Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to transcend the nominalist impasse in post-processual archaeology by showing that the emergent properties revealed when combining it with the archaeoastronomy of Silbury Hill, Avebury operate at the level of ethnographic meaning.

Paper long abstract:

Landscape phenomenology limits the number of possible narratives for interpreting prehistoric monuments through the embodied experience of walking their remains in their landscape. While this method may improve upon an archaeology that narrows interpretation to single site excavations isolated in euclidian space, it has been criticized for deploying unsubstantiated metaphors as an interpretive resource. Contemporary archaeoastronomy's dominant methodology submits regional groups of prehistoric monuments to rigorous statistical methods for testing whether perceived alignments were in fact intended by their builders. However, it is presently unable to saturate alignment findings with meaning, and reaches its limits when monuments are found to align on local landscape features rather than 'astronomical' bodies. Through a detailed examination of Silbury Hill in its landscape and late Neolithic/EBA monument context this article shows that problems in both methods can be transcended by studying the emergent properties generated by their combination. These emergent properties are consistent with the predictions of a recent anthropological model of lunar-solar conflation.