Podcast | The Older Circle

Stonehenge, where I am standing this Saturday morning, is the answer to a question I have been carrying since May 2021 - and it has taken me five years and three thousand kilometres to carry the question back to these stones. I want to say something at the outset that will only be fully earned by the end: I feel Ukraine’s presence here. Not as metaphor. As ancestry, as language, as the later courses of this very monument. By the close of this piece I intend to have shown you exactly where to look for her.

The coach parks are already filling. Jackdaws are working the wind above the lintels. Several hundred people are filing along the rope walkway, photographing the most famous stone circle on earth, and nearly every one of them - I have been listening - is doing so in a daughter language of a mother tongue first spoken on the steppe of what is now Ukraine. They do not know that. Most of them also do not know that when the great sarsens in front of us were being raised, a stone circle beside the Dnipro river had already been buried, deliberately, under a mound of earth, for something like a thousand years.

I have touched that older circle. This post is about who built it, who buried it, and why the answer runs in a single thread through three monuments: Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, Tara in County Meath, and the cromlech at Novooleksandrivka, fourteen kilometres south of Dnipro. What I have noticed - and it is a pattern I keep testing, not a verdict I am handing down - is that all three circles were raised by Old Europeans; that the people who buried the third one were, in the most literal genetic sense, their own descendants; and that the burying itself may have been the wisest thing anyone ever did for it. The wisest people I met in Ukraine thought so. We will get to them.

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Let me take you to the Dnipro first.

The Uncovered Circle

In May 2021 a five-thousand-year-old burial mound was torn apart by housing developers in Novooleksandrivka, a wealthy suburban hromada south of Dnipro, Ukraine’s third city. News of the vandalism found a global audience - it made the front page of the New York Times, and Ukraine’s chief mound guardian told that paper: “It’s genocidal. Erasing our culture like that.” Residents blocked a road in protest.

After the kurgan - as such mounds are known in Ukraine; Mane, as I have come to call them, for reasons that will surface below - was removed, a much older stone circle was, unexpectedly, discovered underneath. Five thousand years for the mound; five and a half for the circle beneath it. Hold that five-hundred-year gap; it is very important, and it is in the contemporaneous record, not just in my memory.

At that time I was an Irish peacekeeping diplomat serving with the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, posted to Dnipro, in my final year before compulsory retirement, watching for early warnings of Russia’s meddling in a war then already seven years old. Anything that made international front pages in my city was my professional business, so I crossed the Sura River to investigate. What I found rearranged my mental furniture, and eventually my life.

Sixty-four stone boulders, set in a ring. Touching them felt like caressing the Delphic Omphalos - except that this rondel was older than any material reminder we have of the oracle at Greece’s cultic centre. Through that summer and early winter, as Russian forces massed beyond every one of Ukraine’s borders, I kept going back. I photographed each of the sixty-four stones, carefully, on every visit - it was the one thing I could do, since a minor Irish diplomat has no mana with which to counteract a property developer. And the stones began to resolve themselves into human-like forms. Stelae. The deities they had represented to the people who levered them into position. I had a favourite: a broad-shouldered stone god. Sometimes, when I arrived, there were fresh flowers in the centre of the circle.

Inside the mound that had covered the stones, the bulldozing archaeologist working for the developer had found the bodies of twenty-seven people, buried there between roughly 3,500 BCE and 1932. Many were covered in red ochre. Most were crouched, knees bent. One was mummified. The 1932 interment was the manager of the Soviet collective farm that the Muscovite colonisers of Ukraine had planted on the site - a functionary laid down where the high kings of the area had lain five thousand years before him, in the very year Moscow’s engineered famine began killing millions of Ukrainians. Talk about delusions of grandeur! And, in a darker key, about continuity: the mound never stopped doing what mounds do, which is to announce whose the past is.

One afternoon I found a pair of teeth sitting on one of the stone gods, champing into a tube of what looked like fossilised wood. Research settled it: horse teeth. And some of the earliest evidence anywhere on earth for the ritual use and keeping of horses comes from Ukrainian sites near that very circle - Dereivka, on a promontory of the Dnipro, a name to hold onto, because it is about to become the hinge of this whole piece. One of the three oldest wheeled wooden carts ever found in Europe came out of a Mane in the grounds of Dnipro airport in 1949, ten kilometres away.

Hold the dates. The Dnipro cromlech had already been buried for a millennium when Stonehenge was being assembled. Newgrange was built around five hundred years after the Dnipro stone palisade. Emain Macha, Ireland’s holiest site, near which I grew up, came later still.

The Mound Guardians

Now I owe you the origin of this whole quest - the origin, really, of Finding Manuland - and it is a Zoom call.

On 23 June 2021, in the Covid manner of the time, the Mission spoke from our separate locations with four members of the All Ukrainian Civil Society Organisation “The Mound Guardians”. I had read the New York Times coverage; I had crossed the Sura and touched the stones; but it was at that meeting that the mounds acquired their people, and I acquired my teachers.

The Chief Mound Guardian - the man quoted in the Times calling the destruction a national security issue - confirmed the quote and then, unprompted, gave us his reasoning, and it deserves to be set down carefully because it is one of the finest arguments about memory I have ever heard from anyone, professor or peasant, in any country. Article 11 of Ukraine’s Constitution, he explained, places a duty on the State to protect the cultural heritage of its citizens, and their right to learn their own history. A nation is established on a bedrock of knowledge about its past. When a five-thousand-year-old tomb complex is destroyed to build houses, children are denied that bedrock. While the kurgans stand, he said, children can visit them and connect with them tactilely - his word, through the translation - with their hands; destroyed, they survive only in the papers of a small circle of elite archaeologists. A child’s right to know their nation through touchable things, he concluded, is a matter of national security. (Note the shape of that argument. We will meet it again shortly, coming from a scholar in Australia who has never heard of Novooleksandrivka.)

The Guardians told us there are more than one hundred thousand kurgans in Ukraine, and that each Guardian is assigned a specific set of mounds to watch over - they are building a movement, they said, not an organisation. One of them, responsible for eighteen kurgans in Kirovohrad Oblast, told us that in 2006 his project won legal protection for four of them; the other fourteen remain unprotected to this day, and in his view the authorities frustrate the very civil society groups who step up where the State fails. On paper, everything is safeguarded. In truth, a handful. That same week, the developers at Novooleksandrivka laid cables across the sacred site, through ground where human remains had just been lifted.

I left that call changed. In the weeks after it, working from my flat under Covid restrictions, I began pulling threads through the online holdings of Oxford’s round stone Radcliffe Camera library - and the threads led, within a month, to a people I had somehow never heard of in six years of driving past their mounds: the Yamna. And behind the Yamna, older, on the same stretch of river, to the people this post is really about. The Mound Guardians were my first teachers in Finding Manuland. Everything since has been an attempt to be worthy of that meeting.

The Memory Code

I did not come to Stonehenge empty-handed. In my bag is Lynne Kelly’s The Memory Code (2016), together with the Stonehenge chapter of her Cambridge monograph, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (2015). It is an excellent, patient, sceptical piece of work - anchored in the actual archaeology at a site where, as Kelly notes with some restraint, most new theories float entirely free of it.

Kelly’s contention is this. The British and Irish Neolithic was a world of stone circles - more than a thousand of them (her count comes from Aubrey Burl, and who am I to argue with the man who counted them?). Their builders were settled farmers who had given up travelling the landscape but had no writing. A community like that must keep its survival knowledge somewhere: the calendar, the plants and their poisons, the animals, the genealogies, the law. In every documented oral culture on earth, such knowledge lives in structured memory practice - and the simplest machine ever devised for structured memory is a sequence of distinct locations. The Greeks would later call it the Method of Loci. A circle of individually distinctive stones is a Method of Loci built in the landscape: each stone a fixed place in a fixed order, each holding its portion of the knowledge, the walking itself the act of retrieval. Kelly walked Avebury and the Cornish circles and found precisely what the method requires - every stone identifiably itself, easy to bind to a specific portion of a tradition. She notes, citing her Warlpiri advisor Nungarrayi, that bodily movement is itself a powerful mnemonic when chanting the knowledge bound to place.

Bodily movement. Touch. Children connecting with the monuments tactilely. Do you hear it? The Chief Mound Guardian of Ukraine, on a Zoom call from the Dnipro steppe, and a memory researcher drawing on Warlpiri elders from the other side of the planet, arrived independently at the same finding: the knowledge lives in the meeting of body and monument, and a nation that loses the touching loses the knowing. When two witnesses who have never met agree that precisely, a monitor writes it down.

Kelly rehabilitates even the ditch I am looking at now. Not a quarry, not a defence: a flat-bottomed, segmented performance space, cut into white chalk that threw torchlight back at the dancers, where a song performed down in a segment reached listeners on the bank as sound rising strangely out of the earth itself. Ceremonies moved around the circle through the year, segment by segment. Knowledge, performed on schedule, in sequence, for a hundred generations - some thirty million work hours of it by the time the sarsens stood.

Here is my confession, and it is why her argument went through me like a current. When I photographed each of the sixty-four stones by the Sura, visit after visit, learning them the way you learn faces, attaching to each what I knew and what I felt - I was practising, blindly, the exact discipline these monuments were built to serve. I did not have a word for it then. Reading Kelly at Stonehenge, I do, and the word will matter later, so note its skeleton as it goes past: mnemonic.

Kelly ends her Stonehenge chapter with a sentence of nine words that I will come back to at the end, because it is the hinge on which everything below turns.

Who Built Stonehenge and Tara - and Who Finished Them

For the two western circles, the ancient DNA has settled the question of builders with a completeness that would have astonished every previous generation of antiquarians.

Stonehenge, from the first circle in the Aubrey holes around 3000 BCE - which may already have held the Welsh bluestones, making this one of the earliest stone circles known - through the raising of the sarsens around 2500 BCE, was built by Britain’s Neolithic farmers: a population descended from the early farmers of Anatolia, with no steppe ancestry at all. Old Europeans, in the broad sense of pre-Indo-European Europe. That population was then almost completely replaced - around ninety per cent turnover, beginning about 2450 BCE - by Beaker people carrying ancestry from the Ukrainian-steppe world (Brace et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019, doi 10.1038/s41559-019-0871-9).

But mark what the newcomers did, because here is Ukraine’s presence at Stonehenge, in dressed stone. They did not abandon the old farmers’ circle. While monument after monument across Britain fell out of use in the early second millennium, Stonehenge was the exception: the steppe-descended inheritors kept it, rearranged the bluestones into the settings whose remains you see today, and dug the final rings of Y and Z holes centuries after the turnover. The founders of Stonehenge were Old Europeans; its finishers, its keepers, its last congregation, were the descendants of ancient Ukrainians. When I say I feel Ukraine’s presence here, I am not being mystical. The later courses of this monument were set by hands that carried the Dnipro in their blood - and even Ukrainians, by and large, do not yet know that their ancestors’ children completed Stonehenge. Telling them is part of my mission.

Tara tells the same layered story. The Mound of the Hostages, the founding monument on the hill of the kings, is a passage tomb of around 3200 BCE, raised by the same Irish Neolithic farmer population whose dynasty was uncovered in the great chamber at Newgrange (Cassidy et al., Nature, 2020, doi 10.1038/s41586-020-2378-6). Tara’s fame as a royal seat is later, and belongs to the steppe-descended Irish. Founded by one people; crowned by another.

So: two of my three circles were securely raised by Old Europeans and inherited by ancient Ukrainians’ descendants. The third circle is the one I actually touched. For three years, in my writing, I attributed it to “one of the major ingredient cultures in the Yamna” and left it there. That was a placeholder, and placeholders are a form of forgetting. Time to name the builders.

Serednii Stih

The culture is called Sredny Stog in the Russian-era literature and Serednii Stih in Ukrainian. I use the Ukrainian, for the same reason I write Dnipro and not Dnepr. The island that gave the culture its name sits in the river at Zaporizhzhia - the same Zaporizhzhia in the news for its shelled nuclear plant - a couple of hours downstream of the cromlech. A small settlement explored there before the Second World War by A. V. Dobrovolsky christened the whole horizon.

The foundational text is Dmytro Telegin’s Dereivka monograph (Dereivka: A Settlement and Cemetery of Copper Age Horse Keepers on the Middle Dnieper, BAR International Series 287, 1986), and I confess a purely tribal delight in its production history: it was edited into English at Queen’s University Belfast by J. P. Mallory - yes, that Mallory, who would go on to write In Search of the Indo-Europeans - with the radiocarbon dates calibrated on an Ulster Museum computer and the final copy typed by A. Sheridan. The deep past of the Dnipro, prepared for the world by hands in the north of Ireland. (My first career was in post-conflict Belfast politics; the Monde does enjoy its little arrangements.)

Telegin’s pages give the builders their shape. Serednii Stih was, in his phrase, an “expressly horsebreeding culture”, occupying the Lower and Middle Dnipro and the southern Left Bank up to the Siverskyi Donets basin, with sites out into the Right-Bank steppe and the Lower Don - settlements, cemeteries and single burials. Its most important and prolific monument is Dereivka itself: the settlement and cemetery whose horse remains made it, for a generation of scholars, the world’s first candidate site for the domesticated horse. My horse teeth, resting on the shoulder of a stone god by the Sura, suddenly have a culture to belong to! David Anthony extends the culture’s reach: at Konstantinovka on the lower Don, a late Serednii Stih settlement, around ninety per cent of the ceramics are local Dnipro-Donets cord-impressed wares and the remaining tenth are early Maikop imports from the Caucasus (The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 2007) - a Dnipro community trading, at the end of its run, with the mountain world that will matter shortly.

And then the crown, from a passage I circled very early in my research into what the Dnipro cromlech was - it comes from the Indo-Europeanist literature answering Colin Renfrew’s Archaeology and Language, which had tried to talk the reconstructed Indo-European king down into a mere village headman. The later Serednii Stih graves with prestige goods, the passage records, are often marked by a surrounding circle of stones - “cromlechs” in the regional archaeological literature - and are best read as the graves of elite persons in a ranked society, their occupants “entirely appropriate candidates for the title *rēg”.

Read that again, standing where I am standing. The Dnipro cromlech is not an orphan or an anomaly. It is a type. A ring of stones around a high-status burial is what the later Serednii Stih did for its greatest dead. The circle at Novooleksandrivka is a Serednii Stih king’s grave-ring - and the “local monarch” of the 2021 news coverage was, in the literature’s own reconstructed vocabulary, a candidate for *rēg.

The builders are named. Now for the fight about what to call their world.

The Gimbutas Problem

I said at the top that all three circles were raised by Old Europeans, and for the Dnipro circle that claim walks straight into the formidable person of Marija Gimbutas, who coined the term and owns its definition.

Her 1979 paper, “The three waves of the Kurgan people into Old Europe, 4500-2500 B.C.” (Archives suisses d’anthropologie générale, 43/2), sets it out. Old Europe is pre-Indo-European Europe of the Neolithic through Copper Age, roughly 6500-3500 BCE: egalitarian, very probably matrilinear, virtually weaponless until its final stage, given to art. Against it come the Kurgan people, in waves around 4400-4200, 3400-3200 and 3000-2800 BCE, and their diagnostic signature is their graves - round stone cairns in the first wave, and in the later waves round earthen tumuli “surrounded by stone walls or rings”.

And on the very same pages, Gimbutas files the early Kurgan culture of the lower Dnipro basin - her Kurgan I and II - under its regional name: Srednij Stog II. Seredni Stig II.

So there is no smuggling the label past her. By Gimbutas’s own equations, the culture I have just credited with building my circle is the first wave against Old Europe, and a ring of stones around a burial is the invader’s calling card, not the victim’s art. If I want to say Old Europeans raised the Dnipro cromlech, I cannot do it by assertion. I have to argue it through her - openly, and on the evidence.

Rassamakin’s Steppe

Three things let me make that argument, and the first two come out of Telegin’s own monograph.

First, phases. Early Serednii Stih is not late Serednii Stih. Telegin divides the culture into periods - the Voloshske horizon early, the Dereivka horizon later - and the cromlech-crowned prestige graves, the *rēg graves, belong explicitly to the later phase, the one already leaning toward the Yamna synthesis. A culture that runs the better part of a millennium is allowed a beginning that differs from its end. Judging the whole of Serednii Stih by its final, ranked, kurgan-adjacent phase is like judging the whole of Rome by the third century.

Second, the ceramics run both ways. Cord ornament - the decoration that would one day name the Corded Ware horizon across half of Europe - appears at Dereivka and its related settlements earlier than anywhere else on the continent, and spreads outward, first of all to Trypillia and Lower Mikhailovka sites. But the traffic is not one-way: channelling, and pinched-fingernail decoration, flow into Dereivka’s kitchens from the Gumelnița-Trypillia world - Old Europe proper - where those manners were long established. These are Telegin’s own observations. They describe neighbours exchanging, intermarrying tastes across a river system - not a wave breaking on a shore.

Third, and decisively for me: the post-Soviet Ukrainian re-reading of the whole steppe Eneolithic. Yuri Rassamakin (in Levine, Rassamakin, Kislenko and Tatarintseva, Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, McDonald Institute, 1999) dismantled “Sredni Stog” as a single culture altogether and re-oriented the Dnipro Eneolithic westwards - toward the Carpatho-Balkan metallurgical province, toward the Trypillian exchange network, toward Old Europe’s copper and prestige system - against the Gimbutas-Anthony reading of it as proto-Kurgan pressure building in the east. Nadiia Kotova’s work runs in the same direction. On the Rassamakin reading, the horse-keepers of the Dnipro rapids were not the storm gathering against Old Europe’s house. They were the household’s easternmost porch: cousins on the steppe, keeping horses where the farmers kept cattle, taking Balkan copper and Trypillian table-manners upriver, giving cord and horses back.

So here is the open redefinition, in my own words and on my own responsibility. What Gimbutas filed as the first Kurgans, Rassamakin refiled as Old Europe’s steppe partners - and I side with Rassamakin. I contend that the people who levered those sixty-four stone gods into place by the Sura belonged to Old Europe’s world: its horse-keeping eastern cousins, standing in the doorway between the farmers’ Europe and the steppe. Gimbutas, I think, read their end back onto their beginning - because of what their descendants became, she made their ancestors the invaders. That is a pattern I keep testing rather than a verdict; where the ancient DNA leads, I follow. And the ancient DNA, as it happens, has just led somewhere remarkable.

The Mound That Kept the Circle

What their descendants became is the Yamna - the people I call ancient Ukrainians, whose language, what linguists call Proto-Indo-European, is the source of the words in almost every sentence you and I speak.

In February 2025, ninety-four authors published the largest ancient-DNA study yet attempted on the question (Lazaridis, Patterson, Anthony and colleagues, “The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans”, Nature 639, 2025, doi 10.1038/s41586-024-08531-5). From 428 Eneolithic individuals they resolved the Yamna’s formation into two great streams: one running up along a Caucasus-Lower Volga cline, saturated with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry, and one drawn from the Dnipro side - the Serednii Stih world. The expansion that would reach from Hungary to Kazakhstan, and whose daughters would reach from Ireland to India, began, the paper concludes, with a small community north of the Black Sea. Roughly half of the inheritance from each stream is a fair lay rendering - the exact fraction moves with the model chosen, which is why I anchor the claim to the paper and not to a slogan.

Sit with what that means at Novooleksandrivka. Around five hundred years after the Serednii Stih raised their king’s grave-ring, the Yamna heaped tonnes of earth over it and buried their own dead on top, in the crouched, ochre-strewn manner that marks their mounds from the Boyne to the Swat Valley. Annihilated it, I have written before, and the word keeps its claim: a monument you cannot see is a monument on its way to being forgotten. But the genetics forces a second word into the sentence. The people who buried the circle were, in the most literal sense, burying their own grandmothers’ world - the Dnipro half of their inheritance. A people who mound over their ancestors’ ring may be erasing it. They may equally be enthroning themselves upon it: sealing the old *rēg into the foundation and announcing, in tonnes of earth, that the title has passed.

And now I have to give you a third word, and it was the Mound Guardians who taught it to me, though I did not understand the lesson at the time.

On 22 October 2021, four months after that first Zoom, the Mission spoke again with one of the Guardians for an update. The picture he laid out was bleak in the particular way that paperwork is bleak: the developer’s permits, in the Guardians’ view, had never been properly issued; after the international press coverage, developer, archaeologist, hromada and the State heritage office on Yavornytskyi in central Dnipro all appeared to be regularising documents after the fact; the State archaeologist’s report on the circle was due in the spring of 2022. Meanwhile the circle itself - which had spent five thousand years in the stable dark under thousands of tonnes of soil - was being destroyed by the open air: the summer’s extremes of heat, then the rains, with the snows coming. The mud holding the stelae was cracking. The gods were beginning to crumble.

And so the Mound Guardians reached a conclusion that stopped my pen when I wrote it into the record, and stops it again now. The entire site, they told us, should be reburied - as the only way to protect the cultural rights of the people of Ukraine.

Rebury it. Put the mound back. The people who love the circle most, who chained their movement to its protection, who argue for it from the Constitution of Ukraine, independently rediscovered - in one season of watching the stones crumble - the exact act the Yamna performed five thousand years ago. The mound was not only annihilation. It was not only claiming. It was a preservation technology. The circle exists at all, for us to fight over, because someone buried it; every year it has spent uncovered has cost it more than its first five millennia combined. Erasure, enthronement, safekeeping: at Novooleksandrivka all three readings are true at once, and the stratigraphy holds them the way the mound held the circle.

The State archaeologist’s report was due in the spring of 2022. In the spring of 2022 the missiles were falling on Dnipro. The deadline, like so much else, was swallowed by the full-scale invasion - and the question of the circle’s future waits, with so many other Ukrainian questions, for the peace.

Rí, Raja, Rex

Now the gift hidden in that circled passage, the one I very nearly left on the table.

*Rēg is the reconstructed ancient Ukrainian word behind Latin rex, Sanskrit rājan, Gaulish rix - and Old Irish rí. The kings of Tara were rí Temro, kings of Tara, and at the head of Tara’s line our tradition sets Érimón, first high king of all Ireland, beside Manannán, Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity. Which means the man sealed under the Dnipro circle and the kings remembered on the hill in Meath wear, across five thousand years and four thousand kilometres, the same title. The circle-grave by the Sura and the hill of kings above the Boyne valley are joined by one reconstructed word - and it survived the whole journey, from the steppe porch of Old Europe to the wet green edge of it, carried in the mouths of the very people who buried the first circle.

Tara keeps the older layer too, in its own way. Walter Evans-Wentz, tramping Ireland for The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), was still collecting testimony around Tara and the Boyne of the good people living in the mounds - the síd, whose women, the ban shees, wail yet in our folklore. The defeated older people of Ireland, our tales say, were bequeathed the earth-mounds to live in. Strip the enchantment to its foundational beam and it is a memory of exactly the sequence the ancient DNA now confirms: an older people, and a newer people who took the surface and left the ancestors the interior of the monuments. Ireland kept as folklore what the Dnipro kept as stratigraphy.

And say the names slowly, because the sound is about to become the subject. Manannán. Emain Macha. Mane...

M-N-

The ancient Ukrainians’ sound for the moon is spelt by modern linguists *méh1nōt, and it grew out of their verb *meh1-, to measure (the table of its reflexes across eleven daughter branches is in Mallory and Adams - the same Mallory! - The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European, Oxford University Press, 2006). The moon was the measuring instrument; the month is what it measures; the mind is the measurer. And once you get your eye in, the family is everywhere: moon, Monday, measure, meaning, memory, human, money, mana, monument, mnemonic...

Stop on the last two. Lynne Kelly demonstrates that the stone circles of the Neolithic were memory technology - and the English words for what she says they did, memory, mnemonic, monument, all carry the M-N- skeleton of the moon-measure family, forged by the people whose Mane blanket the land between Ireland and India. The circles were machines for measuring the year and keeping the mind of a community. The words we use to say so still carry the maker’s mark.

This might just be a coincidence. So I tested it. Across NorthEuraLex, a lexical database of 43,251 word-forms covering 1,016 meanings, the words for this family of meanings carry the two consonants m and n keeping company in the word, either order, at 20.8 per cent, against 3.5 per cent elsewhere in the lexicon - an odds ratio of eight, at p = 5.60 × 10⁻⁶⁶, the strongest of the 182 sound-frames I tested. In lay terms: replay a draw at those odds once a second since the Big Bang, and you would still be waiting for it to come up. A pattern, then - not a proof of design, and I keep testing my hypotheses rather than resting on them. But it is some pattern.

Meaning Maintenance

Kelly’s nine words, the ones I promised to come back to, close her Stonehenge chapter: “In the end, the monuments simply lost their meaning.”

That sentence is the true mechanism of cultural death, and notice that it is not a sentence about bulldozers. The forgetting comes first; the bulldozer merely arrives afterwards to collect. The Novooleksandrivka kurgan could be torn apart in 2021 because, for almost everyone, it had already become background - a lump in a suburb. Stonehenge itself was, for centuries, a quarry and a curiosity. Tara had a motorway driven through its valley within living memory, by my own countrymen. The monuments do not fall when the stones fall. They fall when the last person who can say what a stone holds stops walking the circle.

Which is why the Chief Mound Guardian’s argument is, I contend, the most advanced heritage thinking in Europe, and it comes not from a ministry but from a volunteer on the steppe: memory as a constitutional duty; touch as the medium of national knowledge; a guardian assigned to every mound. Article 11, applied with hands. And the movement he described - a movement, pointedly, not an organisation - is growing. The Guardians’ network now shares new publications tracing the deep continuities of the Dnipro region for a Ukrainian public that was never taught them; word reached me this very week, at Stonehenge, of the newest. Even Ukrainians, by and large, do not yet know that their ancestors incubated the languages of half of humanity, or that the children of the Dnipro’s people set the last stones of the monument behind me. The re-archetyping of Ukraine - from borderland to wellspring - has begun, and it has begun where it should: at home, at the mounds, with the children’s hands on the stones.

Meaning-stripping, remember, is not only entropy. It can be policy. Russia’s centuries-long archetyping of Ukraine as not a real country - no roots, no culture, “Little Russians” - is the deliberate, industrial version of Kelly’s sentence: strip a people’s monuments and language of meaning, and the erasure that follows can be presented to the world as nobody’s loss. I watched the retail end of that policy for eight years in eastern Ukraine. The answer to it is not only air defence. It is memory work, done with the circle’s own tools - sequence, place, touch, repetition, performance.

Sometimes, when I visited the cromlech by the Sura, there were fresh flowers in the centre of the circle. Someone was still walking it. That is the whole of my politics, really, laid on a stone.

If you have the chance to stand at any of the three - here at Stonehenge, at Tara among the síd, or one day, when peace allows, at the older circle of Novooleksandrivka, reburied and safe under its restored Mane, as its Guardians wish - you must. Walk the ring. Learn one stone. Give it something to keep, and tell somebody what it holds, because a monument is only the durable half of a conversation, and the perishable half is us.

If Mana is what remains of us in others when we leave them, then the Mane are Mana made earth, and the circles are Mana made stone. Mana’s permanent. Monuments only lose their meaning when the meaning stops being spoken. So speak it.

Slava Ukraini.

Stephen Douglas is a writer who publishes on Disinfolklore.eu, Disinfolklore.net, PowerofMana.net, and as Decoding Trolls on Substack and X.