ABSTRACT
For anyone who has visited the late Neolithic henge monuments of Avebury or Durrington Walls, the passage graves of New Grange or Gavrinis, or the stone circles of Callanish or Brodgar, there can be little doubt of the feelings of awe and excitement which these spectacular monuments inspire. In this chapter, the author aims to pursue Bradley's questions concerning the monuments, and offers interpretation of a group of well-known late Neolithic sites situated on the Stenness promontory, Mainland, Orkney. It is all too easy for archaeologists to represent sites and monuments as two-dimensional plans. The sites are always drawn as plans and are subsequently analysed as plans, normally in the guise of phases and artefact distributions. In attempting to understand the monuments of the Stenness promontory it has become clear that they operate upon several planes of meaning. A recognizable cosmologically-based sense of order is manifest in the architecture of all the monuments.
