The integrity of Stonehenge A discussion on human interference at the heritage site

Should there be human intervention in the management of a natural heritage site, or should we let nature run its course? This is a question that can be raised when looking at any heritage site that has either been set up by or changed by human hands. This blogpost will look at the question of integrity of one of the most famous UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the prehistoric Stonehenge monument in Amesbury, England.

Human intervention has impacted nature in positive and negative ways. Lowenthal (2005), an American historian and geographer renowned for his work on heritage, says that development came at a price to the ecology of the earth. However, at the same time nature also affects the creations of human kind such as old buildings and artifacts. This means that nature is affected by human influence and vice versa.

Most of the one million visitors who visit Stonehenge each year believe they are looking at untouched 4,000-year-old remains. For decades the official Stonehenge guidebooks have been full of facts and theories surrounding the world's greatest prehistoric monument. However, what the brochures do not explicitly mention, is the restoring - or rebuilding - of the 4,000 year old stone circle throughout the 20th century. Even recently, from 1881-1964, changes were made to the Stonehenge to reverse the effects of nature and to preserve the monument and the landscape.

The very first documented intervention at Stonehenge happened in 1881 and is described  here by Simon Banton. There was a lot of outrage in both local and national press about the intervention. The picture above shows workers on the site in 1901, and more restoration work  was carried out in 1919, 1920, 1958, 1959 and 1964. Most of the restorations were focused mainly on straightening stones that were in danger of falling.

In the above pictures, we see the impact of the restorations throughout the 20th century. 

The first picture shows the Stonehenge monument in 1877, the second picture was made from a similar angle in 2008. Here you can find many more pictures of restorations as well as information about what kind of adjustments were made to the monument. These human interferences could bring up questions of integrity, as Lowenthal (2005) also mentions. Lowenthal notes the importance of thinking about the combination of nature and human effort as cultural landscapes that are in need to be preserved, requiring the combined expertise of both humanists and earth scientists; however, people tend to understand human interference in cultural heritage, but the same doesn’t go for a natural one. 

If we want to examine the ‘heritagescape’ of Stonehenge a little further, we can use the approach of Garden (2006). Garden describes the heritage site by means of a combination of the principles of boundary, cohesion and visibility. The Stonehenge site consists of 2,600 hectares of grass fields that are bounded by the river Avon, two car roads and an invisible field boundary. The roads have been a problem within the heritagescape as it is thought to interfere with the peace and tranquillity of this sensitive heritagescape. The site consists of the Stonehenge monuments aswell as other, less popular smaller monuments, standing in different places at the large site. Combined with a road tunnel that goes right through the middle of the site, we could say that there is a lack of cohesion in shaping the heritagescape. This lack of sense of cohesion can also be found back in the same discussions about the placement of the roads and tunnels in the area and human interference.2 Altogether, the visibility of the Stonehenge is obvious. It is called one of the wonders of the world and has a prominent place on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

These points make Stonehenge an interesting case as it is a popular prehistoric monument of natural elements which could lose all of its cultural integrity when changed by humans of the present. At the same time, the lack of interference of the present people could mean deterioration of its state through natural influences.3

In many cases, the line between what can be considered essential restoration work, and significant rebuilding, is blurry. Where should the line be drawn to reassure the integrity of a heritage without leaving it to be damaged by the elements of nature? We think every World Heritage is unique. Therefore each of them have different factors that have to be taken into consideration when making decisions about the extent of human intervention necessary to maintain the heritage and its cultural and global value.

However, an argument against human intervention at the Stonehenge monument could be that it has become a product of the 20th century heritage industry, making Stonehenge a reminiscent of what it might have looked like thousands of years ago, but is not anymore the creation of primordial people. What do you think about this particular case? Is the revitalization of Stonehenge justified and does it still have the same cultural value as before it was restored?

Written by,

SB, SL, MB

References

Barber, M. (2018, February 20). 100 years of care: early excavations and restoration at Stonehenge.

Opgehaald van English Heritage: https://blog.english-heritage.org.uk/stonehenge-early-excavations-restoration/

Batchelor, D. (1997, January). Mapping the Stonehenge world heritage site. In PROCEEDINGS-BRITISH ACADEMY (Vol. 92, pp. 61-72). OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS INC.

Emerson, S. (2016, May 26). Stonehenge, Easter Island, Venice: Climate Change Will Destroy Human History. Opgehaald van Motherboard: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xyga3q/stonehenge-easter-island-venice-climate-change-will-destroy-human-history-unesco

Garden, Mary-Catherine E. “The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12, no. 5 (2006): 394-411.

How They Rebuilt Stonehenge 50 years ago. (2015, December 29). Opgehaald van Indymedia.org: https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/12/330623.html?c=on

Kinsley, A. (2017, January 10). Restorations at Stonehenge. Opgehaald van Silent Earth: https://www.silentearth.org/restorations-at-stonehenge-2/

Lowenthal, D. (2005). Natural and cultural heritage. International Journey of Heritage Studies 11:1, 81-92.

Meskell, L. (2009). Introduction: Cosmopolitan Heritage Ethics. In L. Meskell, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies (pp. 1-24). Duke University Press.

UNESCO. (1886). Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites. Opgehaald van UNESCO: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/373

Traces of Slavery in Groningen, Where?

On a very sunny Wednesday afternoon, we did a city walk through the city centre of Groningen on traces of slavery for our bachelor course on cultural heritage. Our guide led us to many spots in Groningen which we pass by on a daily basis, but of all these spots, we did not know their history at all. We decided to find out what the heritage sites, or the heritagescapes are like for traces of slavery in Groningen. We would like to find this out, to think of ways how there could be more attention for the slavery traces and to make it more visible.

The tour started at the Groninger Museum, where our guide showed us a picture of the painting of Elsebeth Schaij, by Hermannus Collenius. On the painting, you can see a black servant on the side of Elsebeth, in stylish clothes. “In that time (the 18th century),” our guide Barbara told us, “being painted with a servant on your side, oftentimes smaller pictured and at the edge of the painting, was some kind of figure of speech.  Also, pictured like this, the white skin of the woman on the painting should look better.” This painting is in the Groninger Museum, but we think over there it is only one of the many paintings, so it doesn’t really stand out. So we concluded that this first site is only a little visible. Painting of Elsebeth Schaij (mappingslavery.nl)

We walked onto the St Anthony Guest House, where our guide told us that it was founded in the 16th century as a charity institution to isolate infectious diseases such as the plague. Soon after that, it turned into a madhouse for people with mental or psychological disorders. Barbara also told us that over here, an employee of the WIC (West-Indische Compagnie) has been hospitalized for a while. “After his wife had sued him by the city government, they sent him on a ship to the West Indies. He was shipwrecked, but the man returned unscathed, so they sent him to the St Anthony Guest House”, she continued. We were all shocked and we could barely believe it when Barbara also told us about a way of income of the Guest House. Apparently on Sundays, people could go to the Guest House and pay to watch the people in there, unbelievable. For that matter we are glad that times have changed. At the Guest House, we could not find any traces of slavery, it was only described on a tourism plaque.     

St Anthony Guest House (mappingslavery.nl)

Our tour continued and we walked in the direction of the Gedempte Zuiderdiep. The Gedempte

Zuiderdiep is a street now, but before 1880 it apparently was the spot in Groningen where the ships, sometimes with slaves on it but also with goods, arrived. On the Zuiderdiep a lot of beer breweries established. The water was not suitable for long journeys, because it would rot easily. Beer was the perfect solution, because it doesn’t rot that easily, so the WIC ships were packed with a lot of beer for the crew to drink on their journeys, the crew members must have enjoyed themselves a lot during these journeys and it is a miracle that so many ships made it without suffering shipwreck. However, there were no traces to be found at the Zuiderdiep either.   

Our tour continued, and we walked from the Zuiderdiep through the Oosterstraat to the Grote Markt. We stopped at Hotel de Doelen, where in 1841 a bold opponent of slavery, John Scoble, stayed. He pleaded for the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a growing number of organizations turned against slavery. Together they formed the abolitionist movement. The Netherlands were rather late with the abolition of slavery, it was only in 1863 that slavery was officially forbidden. The people who owned slaves got thirty florin compensation for every ‘lost’ slave they had to give up after the abolition of slavery.  After Hotel de Doelen we walked to the city hall and we ended the tour at a house where a slave owner had lived. What stroke us during the city walk, was that our guide showed us mainly sites and spots where the slave owners had lived or where slave owners had worked. There was not much to see or tell about the slaves themselves, we barely saw any concrete traces. This is also because there is little material of the slaves being preserved, which shows how little people cared about the slaves.

We ended the day in style with a beer on a terrace at the Zuiderdiep and discussed the city walk and the traces of slavery, or especially the lack of traces. Some of the sites provided you with a  little information on a small tourism plaque, but that’s it. We had our tour guide to provide us with information and she told us about the website of mappingslavery.nl, on which more information on slavery traces can be found, but it is not visible at all when you walk through the city. In our opinion, it should be made more visible, and in this way it will also be better known. We missed the visibility of the heritagescape for the slavery traces. There were no boundaries that mark a heritage site, no actual cohesion to tell the stories of the slaves and only very little visibility of the traces, mostly on plaques. Some of the buildings were still more or less the same, but when you did not know about its past, you would not have any clue about it. We concluded that it would be a good solution if the Groninger Museum became responsible of this, and that they should set up some kind city tour in the weekends and holidays through the city centre and an additional audio tour through all the traces of slavery, providing you with more information about the spots. Also the tourism plaques should be more extended or they should provide you with a QR code, linking you to a website on which you can find more information about the specific site. Furthermore, the municipality should set up some kind of path, with visible and recognizable signposts, covering all the traces of slavery in Groningen. Without these tours, plaques and signs, nobody will notice the hidden traces of slavery in the city of Groningen.

Sources:

Garden, Mary-Catherine E. “The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12, no. 5 (2006): 394-411.

https://www.deverhalenvangroningen.nl/alle-verhalen/het-slavernijverleden-van-groningen 

http://mappingslavery.nl/en/kaarten/nl-reg/groningen/groningen/ 

Written by

MB, SL