Perception Creates Worlds: Meaning and Experience in the Erection of the Standing Stones of Western Scotland

Phenomenology provides a useful and sound theoretical framework for landscape archaeology through the consideration of a Husserlian document, published posthumously. Bronze Age cosmology can be interpreted through Husserl’s vision of human experience where the place of an individual and her or his concordant perceptionof their world creates it. Furthermore, our physiological nature as human beings forges this perception and thus our cosmology. More specifically, studying prehistoric cultural astronomy inherently uses Husserl’s phenomenological approach, its concepts of primordial experience and the nature of vision, to understand what it was that ancient people saw when they looked at the sky and the form of their comprehension. Recent reviews have considered the various ways phenomenology has been considered or used within British and European archaeology (Gosden 1999; Ingold 1999, 2000, 2001; Cummings 2002; Fleming 2004, 2006; Brück 2005; Fowler and Cummings, 2003; and Cummings and Whittle, 2004; Thomas 2006; Barrett and Ko 2009). However, the intention herein is to offer a sharp and vibrant example of how phenomenology provides a framework for landscape archaeology. Whilst we have discussed an initial consideration of Heidegger for this field (Higginbottom and Tonner, forthcoming), the approach here is based on Husserl’s ideas, Heidegger’s mentor. A primordial experience does not involve any prior cultural perception and therefore all human beings experience it in the same manner. The centrality of an individual is uppermost here and our perception and experience is based upon our physicality and our elemental nature, in particular how the human-centred view engenders a connection between the individual and the universe. The prehistoric cultural astronomical examples come from the Western Scotland Megalithic Landscape Project.