pyramid structure. This rubble was most likely used to construct a ramp that was used to haul the quarried stone blocks up to the pyramid. The foundation site was then made level, probably with the use of a square level and a plumb bob. Survey benchmarks were established along the length and width of the foundation, and corner positions were decided upon. A second important task was to dig a canal that connected the Nile to the harbor and build houses and workshops for the resident laborers. This canal served to create a local stone quarry for building materials, a horseshoe shaped area that has been studied by archaeologist Mark Lehner (1985,

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Figure 4.22 The Giza Plateau. After Lehner (1997: 107).

1997; Lehner and Hawass 2017). He has argued that its excavated stone was used in the construction of Khufu’s Pyramid, and has calculated that approximately 2.8 million cubic meters of stone were quarried, slightly more than the 2.6 million cubic meters of stone needed for the construction of the pyramid’s inner core. Parallel trenches were first cut into the plateau that isolated large sections of the bedrock, which were then subdivided with small trenches to form individual blocks up to ten tons in size. A series of sockets were carved at the base of each stone in order to insert large wooden levers used for prying each block from the substrate and hauling it away to the construction site. Quarrying reached a depth of 30 meters below the surface of the plateau, sloping northward in order to facilitate removal of the cut stones. Remnants of unfinished stone blocks, channels, and socket holes may still be found in the quarry area. Some of the block remnants weigh around 200 tons, and were split into more manageable segments once extracted to the quarry floor. The typical block size was 2.5 tons, although some of the blocks at the center of Khufu’s Pyramid were 40 times heavier. The majority of the stone must have been removed at the time of Khufu, since the children of Khafre are buried at carved tombs in the west wall of the quarry. At the onset of pyramid construction, the Giza Plateau was busy with activity of the pyramid-builders and their families. While numerous scholars have discussed pyramid engineering (e.g., de Haan 2009, 2010, 2010; Romer 2007; Wier 1996), it seems clear that the most effort would have been invested at the onset. One-fifth of the pyramid’s stone volume would have been set during the first year of construction; a total of 3,700 tons of local stone each day was extracted from the nearby quarry, hauled, and then dropped into place (Romer 2007: 36). This would have required 15,000 general laborers and 1,500 stone masons. Large quantities of water would have to have been collected from the river, for drinking as well as for lubricating the slipway on the ramp. That would be mean that approximately 150 quarry blocks per hour were extricated from the quarry—a dizzying pace.

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Care would have been taken to precisely carve and insert those blocks that served as external facing stones, with less care for the blocks destined to rest within the pyramid’s interior. And although considerable variation existed in the size of stones used between the 200-odd courses, the consistency of stones within each course did not vary by more than a few centimeters. This precision served an important functional unity, to guarantee accuracy and geometrical exactness as the structure grew in size. The external dimensions and internal layout of Khufu’s pyramid was planned and executed with an exceedingly high degree of precision. At the time of construction, each base side was to be 440 Egyptian Royal cubits (approximately 230 meters long) with a height of 280 cubits (approximately 146 meters). Three internal chambers and a series of passageways were also planned. The lowest chamber is cut into the bedrock beneath the pyramid shortly after the area was cleared. A so-called “Queen’s Chamber” and “King’s Chamber” were placed higher up within the rows of stacked stone blocks and linked by an ascending corridor (Figure 4.23). How was such three-dimensional precision maintained through the course of construction, particularly when all the original survey benchmarks were slowly buried under stone blocks? Two important tools were used.

Figure 4.23 Isometric cross-section of Khufu’s pyramids denoting the yearly construction progress of the fourteen-year project. Source: After Lehner (1997: 108).

196 Scale The first was a simple plumb bob and string, the common architectural tool of the time to trim and set stone blocks. In fact, this tool served as the primary architectural instrument not only for measuring verticality, but when mounted in an A-frame square, it could be used for measuring and controlling angularity. During the early years of construction, when the majority of the stone work was placed, the internal central staircase provided a vital corridor of precise survey points that were used to gauge progress and correct any construction as row upon row of stone blocks were placed. The second was a full-size spatial plan that was laid out upon the ground next to the construction size in 1:1 scale. This layout served as a working blueprint or diagram to check and cross-check architectural measures before any stones were actually dropped into place. By the end of the second full year of construction, the pyramid would have completed its 15th course, at the location of the entrance doorway. A descending corridor to the lowest chamber had to have already been planned for and set. By the end of the third year, at course number 23, the so-called Queen’s Chamber would have been begun. By the end of the eighth year, when approximately three-quarters of its volume was in place, course number 50 would have been laid to form the floor of the King’s Chamber; most likely King Khufu’s final resting place. It would have also served to complete the corbelled roof of the Grand Gallery, the vaulted portion of the central ascending passageway that leads to the King’s Chamber, another V-shaped corbelled roofed vault. At the tenth year of construction, when the pyramid was approximately half its total height and four-fifths of its volume was laid, a colossal ramp would have had to have been built to deliver blocks to the top, approximately 203 courses in total. A finer quality of limestone was used at the upper levels to improve precision as each of the four sides of the pyramid converged, and to better support the outer casing of polished white Tura limestone blocks added last to smooth the entire structure. By the 14th year of construction and stone course 203, the structure was complete. Laborers worked to carefully deconstruct the ramp and deposit its debris out of sight in the quarry below. The center of the quarry is filled with a mound of rock and clay detritus of what is all that is left of the ramp. Workers also demolished settlements to remove all traces of labor, and carefully landscaped the plateau in order to create an unobstructed view of the pyramid from afar. Khufu lived another decade before he occupied his tomb, during which time a range of more modest funeral monuments arose around his great pyramid. Materials and building techniques varied, but it is clear that many of these projects were undertaken by members of the royal workforce that labored to build Khufu’s Pyramid. By the time of his death, there were at least five boat burials, a mortuary temple added to the east side of the Pyramid, a causeway leading to the Nile River, smaller pyramids, and over 70 mastaba tombs grouped into four separate cemeteries organized orthogonally with

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streets and avenues. It is likely that cemetery construction began after the decrease in pyramid construction efforts in year five. For three more generations laborers continued to work here, building two more giant pyramids, one for Khafre, Khufu’s son, and Menkaure, his grandson. The pyramid labor camps moved north of Giza to begin a more modest and poorly made pyramid for Khufu’s son, Djedefre, who ruled for only a few years. The next king, Khafre, built a similarly large pyramid at Giza, only three meters shorter than his father’s pyramid, but equally impressive, even though the bulk of this new pyramid employed smaller blocks of softer stone. His temple was larger and divided into five architectural elements, including the causeway that enters the temple near the south-east corner. Also preserved was Khafre’s valley temple, which served as the gateway to the Giza Plateau. Khafre’s complex included more statuary, and which may have included the Great Sphinx, probably carved out of a bedrock formation that was first cut up for blocks used in pyramid construction. The lion body topped with the king’s head symbolized power and might, governed by royal intelligence. The third great pyramid of Giza was built for Menkaure, and placed at the far end of the Giza diagonal, at the edge of the Mokattam Formation. Its base is less than a quarter of that of its predecessors, with a height of 66 meters. While smaller, Menkaure’s pyramid and mortuary temple make use of harder red granite. The last major royal burial placed upon the Giza Plateau was the mastaba of Queen Khentkawes (a daughter of Menkaure), who helped to found a new dynasty that changed royal burial traditions and moved them to new locations. The overt pyramid spatial-cognitive metaphors that resulted in the Giza pyramids employed precise geometric proportions, scalar envelopment, and formalized ritual movements to evoke the cyclical and hierarchical social order of Egyptian nature and society. Certainly the three great pyramids at Giza were built to employ a specific set of scalar metaphors. The sheer size of these tombs dwarfed all other structures; their flawless geometry representing the primeval hill as it stretched from the murky waters of the Nile upwards towards the sun, the all-seeing and sovereign power of the Egyptian rulers (Roth 1993). No matter where you stood in the streets of ancient Memphis, in a fishing boat on the Nile, or at the causewayed entrance to Khufu’s Pyramid, these white pinnacles spatially enveloped you and transformed your reality. Once atop the Giza Plateau, a worshipper or mourner would be drawn to the lofty stature of these pyramids, and the sun would reflect upon them. Regarding spatial-cognitive metaphors of time, Giza is unequivocal in the metaphors it uses. As part of royal symbolic motif, it emphasized hierarchy and social order in both real and ancestral time. As a city of the dead it became a timeless place, becoming an arena of performance for revealing the netherworld to the living, embedding cultural memories that perpetuated the order of both society and the natural world. The experience of

198 Scale watching the setting sun at Giza was, and still is, a potent personal experience. It represented a visual melding of sky with earth, light with dark, and life with death. As daylight dwindled and the sun hovered and then merged with the great pyramids, the horizon was visually experienced and escape was impossible, even for the sun. Regarding spatial-cognitive metaphors of encoded movement, the construction of the great pyramid at Giza represents the most potent example in ancient history of the process of architecturally encoding cultural meanings. Building Khufu’s Pyramid was an extraordinary event undertaken at an unprecedented scale. It required a large and dedicated labor force, drawn from every community in Egypt, and a highly organized bureaucratic system of resource procurement and logistical management. Literally every citizen of the 4th Dynasty participated in this constructional crusade, which did not end with the completion of Khufu’s Pyramid. The subsequent construction of Khafre’s and Menkaure’s pyramids meant that the system of pyramid construction that gripped an entire society would continue. The pyramids of Giza captured the collective heart of society in the same way that the medieval cathedral dominated the religious movements of Europe. Moreover, the Giza city of the dead was also designed to orchestrate distinct metaphors of wayfinding movement; the processional causewayed approaches, the cemetery avenues, and the orthogonal uses of space, directed movements that orchestrated collective meaning of the hierarchical social order. The ruins today are nearly as inspiring as they were 4,000 years ago. Although few buildings have remained pristine, Giza has now become a more practical tourist and historic space. Yet this ancient site is more than an honorific place. It still retains an important role in Egypt’s collective consciousness as well as a foremost wonder of the world today.

Borobudur The conduct of Javanese Prince Manchanegara greatly disappointed his father, Sultan of Jogjakarta. In addition to his oblivious ignorance in matters of protocol and procedure, the Prince was also proud and arrogant. He habitually disregarded the advice of propriety offered by his father, the Sultan of Jogjakarta. He associated himself with women of ill-repute. The final straw, however, was that Manchanegara had now decided to ignore the sound guidance of cultural tradition, fabled wisdom, and his father’s command, and journey to a place to a mountain that was forbidden. “He went to the Barabuɖur to see the thousand statues despite the ancient prophecy that misfortune would befall any Prince who beheld those images for one of them represented a Warrior imprisoned in a cage” (Poensen 1901: 268).5 Borobudur was a hallowed yet portentous place, a sacred ruin from the distant past that was not to be treated lightly. Its mystery was too great for the Prince to ignore, and he decided to gratify his impulsive desire to cast his eyes upon the ruins himself, which was reputed to contain a statue that

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depicted a valiant warrior held captive in a cage. The Prince felt both pity and curiosity, and vowed to sojourn to see the unfortunate sight himself. The Sultan became furious after finding out Manchanegara had disobeyed him and chose to depart for Borobudur. The rumor of his son’s impetuous behaviors had reached the ear of the colonial Dutch governor, bringing disgrace upon the family. The Sultan sent some armed soldiers to retrieve the Prince, authorizing them to use force if necessary. By the time the soldiers found their charge he had already entered the ruins and gazed upon the caged warrior. Voluntarily returning with the soldiers, his father received him warmly, but it was too late. Betrayed either by sacrilegious act or the power of Borobudur itself, Prince Manchanegara fell ill, spat blood, and suddenly died. Borobudur of today is just as mysterious as it was over two centuries ago. It is the world’s largest Buddhist temple and Ki Mas Dana’s “mountain of a thousand statues.” Borobudur consists of nine concentric terraces of decreasing size that rise skyward, like steps upon a mountain peak. It has the shared characteristic with Khufu’s Pyramid of being a gigantic stone mountain, possessing no roof or ceiling, monumental in scale and execution. Similar to Khufu’s Pyramid, its masonry was dry-laid without the use of mortar, and follows a balanced geometric architectural design that communicates meaning through the use of metaphors of scale. Borobudur is located on the long and narrow island of Java in the Malay Archipelago, one of the most volcanic places on earth. Virtually a ribbon of rugged mountain ranges and volcanoes, it is a particularly fertile, tropical place. The people of Java are descended from migrants who traversed the open seas over 6,000 years ago. They came from the south China coast, and became farmers and hunters. By 400, the Javanese began to carve stone with inscriptions using adopted characters and designs from other areas of Southeast Asia, and by 700 complex society began to flourish. India was a source of influence, importing religious ideas and iconography of both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. In a brief span of 200 years, the people of Java’s central plain began to erect an astonishing number of religious monuments, most of which have since disappeared or lie in ruins today. The center of this monumental landscape was the Kendu Plains, an undulating countryside filled by a sea of lush rice fields that are fed by tropical storms, and bounded by jagged mountains. It is a sheltered and scenic world, an ideal landscape for monumental inspiration. Local life during this time largely revolved around the needs of local elites and rulers, controlling water for irrigation, farming, and building monuments. Social organization was not unlike that of Egypt: highly hierarchical in nature. Priests were of high social status, and the admixture of both Hindu and Buddhist sanctuaries constructed here attests that both religions were practiced by the populace. The royal families of the time claimed to be closely linked to the gods, who were called upon to maintain fertility of the land and to repel and conquer any enemies.

200 Scale Borobudur was built upon a natural hill that was levelled and contoured as a bedrock foundation (Figure 4.24). Most striking is a large decorated dome that capped the top of the structure and a set of 2,672 carved stone relief panels representing over 2,000 square meters of decorative carving (Soekmono 1976). Set in stations around the platforms are 504 carved Buddha statues. The central dome is surrounded by an additional 72 Buddha statues, each seated inside a perforated stūpa tower. The entire structure was coated in white plaster and then painted bright colors. The resulting edifice would have been a bright mountain pinnacle that beckoned to anyone upon the Kendu Plain who chance to look towards it. No written histories exist regarding the construction of Borobudur. The only clue as to its building are a set of inscriptional carvings on Borobudur’s foundation that possess iconographic similarities to inscriptions denoting royal charters at the end of the 8th and early 9th centuries. This period coincides with a very influential family known as the Sailendra (“lords of the mountain”) who were closely linked to the spread of Buddhism in ancient Java. The Sailendra rose to power around 780, displacing older noble families who had been devotees of Hinduism. Hinduism had a long tradition in Java, but the 8th century was period of intense intellectual activity for Buddhist philosophers and teachers, and resulted in the development of new written texts, ritual practices, and new monuments built upon the Kendu. Construction at Borobudur probably began in 760 and spanned approximately 70 years. The monument is 56,600 cubic meters in area that used over a million blocks of stone, cut and transported uphill from a nearby riverbed, obviously requiring a dedicated and skillful labor force. No large urban areas were located upon the Kendu Plateau at this time, suggesting that the builders of Borobudur came from a set of small farming villages in the area. Work seems to have been undertaken in intervals, with periodic inactivity. Estimates by archaeologist John Miksic suggest that the time spent laboring was approximately 30 years in totality, utilizing a work force

Figure 4.24 Borobudur on the Kendu Plains, Java. Source: Photo courtesy of John Miksic.

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of several hundred laborers who cut, moved, and carved these blocks into elaborate stone reliefs (Miksic 1990: 26). Borobudur has no interior rooms or courtyards, and so does not provide any static religious worship space. Instead, it was designed as a place of pilgrimage and Buddhist spiritual reflection, where worshipers ascended a symbolic mountain, successively climbing a series of terraces in a sequence of ritual circumambulations in order to attain transcendent grace (see the syntheses of Grabsky 1999; Lundquist 1995; Miksic 1990; Krom 1974). Guided and instructed by the narrative relief, the pilgrim proceeds from one terrace to another in silent contemplation. A pilgrim’s journey would have begun at the foot of the mountain where, by standing at its base, they would have been overwhelmed by its size and design. Borobudur’s design is divided into three parts: its base, the middle terraces, and the top (Figure 4.25). The base measures 113 meters on each side with 4-meter-high walls. The original base of the structure was adorned with curved molding and carved relief panels illustrating a Buddhist scriptural scene depicting heaven and hell. It later began to collapse because of its weight and was encased by an unadorned mantle of large stone (Figure 4.26). Four stairways bifurcate each of Borobudur’s four sides, ascending from the ground all the way to the top terrace, approximately 26 meters high. The base of each stairway is protected by mythical half-terrestrial/half-aquatic beasts (makaras) gripping lions in their jaws. The corners of each platform were also mounted with rain spouts carved in the shape of makaras to facilitate rain runoff. The first flight of stairs ends at the top of the lower platform that doubles as a walkway extending around the entire site (Figure 4.27). It was here that pilgrims begin their ceremonial circumambulation in clockwise fashion by perusing the first layer of relief panels that depicted hundreds of celestial

Figure 4.25 Isometric map of Borobudur. Source: After Soekmono (1976: 31).

Figure 4.26 Borobudur architectural features. Source: After Soekmono (1976: 31).

Figure 4.27 Terraces and encasement mantle of Borobudur. Source: Photo courtesy of John Miksic.

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beings, guardian demons, and natural motifs such as trees, buildings, and shells. The occasional right angle prohibits the observer from looking too far forward, making them to focus instead upon the relief panel directly in front of them. This basal layer of motifs served as a ring of mythological guardian images meant to guard the remainder of their holy ascent. Over 100 Buddha statues were set into spaced niches upon this first platform, gazing impassively outward at the observer. The middle section of Borobudur is composed of four additional terraces, each approximately two meters wide with balustrades on the outer railings that create a corridor effect. Each of these terraces is accessible from any of the four stairways, and similarly trace a concentric square path around the monument. The first level is approximately 360 meters in circumference, and contains four relief sequences, two on the outer balustrade and two on the inner wall. To follow them in sequence the pilgrim would therefore have had to make a circuit four times around the terrace. The next terrace is 320 meters in circumference, the third 288 meters, and the final level is 256 meters. These three upper terraces have two sequences of panels. The entire walking distance from base to top is over one kilometer in length, yet the entire ambulatory journey that follows the sequential panel scenes takes the pilgrim around the monument ten times. The entire journey represents an enclosed ceremonial procession upward, enclosed by walls of reliefs, punctuated by right-angle turns, and yet open to the sky. The entire journey extended approximately five kilometers in total length. Few other monuments of the world accomplish what Borobudur does in terms of cosmological storytelling. The 1,460 narrative relief panels are arranged sequentially from simple to complex and real to more abstract. Movement represents symbolic progress towards enlightenment. Panels begin by depicting Buddhist fables and stories, followed by the life of Buddha, the story of a pilgrim seeking enlightenment and becoming a bodhisattva. Gateways mark the third and fourth terraces marking the passage upwards through a world of Buddhist cosmology towards the “sea of immortality.” The ascension from Borobudur’s foundation to its top terrace marks a distinct architectural transition. The enclosed rectilinear and axial passageways give way to an elevated and open space that offers a panoramic view of the nearby countryside, capped with terraces, two elliptical and one circular. On top of the highest terrace stands a huge stūpa measuring 16 meters in dimeter, and placing the monument at 35 meters above ground level. A stūpa is a Buddhist architectural design element that is a mound- or dome-shaped structure, often containing relics, used as a place of meditation. Relics commonly found inside such domes at other Buddhist temples around the world may have been present, but they have probably been looted long ago. The large dome was made of smooth stone. Placed around this large stūpa, staggered upon each of the 3 terraces, are 72 more, each over 3 meters high. These are not closed or solid domes but rather latticed to expose their interior. Upon closer examination, a pilgrim will discover that

204 Scale a life-size stone statue of Buddha has been placed inside each stūpa; Prince Manchanegara’s caged warrior. According to legend, the divine architect of Borobudur was called Gundadharma, however, it is doubtful that the monument was designed by one person. Archaeological analysis reveals that Borobudur was built and remodeled over the course of 70 years. Evidence suggests that an earlier foundation of terraces was built first, perhaps 20 or 30 years earlier; its original function unknown. When construction of Borobudur began in 780, most of this earlier structure was obliterated and absorbed into the new foundation. After construction had begun, they decided that a taller structure was more desirable, encasing the newly carved basal with a wider foundation. Nonetheless, the completed architectural design at Borobudur is sublime. The size of this sacred mountain dwarfs all monuments of the Kendu Plain, creating spatial-cognitive metaphors of scale that impose their own cosmological structures through their sheer physical presence. Its bigness ruptures and subsumes, occluding any associative meanings a pilgrim may have brought with them. No sudden or drastic changes exist between one architectural or sculptural element and another. Any changes observed by an ascending pilgrim are steady and gradual—from the angular and square lower terraces with their insets and projections to upper elliptical terraces, to the circular terrace at the top. Transition is achieved in a subtle and continuous fashion. Although the spatial experience of Borobudur engulfs you, the frequent encounters with the human-size Buddha statues effectively employs a one-on-one scalar balance that counterbalance the overpowering scale of the mountain. The ritual circumambulation at Borobudur, the act of ascending a sacred monument, represents a set of spatial-cognitive metaphors of wayfinding movement that communicated important ideological connotations. Mountains were important religious symbols in pre-Buddhist Java; many early shrines and sanctuaries are found upon mountain slopes. Mountain imagery is also common in Buddhism cosmology, used as sacred spaces to reveal enlightenment. The terraced hillside around Borobudur, merging with the monument’s stone terraces, creates a stunning mountain silhouette topped by a parasollike stūpa, a harmonious architectural portrayal of a holy mountain. This is why that progressive processual movement, ascending in circumambulatory fashion from floor to floor, corresponds to a transcendental ascension towards truth that is both subtle and secret. As a pilgrim passes from an order of tantric cycle to another that is higher, they traverse through the esoteric and mystical liturgy of Mahayana in a meaning and deliberate fashion.

Giants of Rapa Nui The final quote of this essay was penned by our renowned explorer Captain James Cook who was so exuberantly eulogized in our discussion regarding burial markers (Chapter 2). Cook was the third European to disembark on

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the Eastern Polynesian island of Rapa Nui, which at that time was named Easter Island because of the day it was discovered, some five years before he was struck down and subsequently memorialized in Hawai’i. Desperate for provisions, Cook made valuable observations of the customs of its inhabitants, and recorded his thoughts about one of the most fascinating and enigmatic examples of monumentality in the world—the famous monolithic stone giants of Rapa Nui (Figure 4.28). He wrote in 1774: The Stupendous stone statues erected in different places along the Coast are certainly no representation of any Deity or places of worship … we could not help wondering how they were set up, indeed if the Island was once inhabited by a race of Giants. (Beaglehole 1967: 21) The island is a small triangular island (164 square kilometers) and is the most isolated place in the world. It was formed from hot volcanic plume originating on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Rapa Nui is a forbidding place, with a rugged shoreline of sharp rock outcrops and cliffs. The original colonizers of Rapa Nui migrated from central Polynesia by in the 7th century, and undoubtedly found a lush island filled with trees and birds. Distinct clans formed as the population increased and settled in different portions of the island. They eventually began to construct a unique style of monumental religious structure that included multi-ton stone torso statues for ancestor

Figure 4.28 Moai on Easter island. Source: Jones (1871: 119).

206 Scale worship called moai, which were placed upon ceremonial platforms called ahu (important syntheses include Diamond 2005; Flenley and Bahn 2003; Kolb 2012; Martinsson-Wallin 1994; Pavel 1990; Van Tilburg 1994; Val Tilburg and Ralston 2005). Despite the modern notoriety of the giant statues, it was the Rapanuian ahu ceremonial platform that was the most important sacred space. The ahu was a rectilinear rock platform comprised of paved courtyards and augmented with stone altars, walls, and statues. Ahu architecture evolved from the central Polynesian marae platform shrine that contained smaller features such as wooden huts, wooden statues, and a stone altar called an ahu. The word marae means cleared, free of foliage, and it was a rectangular raised area demarked with stones or wooden posts. Over 300 ahu temples were built during a relatively short and intense burst of megalithic construction activity from 1100–1500. These ahu are dispersed along the coastline at intervals of approximately 0.75 kilometers, except for areas of high cliffs. The typical ahu measures 3 meters in height and 720 square meters in area, and was constructed with dry-laid stones (Martinsson-Wallin, 1994: App A). It possesses a one-meter high retaining wall on the sea-side of the structure, used to denote the rear portion of the ahu. The ahu platform itself was filled with locally collected stones, and then paved on the top surface for human activity. A sloped entrance ramp was placed on the land-side of the structure, which was also paved in front as well. Rapanuian and Polynesian ethnohistory indicates that the ahu platforms and their associated moai statues were used in ceremonies pertaining to ancestor worship, and probably began as a distinct variation of the Polynesian ceremonial “meeting place” (Figure 4.29). It is here that many social and religious rituals were undertaken, those associated with birth, death, and apotheosis. Offerings to the gods were deposited upon the open plaza, and facilitated by the ritual labor of high-ranking priests. Death rituals included placing a corpse at the front of an ahu followed by cremation at the rear. The physical

Figure 4.29 Isometric view of an ahu with three moai statues. Source: After Kolb (2012: 141).

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perceived space of the ahu was very straightforward. It was typically located in a central location, nearby an inhabited village, and its elevated stone platform aided its ritual status. Activities undertaken there were available for all to see, yet the inner space was restricted by height and by the bordering wall and markers. Once a participant stepped into the sacred ahu, they would be stepping out of the present physical realm into a complex amalgam of imagery and symbols pertaining to conceived space, where spirit and physical world would unite, and where the large moai statues and other symbolic accoutrements would help conceptually blend and contextualize meanings. There a participant could gain an understanding of the workings of the world around them, and learn their role in the greater universe. The history of ahu construction informs us a bit about how they served as metaphors of social interaction. They were of course public spaces for group worship, although undoubtedly there were various levels of participation and certain areas of the ahu were prohibited for certain people. The earliest evidence we have of Rapa Nuian ahu construction dates to approximately 700. One of these early platforms, called Ahu Tahai, is located on the island’s western shore. Ahu Tahai was a simple affair; a small flat-topped core-filled platform housing a single stone statue carved from red scoria volcanic tuff. Undoubtedly there were many of these open-air altars without statues or with simple upright stones scattered across the entire island, some perhaps built with an adjoining paved courtyard in the typical central Polynesian fashion. These red scoria tuff statues are very similar in design to the “tiki” images of central Polynesia, with naturalistic head-shape, ears, and eye designs. However, by 1100, ahu platform design became more complex as they grew in size. For example, at Ahu Tahai, the single statue there was thrown down and incorporated into the fill of a large platform extension which housed five newly carved statues. More evidence of ahu rebuilding may be found at three other sites, Ahu Tongariki, Ahu Hekii, and Ahu Akivi. Each had the early style statues that were recovered in the fill of later lateral extensions. All were refitted with more modern statues, especially Ahu Akivi, which was built to house seven large ones in 1460, about the time that island ahu construction peaks. The most elaborate of all ahu platforms is Ahu Tongariki, located on the south coast approximately one kilometer from the volcanic crater and rock quarry of Rano Raraku (Figure 4.30). With a length of 60 meters, it is estimated that Ahu Tongariki had a platform volume of 23,000 cubic meters and was constructed in multiple construction phases. Because of its proximity to Rano Rarku, it houses the most moai statues of any ahu (a total of 15), including the largest erected statue of 86 metric tons. Although the typical ahu platform was a substantially sized structure, it was relatively easy to construct given the fact that most were built using stacks of locally available rock. Sometime after 1500 (and maybe as late as 1770), profound sociopolitical and religious changes in Rapa Nuian society resulted in the cessation of statue carving

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Figure 4.30 Ahu Tongariki. Source: Photo by Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Easter Island Statue Project Archives / © Easter Island Statue Project and Jo Anne Van Tilburg.

and significant modification or destruction of most ahu platforms. Moai statues were intentionally toppled over, and many ahu became burial locations for human remains. The reason behind such a drastic change is under debate, the most likely reason being the rise of internecine warfare tied to a generalized degradation of the environment, population pressure, and/or rising social tensions. What sets Rapa Nuian monumental architecture apart are its unique moai carved statues; over 887 moai have been documented all over the island as well as left abandoned in the stoned quarries where they were carved. Most were toppled, defaced, or buried long ago (Figure 4.31). A typical moai statue is carved out of volcanic basalt, trachyte, and red scoria. Almost all of these statues were carved using basalt tools from a distinctive volcanic tuff located at the quarry of Rano Raraku. Approximately 55 statues originate in quarries from other parts of the island. The typical statue measures four meters tall and weighs 12 tons, although the largest statue still lies prone at Rano Raraku, and is approximately 20 meters tall and weighs over 200 tons. Because of the significant labor involved in transporting these monoliths, only about 288 statues (25%) were successfully moved and installed on village ahu ceremonial platforms. Another 397 statues still remain at the quarry site of Rano

Figure 4.31 The excavation of statue RR-001-157. Source: Photo by Vaiheri Tuki Haoa, Easter Island Statue Project Archives / © Easter Island Statue Project and Jo Anne Van Tilburg.

210 Scale Rarku, while another 92 were abandoned in transit along the prepared roads outside the main quarry. Of the 313 remaining ahu platforms, 125 contained one or more stone moai statues, the others may have been at one time been outfitted with wooden statues. The typical moai statue is a whole body statue carved in the minimalist style that is common throughout Polynesia. It possesses a thick torso with slightly carved features in bas-relief. The arms rest against the body with hand and fingers resting upon hips or across the belly with thumbs pointing at the navel. It may have a carved bas-relief loin cloth and/or etchings upon its back, perhaps representing tattooed signs of rank (Figure 4.32). It is sexually ambiguous (although some statues have traces of a beard or etched vulva), lacks any evidence of legs, has a truncated neck, but also has a disproportionally large head; almost 40% of its length was dedicated to facial and cranial features. The most striking facial feature is its all-seeing eyes that gaze at your from every angle as you walk around the landscape, much the same way the eyes of a well-painted portrait follow you around the room. These eyes are made of carved elliptical eye sockets that hold white coral eye balls accented with black or red stone pupils. Numerous eye ball fragments were recovered and reconstructed. The eyes are perched atop an elongated and hooked nose and shadowed over by heavy eyebrows. A set of carved lips protrude from the face into a delicate pout, and two carved elongated ears serve as a backdrop for the entire oblong face. Why is the gaze of each moai so penetrating and the expression so enigmatic? Because each statue functioned as a metaphor of ancestral time, an intersecting point of both prospective and retrospective memories. As a prospective memory, a moai statue served as a stone marker carved to commemorate and immortalize an important and high-ranking ancestor. The deifying of important individuals was a deeply rooted Polynesian cultural tradition, for the spiritual power or mana of a worthy ancestor persisted after death and could be materialized into objects. Upright stones in the Society Islands, for example, were often assigned as ancestor markers, as were the carved wooden images of Hawai’i. So the carving of moai statues in detail was a prospective act of adoration that incorporated representation in the hopes of invoking the memory of future generations, a mnemonic message of the great people and great deeds of the past. Likewise each moai statue was embodied retrospectively by later generations. Each statue was erected upon the sacred ahu platform of a settled village, in an eternal resting place with its back to the ocean and its gaze casting over the accompanying ceremonial area and nearby village. Each lofty Rapanuian statue was forever included in the yearly religious ceremonies, made privy to elder councils, and was looked upon as a protector of the village. Its impressive visage would have been a comforting sight to those who resided there, a perpetual reminder of their link not only to the spiritual world, but an intersecting spatial and temporal marker that the surrounding countryside belonged to them.

Figure 4.32 Peaked embellishments on the dorsal side of statue RR-001-157. Source: Photo by Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, Easter Island Statue Project Archives / © Easter Island Statue Project and Jo Anne Van Tilburg.

212 Scale Moreover, the enormity and height of each statue as well as its familiar human features served to conceptually blend and interpret the physical and cultural world (Figure 4.33). A towering ancestor embodies and conveys metaphors of scale to an observer in a very personalized and first-person nature, and the experience of a gigantic statue is direct and unambiguous. A direct encounter with one of these statues and its colossal features temporarily overpowers any ephemeral thoughts we might have, commanding and beseeching the observer to take in all its glory and meaning. Movement towards a statue and its surrounding place of worship gives rise to social contemplation and reflection. Feeling a gigantic statue’s weathered texture and reading its inscribed tattoos enhances memory and a sense of time. Its scale emphasizes communing with the great ancestors, much in the way a child looks up to an adult warden who hovers over us with concern. A tourist today also feels awe and majesty, temporarily forgetting the discourses of self that revolve around the modern world of travel and communication. They relive the sense of wonder experienced by the ancient villagers who lived there long ago and whose day-to-day meanings of subsistence and family were also set aside for the time being, replaced with unequivocal meanings of ancestor, spirit, and community.

Figure 4.33 The conceptual path of making and reading an ahu platform from Rapa Nui. Source: Author drawing.

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213

The size and scale of a moai statue also enhanced metaphors of encoded movement in an essentialist way, because the actions involved in the carving and movement of a large moai statue was a laborious affair. It was also a constant string of events that required organization, resources, invoking family obligations, and undertaking community festivities. The encoding movements of each statue began at the quarry, usually the giant volcanic crater of Rano Raraku. Undoubtedly under the eye of rival villagers, a suitable outcrop had to be first found and evaluated. Measurements had to be marked onto stone, tools had to be assembled, work schedules assigned. Only then could carvers begin their laborious task of using basalt chisels for pecking outlines and shaping stone. A chief or lineage head presumably commissioned each moai. Statue carving was a highly esteemed profession and undertaken by a specific hereditary social class. Carvers worked under the leadership of a master crafter, and they were paid for their work in subsistence goods such as fish and shellfish. The first goal was to square off a rectangular block, then undercut it from both sides leaving a stone “keel” upon which it could be balanced. They made the most of any section of rock they found suitable. Moai were carved in all directions along the outcrop face, and if a defect arose, they would abandon their efforts and move to another area. They readily took advantage of any existing fissures and cracks as well. A second task would be to begin sculpting details of the statue’s upper surface, sides, top, and base. Although moai statue carving might appear to be a daunting task, modern labor estimates and experimental archaeology have shown that 20 individuals could easily carve a statue in their spare time within the course of a single year (Pavel 1990). By far the greatest effort in Rapanuian monumental construction was actually the movement and installation of the moai statues. Such spatialcognitive metaphors were important for propagating the sacred landscape and show-piecing tribal ancestry. Once a statue was completed, it was broken off its keel, anchored from above to palm tree trunks sunken in specially prepared holes, and then lowered down the cliff and slope of the crater using ropes, logs, and levers. Once down, statues were transported either in prone or supine positions, depending upon the size and weight of the sculpture. The statue was probably strapped into a wooden sledge and then move with log rollers lubricated with palm oil or organic matter. A number of carved V-shaped track ways exist between the Rano Raraku quarry and other parts of the island; evidence that much effort went into constructing and maintaining the paths for moai transportation. Moreover, the number of discarded and broken statues along these paths is further evidence that transportation was fraught with hazard. The labor force for moving these statues was less than one would think; 50–75 people could haul a statue 15 kilometers in the course of 1 week (Van Tilburg and Ralston 2005). Once a statue reached its final destination, it had to be placed into proper position. Using a stone ramp, the moai was slowly raised into an upright position using lever, ropes, and stone fill.

214 Scale It is clear that transportation clearly required the greatest logistical effort; including the construction and maintenance of V-shaped roads, the manufacture of large qualities of rope, foodstuffs used as lubricants, and wood to serve as harnesses and leavers. The organic goods, particularly the rope and wood were of limited quantity on such a small island. Total food requirements during the 300 years of statue construction increased by 25%, and may have contributed to overexploitation and eventually decline in availability of such materials, probably contributing to the end of statue carving (Van Tilburg and Ralston 2005). Undoubtedly each ahu ceremonial platform with its set of gigantic moai statues use scale to accentuate spatial-cognitive metaphors of ancestral time and encoded movement. The elaboration of the Rapa Nuian monuments represents an interesting phenomenon regarding the nature of emerging elite religious power in a highly constrained environment. At first glance, it would seem that some sort of centralized hierarchy was involved with monumental architecture on Rapa Nui. The grandiosity of the statues, the uniformity and uniqueness of their stylistic design, and the laborious scale of carving and construction with such a small population all point to some sort of controlled coercion. However, ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence indicate that ritual power was instead decentralized among a series of rival kin groups competing with one another. The ease by which ahu were built and moai carved, the fact that so many statues were carved but not moved, the lack of any clear central monumental place, and the equal distribution of monuments across the landscape supports the argument that inter-group social completion drove monumental elaboration.

Notes 1 A 0.1107 troy ounce gold ducat was worth 5 shillings in 1512. Therefore 3,000 ducats equaled £760, or about £308,000/£3.74 million today. 2 This is equal to £12,742 in 1586, or about £2.14 million/£28.7 million today. In contrast, the 2005 cost of returning the Axum Obelisk seized by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from Ethiopia in 1937 was $450 million. 3 It has been suggested the Pythiac trance-state was invoked through the use of volcanic vapors containing ethylene that would have a similar effect as glue or paint thinner. 4 Literally: Sonez que du haut de ces monuments quarante siécles vous conteplent. 5 Literally: Hij zich naar de Barabudur om de duizend beelden te zien, hoewel’t reeds eene voorspelling van de voorvaderen was, dat als een prins die beelden zag, deze plotseling ongelukkig zou worden want daar was een beeltenis bij, voorstellende een satrija in een kooi opgesloten.

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Conclusion/litotes

I began this book with the question: how do we make sense of monuments? I conclude now by recapping the power of three small, powerful spatial tropes; three spatial-cognitive sequences that mold human experiences and perceptions via bodily comparison. I have done so not to simply valorize any particular set of monuments (such as those discussed herein), but rather because any serious study of monumentality must begin and end with an investigation into the discourse between architecture, sensation, and cognition. A monument and its assorted architectural elements is experienced by spatially gauging scales, measuring proportions, determining inclusivities, and assessing relationships. Taken as a whole, monumental space is the synchronized sum of its elements, bound by location and orientation into a summative whole, but its constituent parts facilitate a cross-mapping of the spatial concepts of “containment,” “anchored,” and “proximal” from the sensual to the cognitive domains. Each of the monuments explored in this work is sublime in its own fashion; each engages us at a sensual level. A monument has the ability to evoke emotion, stimulate thought, and encourage interaction. It creates and offers a set of conditions for recalling the past and evoking a set of contemporary responses for the future. What sets a monument apart from other culturally endowed places is its spectacle-like character, a character that evokes collective social identities and values. A monument is architecture that functions as artwork or memento, acting as our virtuous conscience, our whisperings of the spirit, as we consider and rethink the past. As Alois Riegl observed in The Modern Cult of Monuments, “A monument in its oldest and most original sense is a human creation, erected for the specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events (or a combination thereof) alive in the minds of future generations.” In this way a monument is more than an inert architectural form or object, it also represents a quality, a set of signifying practices that interplay between the symbolic and the objectified. It is a historically referential thing that derives its value from its ability to direct attention to grander social issues and collective representations. Perhaps the most indispensable quality of a monument is the way it challenges us to consider time. A monument simultaneously belongs to the

220 Conclusion/litotes present and the past, effectively blending time with space, sequencing and segmenting an experience that is similarly cross-mapped so that temporal perception is likewise segmented. In other words, it creates a space that is unfamiliar, distant, and novel, generating cognitive stimuli that lengthens and prolongs the spatial experiences that occur within the confines of a monumental place, forcing a visitor to move in unfamiliar ways, prolonging the experience and, as a result, decelerating time. Simply put, a monument slows experience so that we pay special attention to detail, becoming emotionally stimulated. However, the nature of monumental time is not strictly chronological but rather associated with cultural memory. Monuments physically encapsulate cultural time for posterity in order to facilitate collective generational memory and the creation of a range of overlapping cultural narratives. A scale of potential cultural times are represented, ranging from simple genealogical time deities to the movement of celestial bodies. The various metaphors of monumental time were explored in Chapter 2. The death marker, one of the simplest of emblematic spaces, conveys the most basic meanings associated with genealogical time. It creates a direct form of temporal continuity, a concordance scalar time that can be measured easily in generations. Ancestral time is measured in a similar way, such as the Reef of Heaven on the island city of Nan Madol, where paired residences and tombs were used to gauge the proximal present to the distal past. Another form of monumental time is sacred time, illustrated by both the Sacramental Church and the Egyptian Pyramid, which used precise geometric proportions, entryways, and passages to elongate and highlight the departure from the secular world and the passage into sacred time. Stone Mountain, as well as the many 19th and 20th century civic war memorials dedicated to tragedy, were used to communicate meanings associated with historical time and knowledge acquisition by both individuals and collective groups. At the far end of the temporal spectrum is Machu Picchu, nestled among the clouds between the sacred Andean mountains, an axis mundi for various celestial bodies (and events) that unfolded across the sky. A second important monumental trope is movement. As a spatial anchor, a monument tells an architectural narrative through the process of journeying, contouring movement into a series of spatial metaphors. Its various architectural elements are rarely perceived summarily—their grandiose nature discourages an absorption of their entirety. Scale and layout often encourages the perception of one element at a time, using ambulatory or pedestrian movement in, around, and through its space. Seeing a monument from a distance is not enough; its threshold must be crossed, its geometric principles explored, its cultural symbols deciphered. Geometry and layout may differ, but each monument creates a unique set of movements and orchestrations that generate collective thought. These movements—encoding, performance, and wayfinding—orient and parse real and imagined places as well as those boundaries and transitions that enable us to “make sense” of things.

Conclusion/litotes 

221

The three metaphors of monumental movement were explored in Chapter 3. The National Mall and the Gothic Cathedral best illustrate how the process of monumental construction is an example of encoded movement, where spatial movement tied to the acts of buildings are imbued with meaning that communicates collective identity. Both the Roman Forum and the Minoan Palace are monuments that best illustrate the use of performance movements, the pilgrim and worshiper. Both monuments helped structure entertainment, commercial activities, religious processions, and many other activities associated with performance that created distinct social meanings. They did so by employing complex architectural layouts, organized asymmetrically in order to visually influence human cognitive perception, exerting control over the movements of those who enter and utilize these spaces in order to inspire and awe. Karnak and Stonehenge represent two examples of monuments associated with wayfinding movements. Wayfinding encourages the integration of knowledge laterally rather than vertically, by the construction of spatial stories that proceed from a part to the whole, creating understanding through metonymy. Wayfinding includes such social actions as pilgrimages, journeying, and other motions in and around a monument, movements that convey meanings by crossing thresholds, experiencing geometric principles, or mapping relationships. The spatial tropes of time and movement are also closely aligned to the trope of scale, which becomes amplified and reinforced by the exaggerated metaphors of “bigness.” To explore the materiality of monumental scale is to encounter that which often challenges, or even subsumes, normal familiarity, challenging us to consider bodily space. When we come face to face with the death marker of a loved one, its human-like scale emphasizes oneon-one engagement rather than enveloping our sense of being, even though nothing reminds us more of our mortality than seeing a death marker, the final stage of naturalness that we cannot escape. When we come face to face with the great size or “bigness” of a monument that is disproportionately exaggerated in scale, it obliterates our bodily experience, myopically condensing our perception of the whole, consuming our bodily experience much in the same way one is consumed by the sky, a landscape, or extended history. We journey around, under, and through a monument; it does not move around or through us. Spaces of the gigantic draw together and integrate the natural and the cultural as a framework for articulating experience, astonishing and confronting the viewer with an inspirational display of scale. Gigantisms, such as monuments, generate history and meaning that are grandiose and communal. They embellish the laws of physical space to offer specific meanings, temporarily interrupting and obliterating our spatial perceptions, overpowering our anatomical familiarity, and occluding the spatial perceptions we experience. As Susan Stewart quips in On Longing, “we inherit our giant as we inherit our language … they are one in the same … an object narrated from an increased distance in the sense of both time and space.” The challenge is that any monumental giant must be

222 Conclusion/litotes properly designed to be spatially autonomous and sublime in its “bigness.” It cannot be fragmented in its architectural layout, ruptured in its set of cognitive meanings, or superfluous in its historical references. The metaphors associated with monumental scale were explored in Chapter 4. The pyramids at Giza are perhaps the most awe-inspiring monuments of all, representing how sublime architectural perfection could be achieved thousands of years ago. The Greek Sanctuary was similarly perfection in execution, a monumental sacred space reserved for the worship of the gods. Borobudur was a constructed mountain for sacred pilgrimage, designed to convey the journey towards enlightenment. The giant monoliths of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, represent one of the most mysterious and most isolated landscapes in the world. Mons Vaticanus, with its impressive Basilica, was the most costly of all monuments, and served as a symbolic landscape of the Holy See of Rome for 1,000 years. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is one of the most peculiar uses of scalar metaphors, and certainly one of the most disturbing; a yet-to-be monument that fails to praise anything, instead making assertions of danger without value. Little has changed over the millennia. Modern monuments such as Stone Mountain and the National Mall are employed in the same way that Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids were built and utilized 5,000 years ago. Building materials and commemorative purposes may change, but the essential quality of a monument remains the same—a culturally evocative place where cognitive meanings become collectively bound to a spatial location. The journey into the nature of monumentality that this book takes, a voyage from modern death markers to ancient enigmas, demonstrates how the boundaries that may exist between history, memory, modernity, and tradition are somewhat superficial. While commemorative practices change over time, the essential physicality and architectural quality of a monument remains timeless. A monument is an extension of culture, both upon the landscape and inside our heads. A monument aggressively awes and inspires us with its size and complexity, yet is malleable in the way that it flaunts a horizon of distinct social processes. At times this horizon fails to evoke any meanings at all, allowing our own personal lived experiences to overrule the proscriptive intent of its builders, or the added retrospective meanings more recently conceived. This horizon represents an interplay between the symbolic and objectified dimensions that, at certain junctures, unite in momentary union. And such unions are powerful indeed.

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Acropolis 189 age-value 101 Akhenaten 139–141 All Saints’ Church 65–66 American Civil War 85 ancestor veneration 56, 172, 205–6 ancestral time 22, 45–46, 56, 210, 220; and tombstones 22–23; see also death markers; tombstones Antipater of Sidon 71 antiquarian interpretations xviii Arch of Septimus Severus 123, 125–126, 128 Arlington Memorial Bridge 94n5 Athens, Greece 52, 53, 188, 189, 190; see also Greece Atlanta-Constitution 93 Aula Palatina 64 axial paths 25 Axum Obelisk 178 Bakenkhonsu, son of Ipui 136–137, 144 Barrie, Thomas 25 Barthes, Roland 32n1 Basilica Aemelia 123, 124 Basilica Julia 123 Basilica Maxentius 126 Basilica Porcia 123, 124 Basilica Sempronia 123 basilicas 124; architecture 63; Roman 63, 64; see also individual basilicas battlefields: sanctifying 85 behavioralist interpretations xviii, 27 Bell, Catherine 21 Belzoni, Giovanni Battista 100 Bénard, Charles Magloire 17

Benjamin, Walter 23 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 176, 178, 180 bigness 26–27, 161–162, 204, 221; see also gigantisms; metaphors Bingham, Hiram III 76, 82 bodily experiences 30 Bonaparte, Napoleon 190, 191 Borglum, Gutzon 83, 89–90 Borobudur 162, 198–199, 200–202, 203–204, 222 Bramante, Donato 174 Breamore Church 61 Brooke, Robert 29 Brown, Daniel 23 Buddhism 199–200 Caesar Augustus 124–125 Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar) 124–125 Canterbury Cathedral 115 Capitol Hill 104, 108 Capitoline Hill 121 cathedrals 114, 117, 152–53n5; see also medieval Gothic cathedrals celestial calendars 23, 25, 81–82, 146–147, 154n16; see also Machu Picchu; Stonehenge cemeteries xvii, 11, 55; see also death markers; intramural burials; tombstones circumambulatory paths 25 Circus of Nero 121, 169–171, 176 Classical era: commemorative monuments 52, 53 Cleopatra’s Needle 5, 6 cognition 17, 33n6 collective memories 31–32

224 Index Column of Gaius Duilius 123, 124 commemorative monuments 83; Roman 124–126, 128–129 commemorative practices 32; EuroAmerican traditions 31; Roman 54 commemorative processes: and monuments 4 commemorative successes/failures 3 conceptual integration 16 conceptual space 12 Confederate Lost Cause monuments 89, 93; see also Stone Mountain Confederate memorials 83, 88; see also Stone Mountain Connerton, Paul 33n9 conspicuous consumption 27 construction crews 119, 153n7, 193–196, 200–201, 213–214 container/center-periphery schema 8; and monumental space 8; and time 20–21; see also scale/balance schema; source-path-goal schema Cook, James 29, 30, 31, 204–205 cosmological storytelling 203 Crete: Homer on 129 cross-domain mapping 20, 141–149 cruck houses 62–63 cultural time 22 culture 2, 17; linguistic concepts of 32n1; and thought 4 Cuzco 81

137, 190, 191, 192, 194, 198; Great Sphinx 192, 193; Karnak 102, 136, 137, 138–140, 141, 142–143, 144; mastaba tombs 67–68, 196–197; Meroë 74, 75; mortuary temples 69, 70, 72, 75; obelisks 136, 137; Pyramid Texts 67; Thebes 137; Valley temple of Menkaure 18 Egyptian Pyramids xvii, 1–2, 45, 75, 139, 220; construction phases 69; design phases 69, 70; Giza 100, 162, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195–198, 222; Great Pyramid 71; Khafre’s Pyramid 197–198; Khufu’s Pyramid 193, 194–195, 196–199; Menkaure 197–198; movement 71; Red Pyramid 70, 71; and sacred time 67; Sakara step pyramid 68–69, 70, 72; see also Nubian pyramids Einstein, Albert 21 Eiseley, Loren 160–161 Ely Cathedral 113, 116 emblematic gestures 33n7 emic frameworks 2; and monuments 3 Enguerrand VII 46, 51 epigraphs 52 epitaphs 47–48; Roman 54; see also death markers; tombstones etic frameworks 2 Evans, Sir Arthur 129 event segmentation 5–7, 9, 10, 17

Dark Ages Europe 62 Davis, Graeme 153n15 Davis, Jefferson 90 death: in ancient Egypt 67 death markers 46, 47–51, 52, 53–54, 55; Captain Cook 30; Classical era 52, 53; effigy tombs 48, 50, 51; eighteenth century 44; medieval 48, 50, 51; nineteenth century 48–49; warning 163; see also intramural burials; tombstones DeKalb, County Civil War Memorial 87, 88 Delphi, Greece 2, 181–182; Athenian Treasury 186, 187; Sacred Way 184– 185, 186, 188; Temple of Apollo 188 Derrida, Jacques 26 displacement 25–26

Fauconnier, Gilles 13 Feldman, Jerome 4 Ferlini, Dr. Giuseppe 74, 75 Fontana, Carlo 180 Forum Romanum 120, 121–123, 124–27, 128, 129 The Forum see Forum Romanum frescos: Minoan 132, 133, 136 Froissart, Jean 62 Fuller, Thomas xvi funerals 44–45, 49, 127–128

Easter Island see Rapa Nui Egypt 140; Amun-Re 137–138; fascination of 100; Giza 71–72, 100,

Gallagher, Victoria J. 93 genealogical time 51 Gettysburg 86, 87 gigantisms 28, 221; see also bigness; metaphors Glassie, Henry 14–15 god/heroic time 23, 45, 77 Gothic cathedrals see medieval Gothic cathedrals Great Leonine Wall 172

Index  Greece: stone temples 182, 183, 184; Temple of Poseidon 183; see also Athens, Greece Greece, Minoan 102 Greek Sanctuaries 162, 190, 192, 222; Delphi 181–182, 184–186, 186–187; Temple of Poseidon 183 grieving process 49 Groton Battle Monument (Connecticut) 84, 85 Hadrian’s Tomb 121, 169–70, 172, 173 Hawai’i 210; Kealakekua Bay 29, 30, 31, 205 historical time 83, 92; official 87 Homer 129 Horace xvi Horemheb 140, 141 human brain: and event segmentation 6, 7; perceptual information 7; sensory inputs 6; and time 20–21 humanism 176 Huyssen, Andreas 84 Hypostyle Hall 138, 139, 142, 143 iconoclasm 22 information access 31 interpretations: antiquarian xviii; behavioralist xviii; neoevolutionary approach xviii; scientific xviii intramural burials 51 Jackson, Thomas J. “Stonewall” 90 Java 199 Jefferson Memorial 106–108, 109 Julius II 175 Kant, Immanuel 26 Karnak, Egypt 102, 136, 137, 138–140, 141, 142–143, 144 Kilde, Jeanne Halgren 176 King’s House (regia) 123, 124 Klu Klux Klan 90–91 Knossos Palace 131, 132–133, 134, 153n14; see also Minoan Palaces Koolhaas, Rem 26 labor-days 151 Lakoff, George 7 Lanciani, Rodolfo 171 Late Middle Ages 113 Lee, Robert E. 90 Lefebvre, Henri 11, 12, 25, 27, 33n3–4

225

L’Enfant, Pierre Charles 103, 105 Levi-Strauss, Claude 32n1 libraries: Library of Congress 106; presidential 112; public 125 Library of Congress 106 Lin, Maya Ying 110 Lincoln, Abraham: funeral train 49; tomb 50 Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C. 104, 106, 107–108 literacy rates: medieval 117; Minoan 135 lived space: medieval churches 65–66 lolung platforms 56, 57, 58–60, 61 London, England: Cleopatra’s Needle 5, 6 Machu Picchu xvii, 23, 46, 76, 77–80, 82, 220; Intihuatana stone 80; landscape of 77; temples 80–81; tombs 81 McMillan Commission 106, 108 McNeil, David 33n7 Mahrt, William 115 Mallia Palace 131, 133–134; see also Minoan Palaces Manchanegara (Prince) 198–199 Manetti, Giannozzo 168 maps: and mental spaces 16 marking monuments xvii martyrias 172 material culture: defined 3 meaning: objects creating 15 medieval Christianity 63, 150 medieval Gothic cathedrals 102, 112, 113, 114, 115–116, 117–120, 144, 152n2, 221 medieval populations 62 medieval Sacramental churches 45, 220; architecture 63–65; interior 65–66; movement in 66–67; see also basilicas memory 117, 160; collective 160–161; and monuments 45; power of 23; retrospective 150 mental spaces 12, 13, 14, 17; cross-mapping 15, 16 metaphors 33n6; and cross-domain mapping 14; and material objects 14; and miniatures 28; movement 19, 20, 23–26; scale 19, 20, 26–29, 135–136, 150–151, 161–163, 182, 197, 199, 204, 212, 221; spatial-cognitive 19, 20, 21, 149–150, 197; time 19, 20, 21–23, 45, 150

226 Index Miksic, John 200 Mills, Robert 105 miniatures 28, 34n34 Minoan Greece 102 Minoan halls 134–135 Minoan Palaces 129–131, 132, 133–136 The Modern Cult of Monuments (Riegl) 219 modern monuments xvii, 222; Waste Isolation Pilot Project 162–164, 165, 166–168 Mons Vaticanus 162, 168, 169–171, 172, 173–175, 176, 177, 178, 179–180, 181, 192, 222 monumental movement 212, 220–221; encoding 20, 24, 101–103, 113, 213, 220–221; performing 20, 24–25, 101–102, 120, 126, 129, 135, 220– 221; wayfinding 20, 24–25, 101–102, 137, 141–145, 189–190, 198, 204, 220–221; see also metaphors monumental size 27 monumental space 19, 24; and the container/center-periphery schema 8 monumental time 21; ancestral 22–23, 45–46, 56; god/heroic 22–23, 45, 77; sacred 22–23, 45, 61–62, 67, 75 monuments 219–220, 222; defining xvi–xvii, 11; designing 164, 165, 166–168; influence of 5; materiality of 1; meanings 31; role of 3–4; and scale 26; “top-down” 87 Morgan, William N. 59–60 Moton, Robert R. 107, 108 Mount Rushmore 83 movement: control of 130 Nan Madol 46, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 220; Nan Dawas 59–60 National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism 111–112 National Mall (Washington D.C.) 102, 104, 111–112, 128, 168, 221–222; see also Washington D.C. neoevolutionary interpretations xviii Neolithic Britain 28, 146, 148, 150–151 Nicholas V 168 Nora, Pierre 31 Norkunas, Martha 34n9 Notre Dame Cathedral 118 Nubian pyramids 72, 73, 74; see also Egyptian Pyramids Nuclear Waste Policy Act 164

obelisks: Axum 178; Cleopatra’s Needle 5, 6; at Karnak 136, 137; at the Vatican 169, 175, 176, 177, 178 objects: creating meaning 15; meaning of 4–5; and metaphors 14–15; role of 3; and thought 17 On Longing (Stewart) 221 Ovid xvii Palatine Hill 121 Papal tombstones 178, 179 Paris 153n6 Parthenon (Temple of Athena Parthenos) 188–190 Pasetto Wall 172 patriotic monuments 84 Paul III 178, 179 perceived space 11, 12, 162 Phaistos Palace 131, 133–134; see also Minoan Palaces physical spaces 3, 14 pilgrimages 25–26, 81, 126, 138, 144, 148, 201 place-bound experiences 16–17 place-making 3, 10–11 Plane, C. Helen 89 planetariums: compared to Stonehenge 149–150 Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus) 120, 123, 128, 153n10 Plume, Helen 90 Pohnpei, Micronesia 55, 57–58; see also Nan Madol Pollard, Joshua 149 Pope, John Russell 108 power of the moment 45 presidential libraries 112 prospective memories 21–22 public libraries 125 Quintilian 152n3 radial paths 25 Rapa Nui 162, 205, 213–214, 222; ahu 206, 207–208, 210, 212; Ahu Tahai 207; Ahu Tongariki 207, 208; moai 205, 206, 208–209, 210, 211, 213; Rano Raraku quarry 207–208, 213 Rapoport, Amos 33n4, 33n8 Reef of Heaven 45–46, 220; lolung platforms 56, 57, 58–60, 61; see also Nan Madol; Pohnpei, Micronesia religious symbols 47–48 Renfrew, Colin 3, 32n2

Index  retrospective memories 22 Rhetorica ad Herennium (Anonymous) 117 Riegl, Alois 101, 219 Roman empire: Christianization of 54; deification in 124; Forum Romanum 120, 121–123, 124–127, 128, 129; funerals 127–128; Temple of Jupiter 101 Roman Senate House (curia) 121, 123, 126 Ruggles, Clive 149 sacred time 22–23, 45–46, 61–62, 67, 75 St. Peter’s Basilica 124, 169, 170–171, 174, 176, 178, 179–180, 181 Saint Peter’s Square 175, 176, 180 Salisbury Cathedral 63, 115 Samuel, Raphael 168 scale/balance schema 8, 10, 26; see also container/center-periphery schema; source-path-goal schema schema 7, 8; see also container/centerperiphery schema; scale/balance schema; source-path-goal schema Schwartz, Barry 33–34n9 scientific interpretations xviii Seferis, George 1 segmented paths 25 sensory input: of monuments 19 shamanic cultures 48 signification 1 simulacra 117, 118, 152n4 Sistine Chapel 169, 173, 174 Sixtus V 178 Smith, Robert 43 social memory 21 society, and monuments 3–4 Society Islands 210 Soldiers’ National Cemetery 85 Soldiers’ National Monument 86 source-path-goal schema 8, 9–10, 101; and time 20; see also container/ center-periphery schema; scale/ balance schema spatial-cognitive metaphors 19, 20, 21, 149; Nan Madol 59; see also metaphors spatial-cognitive sequencing 13, 17, 45–46, 54, 56, 66, 75, 83, 101–102, 110–111, 117, 127, 142–144, 147–148, 150–152, 219; and the senses 19

227

split paths 25 Stewart, Susan 27–29, 34n34, 221 stone 64; and medieval churches 63–64, 119, 153n6; qualities of 1; reuse of 72, 124, 126, 171 Stone Mountain 45–46, 82–83, 88, 89–91, 93, 94, 220, 222; park 89, 91, 92 Stone of the Pregnant Woman 161 Stonehenge xvii, 23, 102, 144, 145, 146, 147–149, 150–152, 153–154n16, 222; and god time 23 stupa towers 200, 203 Suger, Abbot 112–113 Supreme Court Building 106 Sweetser, Eve 13 Symmachus 172 Temple of Amun-Re 138, 139, 143–144 Temple of Antoninus Pius 125 Temple of Castor and Pollux 122, 123 Temple of Divus Julius 123, 124–125 Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sunio 183 Temple of Saturn 121, 122–123, 126 Temple of Vesta 123, 126 tholos tombs 130, 131 Thomas Aquinas 120 Thomas, Julian 150 thought: and culture 4 Thutmose III 140, 141 Tilley, Christopher 15, 151 timber: as building material 63 time: in ancient Egypt 67; and container/center-periphery schema 20–21; cultural 22; and the human brain 20–21; impact on monuments 29; and source-path-goal schema 20–21 tomb of Saint Peter 169, 171 tombstones/tombs 13, 22, 50; eighteenth century 43, 44, 45; Minoan 130, 131; as monuments 9; Papal 178, 179; Stonehenge 146; Vietnam Veterans Memorial 111; see also cemeteries; death markers; intramural burials tourists: at Stone Mountain 93 transference 33n9 Trigger, Bruce 27 Trinkle, E. Lee 82–83 triumphal archways 123, 124 Trollope, Anthony 102–103

228 Index Tschumi, Bernard 17, 19 Tuan, Yi-Fu 11–12 Turnbull, David 24 United Kingdom: All Saints’ Church 65–66; Canterbury Cathedral 115; Ely Cathedral 113, 116; London 5; Neolithic 28, 146, 148, 150–151; Salisbury Cathedral 63, 115; Westminster Abbey 119; see also Stonehenge Urban V 172 Valley temple of Menkaure 18 Vatican see Mons Vaticanus Via Sacra 123 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C. 109, 110, 111 Vitcos see Machu Picchu

Washington D.C. 105; Capitol Hill 104; Jefferson Memorial 106–108, 109; National Mall 102, 103–104, 111–112, 128, 168, 221–222; Vietnam Veterans Memorial 109, 110, 111; Washington Monument 104 Waste Isolation Pilot Project 162–164, 165, 166–168 Watkins, Trevor 24 Westminster Abbey 119 white supremacy 83 Whitehead, Alfred North 4 Whittle, Alistair 146, 150 Wordsworth, William 145 Zacks, Jeffery 5 Zakros Palace 132–135; see also Minoan Palaces