New Views over Megalithia

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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby hvered » 10:05 pm

As for pipers and caves. There is a pipe tune called the piper's cave and I believe this celebrates a MacCrimmon who entered a cave and disappeared, as they do. I think there was a dog with him who escaped with his hair all singed.

And under Edinburgh castle there is also a similar story about a young piper doing something similar. I think in York they send a drummer boy down.

Some of the myriad piper stones/caves/holes could conceivably have been (nick)named in the nineteenth or twentieth century when antiquarianism got into its stride. There's an undercurrent of sentimentality in some of the lore, either touched up versions of existing stories or Victorian in origin. It's as if pipes and pipers became equated with Englishness, in myth at least... Pan's pipes, Tom the Piper's son, Puck.

One of the best-loved paintings of the First World War was Estella Caviani's The Piper of Dreams

Image
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby TisILeclerc » 10:23 am

Ah yes. Middle Class English Victorians. Always ready to shed a tear as they watched the little boy climb the chimney or when the little girl had her fingers chopped off in the machinery up't mill.

And what a charming little picture to show the lads as they went over the top. 'Ere you are. Remember, this is what you're fighting for.

The English middle class never changes even its hypocrisy and hatred of the lower orders.

Fortunately for us the Isle of Skye was destroyed by these people and their clan chiefs who threw them all off the land by the time Victorian sentimentality had really got started. Even in the previous century Norman MacLeod was sellling his own people to the Americans as slaves. £3 a head I believe.

There is another piper who goes into a cave. And meets with a grisly end, this time a MacKinnon on Mull. A cynic would tell us no doubt that all these stories were made up so that tourists would come to the island. Ah well.

http://faeryfolklorist.blogspot.co.uk/2 ... -cave.html

These tales were in existence long before the Victorians. The last of the MacCrimmons was out by about 1820 but the story relates to a much earlier time. And there are many versions of it. Otta Swire wrote a book about the legends of Skye. She didn't go to some dodgy Victorian illustrators for her stories though. She spoke to elderly relatives who could tell her about them. Presumably these people hadn't been infected by the Hampstead or Notting Hill virus. Even in the seventies there were old people who could claim to have only visited Portree once in their lives. And had no intention of going back to that sinful city. The eighteen miles or so were too far.

So, why are there so many stories from all over Britain and Europe about pipers and drummers going underground?
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby Mick Harper » 12:10 pm

These tales were in existence long before the Victorians.

Not according to your own evidence. Skyelarkers are just as prone to recovered memory syndrome as anyone else.
So, why are there so many stories from all over Britain and Europe about pipers and drummers going underground?

This though is more persuasive. We definitely need some piping theories, it is obviously the key to much else. Even I can't think of the answer offhand. But I'll recognise it when I hear it from someone else.
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby hvered » 1:39 pm

Otta Swire wrote a book about the legends of Skye. She didn't go to some dodgy Victorian illustrators for her stories though. She spoke to elderly relatives who could tell her about them.

Oral tradition is typically passed down by grand-fathers/-mothers. It can take no time at all for a story to become a 'tradition' so the compiler would need to find out whether grandad/ma was retelling a contemporary story. It should not simply be assumed the stories are old because the story-teller is old; today's folktale collectors have the opportunity to sift through the newspapers, political cartoons and ballad sheets of a century ago (but do they?).

So, why are there so many stories from all over Britain and Europe about pipers and drummers going underground?

The Pied Piper was originally hired to get rid of rats, so the story goes. Wouldn't clearing underground tunnels of rats before starting to mine the rockface be useful in the days before dynamite was available? There may well have been a psychological advantage too even if no rats (or rabbits) were around.
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby Mick Harper » 1:53 pm

a) miners couldn't give a hoot about rats
b) rats don't give a rats about pipers.
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby hvered » 2:40 pm

Surely child-miners are a different matter. Victorian whimsy aside, children constituted a useful workforce. But replaceable. A piper/drummer could have been sent down to test for safety: if the vibrations caused a rockfall, only one person would be killed. If so, ghostly stories were bound to appear.
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby Mick Harper » 5:00 pm

Yes, sound would seem a promising avenue though surely a piper is worth more than a child. I know I would swap my two. Besides we have no evidence--and we know quite a lot about mining technology--that sounds of any sort affect rockfalls.
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby Mick Harper » 5:09 pm

What about echoes? Exploring the lengths of passageways? Also there is the matter of the 'dirge' i.e. the longevity and lower register of the bagpipes. One of the pipes? Tissie will know. I suppose the key is to assume the musical instrument comes from the mining technology rather than vice versa.
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby Mick Harper » 5:12 pm

Dangerous gases? Pumping a bag of air as a substitute for a canary. Makes a different sound. Something along these lines.
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Re: New Views over Megalithia

Postby Boreades » 2:55 pm

An academic bun-fight? Or something insightful?

In my view, the inability of conventional archaeology to interpret the majority of the excavated evidence from prehistoric sites, in particular postholes, has led to development of “New” archaeology, where academics study and become experts in those aspects of culture we don’t find. In those countries like Netherlands and Germany, where their archaeology is better understood, their narrative of the Neolithic is generally about agriculture, while in Britain it is more often expressed in terms of the perceptions, beliefs, rituals, personhood, and cosmologies.

In a clear case of counterfeiting in the knowledge economy, New Archaeologists are employed in publicly funded Universities to teach students what they know about the things we don’t have any evidence for. Sadly, anyone who claims that they know how prehistoric dead people perceived their world either is mentally ill or a fraud, and quite possibly both.

New archaeology as projection

The relevant definition of Projection;
…..8. a. [Psychology];
The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others:

"Even trained anthropologists have been guilty of unconscious projection of clothing the subjects of their research in theories brought with them into the field" (Alex Shoumatoff).

Clearly, New Archaeologists are just projecting ideas in their own minds into the minds of the long dead - who inevitably demonstrate a remarkable unanimity and prescience in their perception of their own archaeology. To what extent, in creating a narrative of how the dead perceived themselves, their dead, the landscape, structures, and even materials like stone and wood, New Archaeologists are fooling the University authorities, funding bodies and ultimately the tax payer is an interesting question, but the crucial psychological issue is to whether they are they fooling each other and themselves.

Do they realise that by projecting their own intuitions into the minds of people evidenced only by skeletal remains they are simply fabricating a mythology . In short, are they fully cognisant of their own conceit? Notwithstanding they teach the courses, review each other’s papers, choose research projects, set and mark the exams, shouldn't somebody have stopped them creating this imaginary past?

And what of the real victims, the students who go to study archaeology, to be taught to dig holes and think like the archaeologists they see on Time Team?
They will have their rationality challenged and undermined by the intellectual demagoguery of a faith-based pedagogy characterised by lexicographic prestidigitation and decontextualized-asymmetrical-cross-cultural-anthropology masquerading as a methodology for the conceptualisation and analysis of archaeological data. Lucky people.

http://structuralarchaeology.blogspot.c ... ogist.html


I couldn't possibly comment on the likelihood of this author successfully applying for a job with the National Trust or English Heritage. Especially as the latter is busy "reimagining the past".
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