Abstract
This paper investigates the processes in the petrification of Iron Age architecture, from initial idea to eventual abandonment and archaeological recovery, exemplified by the Scottish Broch. Although the preservation of these more than 2000-year-old stone-built roundhouses seemingly renders them the archetype of petrification, the analysis here highlights the impact of organic components, now lost, as well as the flexibility in their stone structure, evidenced by use, re-use and rebuilding to conclude that architectural petrification is perhaps never complete – unless deliberate events, such as modern conservation, halt the ongoing processes. Using the metaphors of Becoming and Being in a social and architectural setting, broch building is discussed within a wider British prehistoric context to suggest that not buildings or monuments, but the ideas of them, houses and tombs, became petrified through time. The incorporation of some fragments of some of the deceased in Iron Age brochs could represent another step within these dynamic journeys between matter and ideas and identities. The dynamics in construction should therefore also be reflected in modern reconstructions to highlight alternatives for the same or similar structures, not to petrify certain ideas in our heads.
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Notes
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http://www.pessac.fr; https://whc.unesco.org/fr/list/1321/documents/ (accessed 05 March 2021).
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Sophie Hüglin for the invitation to the workshop in Newcastle in May 2016 and to the Petrification session at the EAA in Vilnius in 2016, and the editors for inviting my contribution. Thank you also to the editing team, and Alexander Gramsch in particular for the fruitful discussion on petrification as a process, and to all discussants for their comments and feedback on the presentations and drafts of this paper. Finally yet importantly, I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding my Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2014-424) and the project Building (Ancient) Lives out of which these current ideas have grown.
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Romankiewicz, T. (2021). Petrification Processes in Prehistoric Architectures: A View from the North. In: Hüglin, S., Gramsch, A., Seppänen, L. (eds) Petrification Processes in Matter and Society. Themes in Contemporary Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69388-6_11
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