Output details

Landscape and Perception

This website documents a programme of research conducted by Wozencroft and Paul Devereux (Princeton University), a key protagonist of a new area of archaeological enquiry, archaeoacoustics, and presents new strategies and outcomes for repositioning attitudes towards heritage. Undertaken over a seven-year period, the research investigates sound and acoustics as key features of prehistoric sacred sites, which have yet to be fully assessed in terms of sonic features and peculiarities.

The project expands interdisciplinary research in the areas of art, sound and archaeology, linking analogue pre-computer modes of perception with a contemporary distribution method. The research has been published in Time and Mind 4(2) and online (Routledge, forthcoming December 2013); ‘The end my friend’ in The Design Journal 15 (2); ‘The hills are alive’ in The Wire magazine 339 (Spring 2012) and expanded online at www.thewire.co.uk, and in keynote lectures and seminars at the ‘Punkt’ festival, Kristiansand (2012), ‘Soundworks’, London (2012) and 9th European Academy of Design conference, Porto (2011).

The project looks at two locations, including the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, site of the bluestones that were transported to Stonehenge in approximately 2500 BC. A parallel study has been made of Avebury, Wiltshire, a constructed sacred site. Wozencroft and Devereux’s investigations at Preseli have unearthed and documented a range of sonic phenomena that defy analysis – a series of lithophones, ringing rocks and other echo-location features that indicate an awareness of sound and acoustics not previously accounted for in the experience of early Homo sapiens. The research explores the potential recognition of Stonehenge as both a sound space and a visual theatre for ritual events. It has also raised key questions about the concentration and sonic dimensions of sacred/prehistoric/protected sites at Preseli, which has 49 – more than any other area in the British Isles.