All The Dumb Things

Both my wife and I are quite interested in European pre-history.  Me, because I feel genetically and culturally adrift in Australia, knowing that I wasn’t really designed for where I live.  The aborigines can claim to truly come from Australia but I know my roots are in Europe.  Engogirl, on the other hand, is fascinated by early forms of technology.

Antequera in Andalucia has some of the best preserved and largest dolmens in all of Europe, so we decided to go there.  About 20 or 30 kms before we reached Antequera, I noticed a very interesting geological formation that I later found out is called La Peña de los Enamorados (“The lover’s leap” based on an old story of a Christian boy and Moslem girl who throw themselves to death because of family disapproval).  Coming from Granada, the formation looked a bit like a high saddle with two limestone peaks and an alpine meadow in-between. 

It just stood out in the landscape, and when I saw it I asked Engogirl “how far are we from the dolmens?” 

She replied, “we’ve still got some way to go”. 

I then said, “I bet that place has a lot of local cultural significance, it just stands out as being important”.  

As we drove along and got closer to Antequera, we swung around the peak, Engogirl said “you know, that looks like a face”.

After a nightmare time fumbling our way through a small Spanish town with very thin streets, many of which were under reconstruction, we finally made our way to the Archaeological Park of Cueva de Menga, which houses two excavated dolmens, the best preserved of which is the Menga dolmen.

The dolmens in this area of Spain are thought to have been constructed about 5,000 years ago.  The stones used in their construction are massive (the biggest being 180 tonnes), and thanks to a very informative video in the reception centre it was explained how they were put into place. 

As informative as I found the video, Engogirl with a much more educated eye than mine about such things had problems with how they came to their conclusions as they didn’t offer any evidence for their suggested methods, although the hypothesis seemed reasonable.

It’s not really known what the dolmens were used for (Wikipedia, bless them, do have a bit more to say on the matter but of they aren’t all that rigorous so I won’t quote them on this matter), but the openings face La Peña de los Enamorados, which looks like a giant person’s face staring up into the sky.

On such a cold and moody day as today, it wasn’t  hard to imagine such an amazing sight having an effect on a person’s mind.

In the reception centre is an enigmatic carving that the archaeological student serving time at the counter suggested was thought to be an idol. 

Unfortunately we couldn’t have much of a discussion because of language difficulties, but I tried to explain to him that it looked like a butterfly or moth chrysalis to me, and since the insect’s metamorphosis would have seemed quite magical to a stone-age person, I think it would be reasonable to think that perhaps a chrysalis might represent rebirth.

If I had anything to do with the research into the “idol” I’d be contacting biologists specialising in butterflies and moths and asking them to identify the species.

On a side note, the bogong moth in Australia was an important seasonal food for the Aboriginals.

As the cave paintings at Lascaux in France have shown, although prehistoric people didn’t have the advanced technology we do, they did have an intimate knowledge about the pyshical appearance of the world around them. Many people think that Stone Age people weren’t very smart, but by evolutionary standards they”evolved” as us and were just as smart, and therefore fully able to represent the world around them in either drawn or sculpted form.

So you heard it here first folks.  If you come across a paper that some professor has written about their discovery of the meaning of the ‘idol’ at Antequera being that of a chrysalis and rebirth, they stole the idea from me…