Comments on Christopher Tilley: The Materiality of
Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology.
Oxford: Berg, 2004.

T

IM

I

NGOLD

LANDSCAPE LIVES, BUT
ARCHAEOLOGY TURNS TO STONE

Archaeology is an outdoor science. In the
field its practitioners face the same elements
that, through the ages, have battered, eroded
and smothered the monuments to past
activity they seek to recover. Yet almost
invariably, when it comes to the analysis and
interpretation of their results, they retreat
indoors to the safety and seclusion of the
laboratory, library or study. The deskbound
body, as it thinks and writes, is no longer
bathed in the light of the open air, infused by
its scents, blown by its currents or immersed
in its pulses of sound. The multisensory
experience of being out in the open is
something that fieldworkers may strive, with
difficulty, to write about, but it is not
something they write in. In effect, the move
indoors converts such experience into an
object of discourse that is endlessly recycled
as it is passed, in writing, from one analyst to
another. Buried in their texts, analysts
compete to craft the most subtle, nuanced
or elaborate literary expressions of feelings
long since forgotten in the flesh, or that they
can conjure up only in faraway recesses of
the imagination. Beguiled by the thought
that such bookish pursuits amount to
exercises in ‘theory’, they have produced a
literature that can only reconstruct the
immediacy of sensory experience in the
image of its representations, in a kind of
double inversion that – far from returning us

to the contexts of our primary perceptual
engagement with the world – cuts us adrift
from it entirely.

In his new book, The Materiality of Stone:

Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology
(2004), Christopher Tilley writes against this
tendency. Indeed the book could be read as a
manifesto for a genuinely outdoor archae-
ology. Tilley complains, with good reason,
that most writing on landscapes of prehistory
is not only set down on paper but also
derived from paper (p.27). Real landscapes
however, unlike paper ones, cannot be read
like texts or viewed like pictures. To get to
know them, they have to be inhabited. Only
by spending time in them, and becoming
accustomed to the sights, sounds, odours and
feelings they afford, under varying condi-
tions of illumination and weather, can they
properly ‘sink in’. And to appreciate their
features you have to explore them on foot (or
if need be, on all fours), getting a sense of
how they look and feel from different
angles

and

in

different

directions.

As

your thoughts begin to take shape you
need to write them down, since the slow
and deliberate concentration entailed in
the act of writing sharpens your own
perception. At least half of this book, Tilley
tells us, was written not at a desk but in situ.
That, in itself, is an impressive statistic, and
attests to a serious attempt by the author and
his assistant, Wayne Bennett, to practise
what they preach. Among writers of a
phenomenological bent, notorious for their

Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK. E-mail: [e-mail]

DISCUSSION

Norwegian Archaeological Review, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2005

DOI: 10.1080/00293650500359078 # 2005 Taylor & Francis

abstruse and recondite prose, the attempt
may be almost unique.

It is, however, an attempt shot through

with paradox and contradiction. Apart from
a general theoretical introduction and a short
concluding chapter, the book comprises
three substantial case studies, each focusing
on ancient monuments of massive stone or
rock. The first study is of the neolithic
menhirs or standing stones of Brittany; the
second is the temple architecture of neolithic
Malta, and the third is of Bronze Age
carvings in southern Sweden. These make
for a nice set of comparisons and contrasts:
for example between landmarks and enclo-
sures, and between rocks that have been put
in place and bedrock that has been inscribed.
In each case, Tilley takes us on his peram-
bulations around and within the various
sites, offering meticulous description and
commentary along the way. This is where
the first paradox arises. Introducing his
project, Tilley argues that to grasp the
experience of a place or monument, we need
to avoid a ‘deadened and deadening litera-
lism’ (p.28), and to use a language that is
richly evocative and suffused with poetic
metaphor. Fortunately, perhaps, Tilley does
not write like that at all. His descriptions are
resolutely matter-of-fact; his writing lucid
and literal rather than ambiguous and
metaphorical. The language is that of an
excellent guide-book, which does not even
pretend to convey the richness of immediate
experience but provides readers with precise
directions so that, on site and book in hand,
they may relive the experience for them-
selves.

Interspersed with descriptive sections are

more speculative passages, pondering what
the monuments may have meant for people in
the prehistoric past. Here is the second
paradox. The opening line of the book
equates, under the rubric of epoche´, the
suspension of belief with the bracketing of
experience. But these are not the same. Indeed
Tilley’s expressed aim is to reveal the world of
experience, not to bracket it, precisely by

holding off on whatever beliefs people might
have entertained about it. In practice, how-
ever, he does exactly the opposite. When not
expounding on the actuality of the world,
Tilley is eagerly speculating on what people
might have believed it all meant! To take just
one example, the solution basins created by
erosion on a standing-stone ‘were perhaps
regarded as carvings created by the ancestors’
(p.51). Perhaps they were; perhaps they were
not. Tilley has a penchant for wheeling in the
ancestors, whenever needed, to lend an air of
ethnographic authenticity to his conjectures.
But if his concern is really with experience,
why do these conjectures deal so exclusively
with what people might have believed?

Part of the problem seems to be that in

pursuit of his phenomenological project,
Tilley remains encumbered by the philoso-
phical baggage of a tradition of material
culture studies that treats the physical world
as a pool of metaphorical resources for the
expression of social or cosmological princi-
ples. In this tradition, material objects stand
in for cultural concepts. There are many
examples of such reasoning in this book.
Maltese temples, for example, are interpreted
as ‘embodiments of ideas, material meta-
phors through which the island world and
that beyond became known’ (p.144). Again,
whereas the menhirs of Finiste`re, with their
sinuous profiles, suggest fertility and growth,
those of Bas-Le´on, shaped like axe-blades
struck into the ground, suggest human
mastery over the land. Thus, ‘a metaphor
of organic growth of stones from the soil was
replaced by a metaphor of wilful transforma-
tion and dominance over ‘‘nature’’ and
‘‘natural’’ forces’ (p.86). And the schematic
depictions of boats in the inscribed rocks of
southern

Sweden

signified

‘both

social

groups and the structuring principles in
terms of which these groups were organised
in relation to each other’ (p.195).

In these examples, the sheer materiality of

stone stands to its ideological significance as
nature to culture. These are, as Tilley himself
suggests, ‘two sides of a coin’. On one side

Comments on: The Materiality of Stone

123

are the physical features of the landscape
(whether or not shaped by human hands), on
the other the symbolic meanings encoded
into them. Together they constitute a ‘com-
plex system of signification’ (p.220). Yet
following his phenomenological bent, Tilley
is keen to refute any opposition between the
material and the ideal. His approach, he
declares, transcends any distinction between
‘nature’ and ‘culture’. But how can the
distinction be transcended if they are to
remain as two sides of a coin? The sides may
indeed be inseparable, but they are opposite
nonetheless. This is the third paradox, and it
is written into the very title of the book. It is
one thing to consider stone as material; quite
another to consider the materiality of stone.
Tilley devotes a great deal of attention to the
former, and in this he makes a major
contribution, above all in his recognition
that the character of stone – its ‘stoniness’ if
you will – is not some fixed essence but
endlessly variable in relation, for example, to
light or shade, wetness or dryness, and the
position, posture or movement of the obser-
ver. Thus the stoniness of stone does not
reside in its ‘nature’ – that is, in its
materiality – but rather in the manifold ways
in which it is engaged in the currents of the
lifeworld. It has to do with the properties
and qualities of materials, not with the
materiality of objects.

Exactly the same problem arises when we

turn from stones to the people, both pre-
historic and contemporary, who are sup-
posed to engage with them. Within the space
of a single page, Tilley both espouses a
radical materialism, asserting that it is
precisely because people are physical objects
that they are able to perceive the world, and
then denies any such thing, insisting that the
body-person is not ‘an object among other
objects in the world’ but rather ‘a particular
way of inhabiting the world, of being
present in it, sensing it’ (pp.2–3). But if
people are not objects among objects, then
nor, strictly speaking, are stones. A stone in
the landscape is not so much an object as a

presence, taking the form of a block,
boulder, protuberance or outcrop organi-
cally embedded in the solid earth below and
immersed in currents of water or air above.
These enveloping media afford perception,
and it is thanks to their fluctuations and
transformations that components of the
landscape present themselves in the ways
they do. Thus, as Tilley notes (p.11), the
qualities of a stone will vary depending,
among other things, on the light and the
direction from which it shines. And on a
misty day the entire landscape in which it sits
may look quite different, compared with a
clear day. From this example, however, he
draws a strange conclusion, namely that the
difference is due to the point of view of the
person who perceives it.

This is the fourth paradox in Tilley’s

account. On the one hand he accepts that
landscapes of perception, for all their appar-
ent solidity, are never the same from one
moment to the next. For example the
Maltese temples, constructed of massive
stone blocks, are like pivots around which
revolves an oceanic cosmos described by the
movements of wind and waves, the arrivals
and departures of migratory birds, the
celestial cycles of the sun and moon, and
the growth cycles of plants (p.135). Yet on
the other hand, in a world where ‘persons
make things and things make persons’
(p.217), no space remains for such generative
movements. To suppose that persons and
things, and their mutually constitutive inter-
actions, are all there is, is a bit like saying
that a river is constituted by interactions
between eddies and banks, forgetting that
there would be neither eddies nor banks were
it not for the flow of the river itself. Likewise,
there would be neither persons nor land-
scapes were it not for those atmospheric
fluxes that normally go by the name of
weather. It is astonishing that Tilley’s out-
door archaeology, with its exclusive focus on
persons and things, cannot begin to compre-
hend the weather. That is why, for example,
he ends up attributing the difference between

124

Tim Ingold & Chris Tilley

mistiness and clarity to the constitutive
intervention of persons in the landscape,
rather than to fluctuations in the medium
that enshrouds both.

It is also why he rushes to endow stones,

along with trees, places and the entire land-
scape with ‘agency’ (pp.18, 31, 217, 222). In
this topsy-turvy world, rivers flow because of
the interacting agency of eddies and banks.
Tilley advocates a return to an ontology of
animism, and I sympathise. But animism is
not about imputing life and agency to things.
It is rather a matter of restoring those things
to the circulatory currents of life and activity
within which they are generated and take on
the forms they do, each in relation to the
other. The much vaunted ‘problem of
agency’ is of our own creation, and has its
source in an inverted view of reality that
represents the dynamic potential of the
lifeworld to bring forth forms of manifold
kinds as an interior property that is carved
up and distributed among the forms them-
selves, whence it is supposed to set the world
in motion. Thus Tilley asks us to imagine a
painter and a tree. But in his account the
visuo-manual movement of the painter as he
paints the tree is rendered as an effect of the
tree’s agency as it moves the painter (p.18).
This is the fifth paradox of the account, and
it stems from the impossible attempt to
marry an animistic ontology, according to
which all things are suspended in currents
of life and activity, with a philosophy of
substance that seeks the wellsprings of life
and activity in a world that already consists
of things-in-themselves.

This same paradox reappears in Tilley’s

frequent allusions to the relations between
persons and place. On the one hand, he
asserts (p.25) that all human experience is
fundamentally

place-bound.

Places

are

‘kinds of things’ to which living bodies
belong from the very moment of their
coming into the world. They have an agency
of their own (p.31), and shape the identities
of their inhabitants just as the latter shape
them.

Yet

on

the

other

hand,

Tilley

recognises that life entails movement, and is
lived not in places but around them, and
along the paths that lead to and from places
elsewhere. Thus, far from human experience
being bound in places, places are bound in
the flows of human movement (p.26). It is
along paths, not in places, that humans
experience the world. Or in short, experience
is place-making but not place-bound. Places
are like vortices, anchorages or resting points
in currents of movement. In his resolute
attempt to have it both ways, Tilley succeeds
in confusing the ‘stickiness’ of place with the
very fluidity of the movement within which it
is generated. For having asserted that places
are things with which people interact, he
promptly declares that place should not be
understood ‘as a fixed and definite thing but
rather as something fluid and flowing’
(p.220). But if places are flows of movement,
then how can people move from place to
place?

Even more peculiar is Tilley’s admission,

in a postscript to the introductory chapter,
that the embodied experience of place is part
of a bedrock of universal humanity that is
given prior to the particularities of culture.
Human bodies, he tells us, ‘carry specific
knowledges and traditions, meanings and
symbols (culture) into places and articulate
them there’ (p.31). So where does this culture
come from? Does Tilley really believe that
there exists some ethereal domain of sym-
bolic meaning, floating above the plane of
material existence, from which culture is
siphoned into the heads of people who then
import it with them into the contexts of their
engagement in the lifeworld? True, there are
many besides Tilley who have argued thus,
but it is a view that flies in the face of his own
argument that knowledge, identity and
meaning have their generative source in the
lived experience of body-persons in a land-
scape.

Out of this welter of paradox, what

conclusions can we reach? Can anything be
said with any certainty? Tilley clearly thinks
so, since many of his speculations concerning

Comments on: The Materiality of Stone

125

the experience and meanings of massive
stone for prehistoric people are prefaced
with words like ‘certainly’, ‘obviously’ and
‘undoubtedly’. Of other things he is appar-
ently less sure, as indicated by his frequent
use of phrases like ‘in all probability’, ‘it is as
if’, ‘could have been’ or simply ‘perhaps’.
Some statements are simply left as open
questions. But in reality these variations
along the continuum from doubt to certainty
are invoked merely for rhetorical effect.
There is no reason why any of his pro-
nouncements should be considered more or
less reliable than any other. What is reliably
true, in Tilley’s account, is trivially true:
because the terms in which it is expressed are
so vague and all-encompassing that they
could be said of almost anything sufficiently
impressive. Thus when Tilley concludes that
Maltese temples ‘are fundamentally to do
with the manipulation and transformation of
human experience’ (p.138), or that in their
depictions of boats, Bronze Age people in
southern Sweden were ‘making fundamental
statements about themselves to themselves
and about the principles of social and
political and cosmological order’ (p.201),
we learn at once both everything and nothing
about them.

It does not matter to Tilley that none of

his conclusions can be deduced from the
‘facts’. For he is not a detective but a
conjurer. Indeed he is a master of the art.
No one can surpass his ability to pull entire
social orders or cosmologies from a footprint
or a scratch in the rock. Every exercise in
hyper-interpretation is like balancing an
elephant on a pinhead; it supports so much
on so little. We should not however begrudge
him this. Surely some informed ideas about
the meanings of prehistoric stone monu-
ments are better than none, and if we don’t
like the stories Tilley tells, it is up to us to do
better. He has placed the ball firmly in his
readers’ court. As for the appearance of the
book itself, I have only one complaint.
Though it includes plenty of photographs,
there are only a few drawings of rather poor
quality. This is strange, in view of Tilley’s
own argument (p.223) that photography
affords no more than the passive apprecia-
tion of a site. Only in situ writing, he argues,
takes us in, allowing us to perceive actively,
and to make connections. But drawing does
this too, albeit in different ways, and in many
parts of this book I felt it could have done
the job better than words. I wonder why
Tilley only writes his conclusions, and does
not draw them.

Reply to Comment

C

HRIS

T

ILLEY

BODY THOUGHTS

I

appreciate

very

much

Tim

Ingold’s

thoughtful and polemical discussion of my
recent book. This is so much more interest-
ing than the normal type of review, attempt-
ing some form of dry summary. Ingold

doesn’t give much of the plot away here at
all so if the reader is really interested in
finding out what the book has to say they’ll
have to read it themselves!

Ingold’s central claim is that the book is

apparently ‘shot through with paradox and

Chris Tilley, Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK. E-mail: [e-mail]

126

Tim Ingold & Chris Tilley

contradiction’. Enough to chuck it into the
academic dustbin, then, but he apparently
likes it anyway. There is a fair amount of
paradox and contradiction, of course, in
Ingold’s own discussion, from my point of
view. Do we simply ‘identify’ these contra-
dictions in an objective and ‘rational’ man-
ner? Are they to be taken in some way as
absolutes, somehow independent of our own
particular point of view, or do we create
them as part of a particular intellectual
debating strategy of reading and analysis?
Most scholars have their own particular axe
to grind and Ingold is no exception, as he
makes clear in numerous places.

Paradox one: I advocate a metaphorical

style of writing but in fact do the reverse. The
text is ‘lucid’ and ‘literal’ instead, which for
Ingold is probably preferable. All writing is
metaphorical in the sense that metaphor is
part and parcel of language. We can’t express
ourselves adequately in literal terms. To
describe my text as ‘lucid’ is to deploy a
metaphor! So Ingold thinks that there is a
clear demarcation line between literal and
metaphorical language when none really
exist. In fact the ‘problem’ appears to be
not the presence or absence of metaphors in
the book, but I clearly haven’t been ‘poetic’
enough for him, and if I had, you can be sure
that I’d be criticised for that. I described
Breton menhirs as giant axes and sprouting
rhizomes, the rocks at Simrishamn as look-
ing like old ice, as containing petrified waves,
the Maltese islands as ‘islands of honey,
floating on the sea’: ‘lucid and literal’ or
‘metaphorical descriptions’? Cannot meta-
phorical descriptions be more ‘lucid’ than
‘literal’ ones anyway? In the book I generally
try to describe landscape, and evoke the
material qualities of stone, in what might be
described as a ‘realist’ style – which does not
mean the absence of metaphor – and where I
felt it appropriate more striking ‘poetic’
metaphors were employed as part and parcel
of the interpretative strategy, for that to me
is why metaphors and metaphorical language
are so important in the social sciences (see

the argument in Tilley 1999). Ingold’s para-
dox is not one I share. To encounter some
excellent examples of deadening archaeo-
logical ‘literalism’ I suggest he reads a few
excavation reports.

I could describe the approach to writing

adopted as being in some ways akin to a
documentary film with slow panning shots
when I discuss the stones themselves, then
cutting and moving on to something much
more theatrical when the imagined people
come in and enter the experiential stage, then
cutting and moving back to the rocks once
more, and so on.

Paradox two: I advocate the bracketing of

experience while eagerly ‘speculating about’
what people might have believed. Apparently
I should have not have attempted to provide
such an interpretation. To clarify: the brack-
eting of experience is a phenomenological
strategy to remove the theoretical presuppo-
sitions or prejudices that some things are
more important than others to study. The
entire reason for doing this is to permit a
different interpretation of experience. No
paradox there. Then Ingold sets up a strange
distinction between ‘experience’ and ‘belief’:
‘If his concern is really with experience, why
do these conjectures deal so exclusively with
what people might have believed?’ Simply
because experience does not determine belief
or action in any simple manner, it offers
differing possibilities and alternatives, or
‘affordances’.

Paradox three: I deny the ‘nature/culture’

distinction while in fact maintaining it. I
declare that nature and culture are like two
sides of the same coin, i.e. that they are
inseparable. However, for Ingold the impor-
tant point here is that because they are
on different sides of the coin, they still
remain opposite. Well, I can appreciate
the

metaphorical

point

he

is

making!

However, the coin can’t be cut in half
without destroying it. In other words ‘nature’
is in ‘culture’ and vice versa. They form part
of each other, constitute each other. Paradox
resolved?

Comments on: The Materiality of Stone

127

Paradox four: I claim landscapes and

stones and people are always changing,
infinitely variable yet also apparently main-
taining that they stay the same. The argu-
ments Ingold advances to establish the
‘reality’ of this paradox are somewhat
involuted and lack the usual standard of
decisive ‘lucidity’ we are accustomed to find
in his writing! I describe stone as infinitely
variable and not having a fixed essence. This
leads Ingold to argue strangely that ‘the
stoniness of stone does not reside in its
‘nature’ – that is, in its materiality – but
rather in the manifold ways in which it is
engaged in the currents of the lifeworld’. It
appears then, for Ingold, that for stone to
have the property of materiality it has to
have a fixed essence somehow independent
of the lifeworld. It can then be labelled
natural. Since I do not accept stone has a
fixed essence it cannot be ‘nature’ as opposed
to ‘culture’ – the ‘nature’ of stone is in its
‘culture’. This is an important property of its
very materiality as a medium relating to
social practice, and why it can be experienced
and understood in many different ways.

Ingold points out that I claim both that

people are physical objects and yet at the
same time they are not. I do not think this
amounts to a contradiction at all – not in
Ingold’s presumably perjurative use of that
term. It is simply to assert that people are
both physical objects in the same sense as
stones are objects but they are also cultural
subjects: an existential fact. I apparently
have difficulty in comprehending the weather
‘attributing the difference between mistiness
and clarity to the constitutive intervention of
persons in the landscape’. This is a striking
obfuscation of my position, which is that
weather alters landscapes so people perceive
these landscapes differently. There is, there-
fore, no stable landscape to perceive. Ingold
regards weather as ‘fluctuations in the
medium that enshrouds both persons and
things’. I agree entirely and I think indeed
that an entire archaeology and anthropology
of the materiality of weather could be

developed. My regret is that I did not pay
sufficient attention to the phenomenal effects
of weather in the book.

Ingold doesn’t apparently like the ‘philo-

sophical baggage of a tradition of material
culture studies that treats the physical world
as a pool of metaphorical resources for the
expression of social or cosmological princi-
ples’. Well, that’s his problem and because he
denies this fundamental link he finds para-
doxes that don’t exist. He doesn’t like the
claim that persons make things and things
make persons. I think my definition of a
‘thing’ is probably far broader and more
inclusive that Ingold’s. He appears to think
that wind and waves, cycles of the sun and
moon, migrating birds, and the weather are
not ‘things’ at all, but something else. To me
these are all material culture, ‘things’. Of
course they are not static things but flows
and processes. So, because the moon moves,
I suppose that Ingold would not wish to
categorize it as a thing, a material medium,
but as something else. However, Ingold has
no name for such an entity that exists
alongside persons and things in the world.

Paradox

five:

this

apparently

arises

because of the ‘impossible attempt to marry
an animistic ontology ... with a philosophy of
substance in which the world already consists
of things-in-themselves’. Such a paradox is of
Ingold’s own creation, since while agreeing
that animism is important he appears to
regard this to simply arise from flows and
circulations in the lifeworld. It is just there
and everywhere, ‘naturally’ arising, I sup-
pose. I attribute agency to things, which
according to him, is a false attribution. The
reason why I attribute agency to things is
because I don’t draw a clear distinction
between persons and things. Things can be
like persons and vice versa. Thus things can
have agency or effects on persons, a theme
running throughout the book. What Ingold’s
position is on this is quite impossible to work
out.

Paradox six: I associate places with both

‘stasis’

and

‘movement’.

How

terrible!

128

Tim Ingold & Chris Tilley

Landscape to me, in the most abstract sense,
is a relational nexus of places and paths of
movement. The former have both the prop-
erties of stasis and change over time and
there is really no paradox there at all except
in Ingold’s mind. Places are ‘sticky’ nodes in
the flows of movement and movement flows
in places. Ingold thinks it strange that I
should regard experience of place as a human
universal prior to the particularities of
culture and yet maintain that people have
culture which they articulate in particular
places which is different. This prompts him
to ask where this culture comes from and
how it ‘lands’ in a place: something that
people pluck out of the air? This apparently
‘flies in the face’ of my argument that
identities are created out of places. I see no
problem whatsoever in regarding ‘platial’
experience as a universal, i.e. as an ontolo-
gical part of that which it is to be human,
while still arguing that people’s particular
experiences in particular places create their
particular identities.

Why Ingold finds so many paradoxes,

apart from the fact that this was obviously a
pleasing intellectual exercise, appears to be
that in the manner of an analytical philoso-
pher of the logical positivist tradition he
wants clear-cut and conceptually closed
categories, so place and movement, nature
and culture, persons and things, all need to
be opposites that share nothing in common.
This is precisely the kind of surreal attitude
to the world that a phenomenological posi-
tion debunks, and demonstrates to be itself
highly paradoxical and contradictory.

We quite clearly see this demand for closed

categories – better closed thinking – when

he clearly wants distinctions to be drawn
between what might be ‘reliably known’
about the past and what is instead ‘specula-
tion’. He states that no conclusions that I
draw can be deduced from the facts. So,
rather than being a trustworthy detective,
I’m a conjurer, a master of illusion and
trickery, who simply sets out to seduce and
beguile the reader into believing the veracity
of what I have to say on no basis whatsoever!
Here Ingold draws, quite clearly, that old
and tired distinction between fact and value,
objective knowledge and subjective know-
ledge, which is so clearly a hallmark of the
entire empiricist tradition debunked and
abandoned long ago throughout the social
sciences. Yet curiously, he does not begrudge
my ‘speculation’ at all, whereas surely it
should be utterly condemned! If Ingold really
is so interested in facts, and their deduction,
he’s clearly in the wrong discipline – anthro-
pology – altogether! But as he himself is
continuing to produce anthropological ‘spec-
ulations’ (i.e. interpretations) of the greatest
interest he probably doesn’t believe in facts
at all, or indeed have a great deal of faith in
the paradoxes and contradictions he has so
deftly created in my book either.

I would love to sketch my conclusions to

this reply but unfortunately lack the artistic
skill and brilliance that would be required to
do so. So the rest of the page will have to
remain as a paradox, or a contradiction, in
the white.

REFERENCE

Tilley, C. 1999. Metaphor and Material Culture.

Blackwell, Oxford.

Comments on: The Materiality of Stone

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