Notes & Queries: Chou Literature, an Iron Age view of Prehistory

Once upon a time books had a life of their own, but in around C7th AD the first wood block printed books appeared in China. This was the beginning of the end, and while this was not yet the soulless reproduction of mechanised printing, this cloning marked a singular change in the life cycle of books.

Until then an individual book could be a being in its own right. Each was original, quite like its parent, but not a perfect copy, depending on the skill, and inclination, of the person that reproduced it.

The power of the book increased with age, and each author, editor, and owner, both real and imaginary, could add authority to the book; attribution, like blood, is everything. These were dynamic objects that were amended, annotated, and appended, But books had enemies and rivals, and most would be broken, butchered, or burnt.

It is one of the tragedies of human civilisation that so few ancient texts survived into the modern era, and it is equally unfortunate that those that did have assumed a vastly disproportionate importance in the world.

21. Thrust, trusses, and not going down the aisle

Much of our experience of height and depth, the z axis of the space we inhabit, comes from the built environment, which has long since outstripped things like trees as tall objects in our lives. By contrast, in prehistoric Britain, when buildings were made of wood, it was difficult to create structures taller than the trees they were made of, and builders got on with the practical problem of creating width. This is one of the perennial problems of architecture, and an important thread in the narrative of the built environment. In this article we shall look at how builders solved the technical problems inherent in wide timber buildings, considering medieval buildings at the end of this process, and how this can be related to the archaeology of Neolithic buildings at the beginning.