Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights

6. Intangible Rites: Heritage Sites, the Reburial Issue, and Modern Pagan Religions in Britain

C h a p t e r 6 Intangible Rites: Heritage Sites, the Reburial Issue, and Modern Pagan Religions in Britain Sabina Magliocco June 20, 2006: the night of the summer solstice, Stonehenge. Thousands of Britons of all ages and from all walks of life have assembled on the grounds of this UNESCO-designated cultural heritage site, with the consent of the authorities , to await the dawning of the sun on the summer solstice and participate in what has become an all-night rave. Druids and drummers mingle with police and vendors, who purvey everything from Mexican and vegetarian food to the glow sticks that have become ubiquitous to all nighttime public celebrations. As the night wears on, a light drizzle begins; the crowds attempt to take shelter under the stones. Some doze, while others drink, dance, and seek ecstasy on this, the shortest night of the year. At last, sky begins to lighten, and the crowd’s energy picks up again. As the sun’s rays crest over the heel stone at the henge’s northeast edge, and the crowd begins to cheer. The roar grows up from the ancient temple toward the rising sun, and at that moment the New Agers, Druids, Goths, ravers, and drunken partiers touch, for a second, the point in the space-time continuum at which all other humans have celebrated this astronomical event at this place, in all times, like the apex of an arc, or light concentrated by a prism.1 August 25, 2008: Stonehenge again. A coalition of modern Druids, part of the Council of British Druid Orders, is present to bless excavations undertaken by archaeologists Mike Parker Pearson and Julian Thomas, accompanied by their colleagues Mike Pitts and Julian Richards, as part of the Riverside Heritage Sites, Reburial, and Pagan Religions 149 Project, whose purpose is to explore the connections between Stonehenge and a neighboring site where ancient peoples may have camped and lived.2 Today, the archaeologists are reopening a pit previously excavated during the 1920s where cremated human remains had been deposited after having been discovered by early archaeologists. The scientists want to subject them to DNA testing and mineral analyses to reconstruct early human life ways and kin relations that could shed light on the history of the monument. Because very little skeletal material remains from the late Neolithic, the study would make significant contributions to knowledge about the lives of these early Britons. The event is attracting a great deal of publicity: BBC cameras are rolling as white-robed Druids and archaeologists in field attire stand over the plotted area, about to kick off the dig. Suddenly one of the Druids who is to conduct the blessing discovers that the excavation will be unearthing early human remains, a fact not previously known to him. Instead of conducting the blessing, he begins to shout abuse at the archaeologists, calling them “grave-robbers” and other slurs. He cancels the blessing and calls on the other Druids present to join him in protesting the excavation as an “insult to our ancestors.”3 * * * This chapter deals with the emerging conflict over access to prehistoric stone monuments, many of which are world heritage sites, and the disposition of human remains found in or near them, between different stakeholding groups in Britain during the first decade of the twenty-first century.4 It addresses the competing claims and heritage discourses of archaeologists and heritage managers, on one hand, and those of a small group of Neopagans, on the other.5 At its heart is the constructed nature of heritage itself, and the centrality of the imagination to that construction. It is imagination that creates intangible heritage, and that constructs “heritage” from places, objects, and events. In that sense, the human right involved in this issue is freedom of imagination—the right to imagine one’s relationship to the past and construct a sense of identity based upon it. While seemingly frivolous in comparison to more vital human rights, the right to imagine actually stands at the center of the process of identity creation, as all cultural entities construct themselves with reference to the past—more often than not, one that is recast in terms of 150 Sabina Magliocco present needs and exigencies. We can thus think of the right to imagine as central to all cultural groups, whether ethnic, national, religious, or based on some other shared characteristic. Narratives of...