Stonehenge: Making Space (Materializing Culture)

This book is an imaginative exploration of a place that has fascinated, intrigued and perplexed visitors for centuries. Instead of seeing Stonehenge as an isolated site, the author sets the stones within a wider landscape and explores how use and meaning have changed from prehistoric times right through to the present. Throughout the millennia, the Stonehenge landscape has been used and re-used, invested with new meanings, and has given rise to myths and stories. The author creatively explores how the landscape has been appropriated and contested, and invokes the debates and experiences of people who have very different and often conflicting experiences of the same place. Today, heritage managers, archaeologists, local people, free festivallers, and druids come to the place with entirely different understandings and agendas. The book demonstrates that the creation of spaces and places for people to express divergent viewpoints is powerfully constrained by social and political forces that allow some voices to be heard while others are marginalized. With dialogues and illustrations that range from the conventional to the cartoon strip, this multi-vocal book not only presents a wide range of views in an innovative way, but provides important new insights on how people shape and are shaped by landscape.

Barbara Bender is Professor in Heritage Anthropology, University College London.

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology, University College London. Recent books include 'A Theory of Shopping', 'The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach' (with Don Slater) and Ed. 'Car Cultures'.

Paul Gilroy is a historian, writer and cultural theorist and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at UCL (2019). Prior to UCL, he taught at South Bank University, Essex University, Goldsmiths, University of London, Yale University, London School of Economics and King's College London. Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the Holberg Prize. He is known for his influential studies on black cultural expression on both sides of the Atlantic; the cultural history of postcolonial societies; and the sociology of ethnicity, race and racism in Britain.