Abstract
Prehistoric stone circles found throughout Europe offer challenges to interpretation. The Beltany Stone Circle, located on a prominent hilltop near to the town of Raphoe in County Donegal, Republic of Ireland, has long attracted speculative interpretations. This chapter reconsiders the ecological concerns that may have underlain the arduous construction of monuments linked to a number of other significant sites tracing out related pathways of cosmological power in the landscape. All of these sites are on hilltops, suggesting that power was thought to be transmitted from hill to hill. Similar ritual landscapes of power are found in Papua New Guinea, where powerful knowledge was transmitted ritually across groups and was held to stimulate fertility, especially after environmental setbacks, such as floods and landslides. In all of these cases, religious practices turn out to be essentially ecological in character, designed to cope with the perturbations of adverse environmental episodes.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the many people that we have worked with us in our global traverses, stays, and movements. In particular, we express our thanks to all the people who have collaborated with us in the field and at institutions where we have been based while conducting research and lecturing around the globe, especially in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Highlands Papua New Guinea; sections of this manuscript were composed while staying in the Hagen area of Papua New Guinea (January–February 2020). We thank the University of Pittsburgh for hosting our webpages, listing our scholarly activities: https://www.pitt.edu/~strather/sandspublicat.htm and http://www.stewartstrathern.pitt.edu/.
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Stewart, P.J., Strathern, A.J. (2021). Eco-Cosmologies: Renewable Energy. In: Riboli, D., Stewart, P.J., Strathern, A.J., Torri, D. (eds) Dealing with Disasters. Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56104-8_6
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