Explanatory Materials Appear Below This Image - Please Scroll Down To View
| This stone is clearly an example of a "dual symbol" - it has an upraised block face looking left, and a pointed faced character looking horizontally right. Please click here for details of this distinct family of Avebury monoliths |
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34a is a clear example of the "dual symbol" style, but there are other, highly abstracted examples of the duality at Avebury. Compare our monolith here in the avenue with Stone 34 in the relatively distant main henge's north-western quadrant (click here to see a large image of this latter stone). Below is a comparision of these two stones which betrays an amazing correlation, too close to be accidental:
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| It isn't just the overall shape that is the same, it is the details too! The correlation is astonishingly precise. It is sobering to realise that without the relative clarity of the Avenue monolith it would have been impossible to decode the image on the Henge one, the latter is too abstract to understand on its own. It is incredible to appreciate that the Neolithic artistic mind was far from being limited to literal pictorial representations, we need to re-evaluate the new stone age peoples and the ways in which they thought: |
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Image copyright David Baldwin Night Photography
