once upon a time

Thomas Robert Guest 1754–1818

ANNC (Prehist).514
Object types: vessel
Description: vessel
Materials: ceramic
Dimensions: 3.81 cm x 5.3975 cm (top) [height x diameter]
Date: Bronze Age (Britain) (c. 2500 - c. 800 cal. BC)
Period: Bronze Age (Britain) (c. 2500 - c. 800 cal. BC)
Associated Places: Winterslow Hut Barrow Group, Wiltshire, England (place of excavation)
Associated Persons: Allan Borman Hutchins (excavator)
Acquisition: Presented by the Rev. A. B. Hutchins, 1847.

`In field not far from road which leads from Amesbury turnpike into Bulford'. Prob. either BuLFORD 2, 3, or 4. Ex. A. B. Hutchins 1824 or earlier: primary (crouched?) skeleton, grooved dagger, and beaker beneath immense sarsen; 2 secondary cremations in urns, one being LBA with applied horse shoe bands. (Wessex grave 52.) Mod. Wilts. Hund. of Alderbury, 209 Arch. xliii. 350, fig. 27; BAP 373. Dagger in ASH; beaker lost? Urn in SAL (formerly in ASH.). 

The Winterslow Hut, Bronze Age, 1500 - 1150BC
Reverend Allan Borman Hutchins, the Curate of Grately, excavated a large bell barrow near The Old Pheasant Inn at Winterslow in 1814. Within the barrow he found at least three burials. The oldest was a male buried with a beaker pot. The middle burial was a cremation accompanied by a biconical urn. The final burial was also a cremation contained in an urn along with a bronze razor and a quanitity of hair. The hair has been reanalysed and is now thought to be sheep wool rather than human hair. One of the burials contained a number of amber beads, probably from a necklace. The smaller urn is in the ‘Trevisker’ style distinctive to south west Britain and is named after a site in Cornwall where it was first recognised.

The Winterslow Hut was an inn, now known as the Pheasant Inn. It was a famous coaching inn where William Hazlitt once resided and wrote his Winterslow Essays and which, at different times, was visited by Charles and Mary Lamb and Rudyard Kipling.

 It was here that the Exeter mail coach was attacked by a lioness in 1816. The lioness was part of a menagerie on its way to Salisbury Fair and severely mauled one of the horses plus a large Newfoundland dog before being recap-tured. The coach passengers with great presence of mind locked themselves inside the inn while the keepers recaptured the lioness from under a granary. Several of the inns on the turnpike and coaching roads in southern Wiltshire were 'Huts'. There was a Cribbage Hut at Sutton Mandeville, which must have been named from the card game that was played there. The word 'Hut' may have derived from its meaning of a shelter for troops which seems to been in use from the mid 16th century. The inn provided shelter to travellers for the night and may have begun life as a wooden hut.

A Bronze Age round barrow cemetery situated to the northwest of 'The Pheasant Hotel'. The cemetery comprises at least 13 round barrows, mainly bowl barrows visible as earthworks and cropmarks. Nine of the barrows were identified by Grinsell (1957) and designated as Winterslow 4-12. Five were visible as earthworks and four recorded as levelled earthworks. Two additional barrow sites were also recorded by Grinsell (undated) and another by Stephens and Stone (1939). Aerial photographs also show many circular cropmarks, interpreted as barrow sites within the vicinity of the cemetery. Ordnance Survey field investigations in October 1970 identified four of the barrows as definite earthworks and two as slight earthworks. None of the other barrow sites could be determined. The site of one other barrow site was recorded, it was visible as a very slight earthwork. Nine of the barrows have been scheduled. Two bowl barrows survive as substantial earthworks - one is 23 metres in diameter with a maximum height of 0.8 metres. The other has a diameter of 15 metres and maximum height of 1.2 metres. Both have traces of the barrow ditch visible. Three other barrows survive as slight earthworks ranging from 20 metres to 30 metres in diameter. The sites of three more barrows are visible on aerial photographs.

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’

But as well as supporting Surrealism’s analyses of kitsch and clutter and all their utopian and dystopian investments, Benjamin and friends are compelled to propagandize for the opposite, more conventionally Modernist strategy of wipe-out, emancipation from clutter. In 1931 Benjamin invents the persona of the ‘destructive character’ - enemy of the comfort-seeking ‘etui-person’:

The etui-person seeks comfort, and the case is its epitome. The inside of the case is a velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world.

The destructive character is a type opposed to repression in its political and psychic senses, who - causing havoc by cutting ways through - removes the traces which sentimentally bind us to the status quo.

The destructive character knows only one slogan: make space; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful, for destroying rejuvenates by clearing away traces of our own age... .

The destructive character wants to make possible the formulation of experience according to revised and appropriate tenets.

 

...

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’, ‘Efface the traces!’, Brecht insisted in one poem in his 1926 lyric cycle ‘Handbook for City-dwellers’. For those traces, the monograms, screens, knickknacks on mantlepieces secreted like sprays of dog-piss, are also tied up with possession; and so signal class society. Brecht’s poetic sentiment details the issue of autonomy at stake: Efface the traces, rather than have someone else efface them. ‘Efface the traces’ - screeched Benjamin in February 1933 in ‘Live Without Traces’, a tiny fragment which presented a horror-vision of the cluttered bourgeois parlour, and detailed the new, potential, lives to be led within shiny, translucent steel and glass. In his 1939 commentary on Brecht’s poem, Benjamin noted that the phrase ‘efface the traces’ now seems to have been a secret indication of the strategy of crypto-emigration by communist activists. By 1939 it had long been obvious to Benjamin and others that it was ‘Jewish trash’, plus other bits of social refuse, which power decreed must be swept out. 

esther leslie