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Concerning Orientation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Extract

If the possessor of a set of Archaeologia will open volume 25, for 1834, he will find over 40 pages, with many admirably drawn plans and plates, explaining some of the chief megalithic structures in England and Brittany as Dracontia, or temples of serpent-worship, a name and attribution which had originated with Stukeley a century earlier. This is but one example of the fantasies of the antiquaries of those times. We should, however, be slow to ridicule those old inquirers; they lacked our nova organa of excavation and comparison, the eyes and brain of modern archaeological science; though it is difficult to understand why they abandoned in these studies the sounder reasoning which served them in every-day affairs.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1930

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References

1 Modern Wilts, Hundred of Branch and Dole, pref. p. 6.

2 Lukis, Wilts Arch. Mag., 13, 83.Google Scholar

3 Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, pp.124158.Google Scholar Avebury, Lord Prehistoric Times, pp.126129.Google Scholar Sir Evans, A. Proc. SOC. Antiq., ser. 2, 31, 191192, and others.Google Scholar

4 Smith, R.A. Proc. Soc. Antiq., ser. 2, 31, 144.Google Scholar

5 ANTIQUITY March 1929, p . 88.

6 This inference was made by Hoare; see Ancient South wilts, pp. 157-158, and map to face p. 170.