The Debate of the Heads - A Short Introduction
- Wade Jones
- Apr 27, 2017
- 4 min read
Behind the scenes of Set in Stone, there were debates on how to present the heads in the exhibition. This reflects the variety of opinions on the topic: research uncovered a diverse range of different experts, from archaeologists and historians, to an Iron Age specialist and even folklorists.
Britons and Continental Celts in Gaul (modern France) left no written records detailing their veneration for the head. Roman accounts from Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Livy and Julius Caesar described the taking of heads as a religious act: archaeological evidence back up the claim that the Celts did indeed behead humans and display them, possibly for religious purposes. The shrine at Roquepertuse in modern day France has three limestone pillars with niches for human skulls, strengthening the case for a ‘cult of the head’.
The Ancient Britons' reverence is evidenced by the numerous stone heads found throughout the country, with the greatest concentration within the territory of the Brigantes tribe in modern day Northern England. No written evidence about the Briton’s belief on the importance of heads survives, and so we instead use the classical sources from the continent to generalise the picture. However, in compiling the mythological stories of Ireland and Wales after the Romans, we uncover a similar theme of belief to those found on the continent. In the 1960’s Anne Ross' extensive work Pagan Celtic Britain stated that classical writers were correct about the importance of the head, and provided a selection of stories that clearly venerated the head as a divine motif, and argued that this is a manifestation of a continuing tradition from prehistory.
Over the last 30 years this idea has been questioned, and new interpretation produce alternative perspectives on what the stone heads represent. What is mentioned here will be a fraction of a complex, substantial debate aimed towards those unfamiliar with the topic. To start with, the historian Ronald Hutton reject the ‘Cult of the Human Head’ from the frequency of human heads in metalwork and stonework as a simply favourite artistic motif with no religious connection. Roman archaeologist David Mattingly suggested that, as many crude carvings of heads lacked a secure archaeological context or coherent style, the ‘Celtic head’ is just a generic label to describe any of the numerous stone heads found across Europe. Although he suggests heads recovered from Roman sites could be a distant-related branch of art from the Roman classical realism, overall the archaeological community are still not sure what the artefacts represent.
Miranda Green, an archaeologist who specialised in Iron Age Britain, asserted the head as a schematic image of a particular deity. Ancient Britons were an agricultural society who worshipped natural phenomena (springs, seasons, animals, the land and trees), where people 'sensed' divine presences rather than trying to capture them 'realistically' in art: the gods were too important to be bound in rigid representation through human forms. During Roman occupation, the Britons borrowed figural stone imagery and retained the abstract nature of a god in smaller, non-monumental sculpture. Focus on the head was a deliberate way of honouring the divinity by emphasising what they saw as the most significant part of the body, to enhance its power. Simple idealistic forms were a conscious and successful shorthand method of presenting images appropriate for the divine, reducing a head's physical feature to the essentials for recognition, while emphasising the value of symbolism. This abstraction of facial features may have been a deliberate attempt to inspire awe in the worshipper: the preference for a far greater role of symbolism in art than the Mediterranean school of classical realism is a pre-Roman tradition.
The lack of Roman archaeological context for many heads raises new questions. John Billingsley, a folklorist, provide one possible and interesting explanation, as he says the previous interpretations of the heads' archaic, 'primitive' style from prehistory stated by Ann Ross is questionable. Crude carvings of heads emerged at different times with differing degrees of fervour: many items believed to be examples of ‘Celtic heads’ could actually be much more modern. There was a revival in English folklore in the 1600s to produce stone heads to ward off evil, a fashion which persisted in less architectural contexts through the 18th and 19th century as fashion for portrait busts become more prevalent. Several stone makers continued the tradition during the 19th century, in particular John Castillo of Lealholm in the North Yorkshire Moors, who even wrote poetry saying throwing stones at ‘the auld man’s face’ brings misfortune. The practice even prevailed into the 20th century on the belief that a stone head was to ward off hauntings: in 1971, regular patrons of the Old Sun Inn at Haworth in Yorkshire, advised the landlord to install a new head over the main door, to ward off disembodied voices!
References
John Billingsley Stony Gaze: Investigating Celtic and Other Stone Heads (1998)
Miranda Green The Gods of the Celts (1986)
Miranda Green Symbol and Image in Celtic Religious Art (1989)
Ronald Hutton The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (1991)
David Mattingly An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire (2007)
Anne Ross Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition (1967)
Image Source: Author's Own
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