Thank you very much indeed. I see I see my segments lit up.
So am I being heard loud and clear? Splendid.
I'll start with the proposition that Britain has an exceptionally rich heritage of pre-Christian ceremonial
monuments and artefacts reflecting the huge range of pre-Christian cultures that made an impact on this island,
which is unsurpassed in Europe, although it's equals in some other parts.
So if your inhabitants of modern Iceland, Scandinavian countries, Finland, most Mediterranean countries and most parts of Eastern Europe,
there is a single pagan heritage to which to look a single pantheon of no Dantes with a set of monuments associated.
Here in Britain, we have an historic records, the native religion here when the Romans arrived.
Religions from every corner of the Roman Empire and then those of the Anglo Saxons and of the Norse dames in the early Christian period.
And looking at the prehistoric ages, we have the full range from Palaeolithic cave carvings,
Mesolithic ceremonial masks, Neolithic chamba tombs and state circles,
Bronze Age round barrows and circles of the huge Iron Age inclusions formerly called Hill Forts and from the late 19th century.
These have increasingly been excavated, protected and taken into state guardianship and displayed to the public, but not until recently.
Were they widely held to have any sense of lingering sanctity attached.
The archaeologists and civil servants concerned with them for the first hundred
years of the process I've described were either Christian or agnostic or atheists.
And although they were fascinated by the ancient cultures that produced the sites which they excavated,
for which they cared, they had no sense of kindred spirituality with them.
Is therefore, these groups, archaeologists and heritage managers.
Well, quite surprised when a significant modern pagan movements appeared in Britain from the 1950s onwards.
And it's not a coincidence that an island which has such a complex and vibrant historic prehistoric pagan heritage should produce such an early,
vibrant, modern paganism. British paganism as coalescing.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, forms the template for Pagan isms across the Western world.
Subsequently, and many British pagans from the start focussed on prehistoric sacred sites as sacred places for their own religion.
Naturally, they focussed on particular of those officially opens the public behind this, according to your area.
By the 80s of English Heritage kartu historic Scotland or the National Trust.
It's a complex but sometimes fraught relationship resulted from my point of view.
That relationship has taken two stages. Each one was equally uncomfortable for myself, but for very different reasons.
The first stage was from the 1970s to the 1990s,
and it was characterised by much hostility to Pagan's of the part of archaeologists and site managers.
This hostility has a long history stretching back beyond the coalition with card carrying Pagan's.
The early 20th century drew an audience.
Societies that appeared from Dave Wardian period onwards and weren't actually pagan, but had a syncretic religion in which Christianity.
Eastern faiths, ancient Greek philosophy were mixed together.
Still settled on ancient sacred sites, especially Stonehenge, as sacred places of their movements.
And each time they gained some success, archaeologists tried to drive them out.
In the 1970s, Druid orders successfully applied to the government for the right to enter the cremated ashes of their own dead at Stonehenge.
The result was a large and successful public campaign launched by archaeologists to drive them out,
resulting in the first comprehensive book of druids by an archaeological leader.
Sir Thomas Kendrick of the British Museum,
which went out of its way to characterise modern druids as charlatans with no right to any sacred site in the 1960s,
drew its rollout's return to Stonehenge and attracted large crowds.
But incur more public condemnation from the archaeological community.
Above all, glib Daniel and Stuart Piggott, who published the next big book on Druids after Russell Thomas Kendrick devoting even more space
to excoriating modern Druids as pointless interventions if the authentic history of Druidry,
which should be about a long, dead ancient world.
This sense lingered in the succeeding decades that people who identified now spiritually with those monuments were in some ways frauds,
impostors generally and authentic. They could be practical nuisances.
In the early years, Pagan's using ceremonial monuments.
We're not always careful about the refuge they left behind. The candle wax offerings of fruits and flowers became a genuine problem.
And occasionally it still is. But there was still a wider sense that these people shouldn't be at these places at all.
That the very basis of their claim was wrong. Now, there were increasing voices of opposition to this idea.
People who spoke up for the rights of pagans to use these places.
Chris, Chippendale tip Daleville is yours truly big, big three of those who publish, most obviously, or active.
Next, obviously, for it is the basic arguments switch in different ways.
We used is that as archaeologists has always admitted since the beginning of the 20th century,
we actually can't get into the heads of prehistoric people.
And so although we can reconstruct with increasing accuracy their chronology, their ethnicity, their technology, their diets,
their medical pathology and the nation of their living spaces and their structures,
we still have no idea if their social arrangements, their politics and their religious beliefs.
So it's really up to anybody who wants to provide conjectural reconstructions of things.
And if that is true, then the conjectural reconstructions provided by modern pagan's of ancient religion,
prehistoric religion, are as good as anybody else's, providing they stay within the limits of the known evidence.
And on the whole, that Swopped pagans increasingly did. So there was a shift.
These all givens worked by the 2000s.
Heritage managers and archaeologists were increasingly viewing pagans as a special interest group within the general public whose interests should be
served along along with those of other groups in the general public as part of the responsibilities of the public on the part of their disciplines.
Special access was being granted to prehistoric monuments for which there was a pay regime, most notably Stonehenge, outside.
Public visiting hours that could accommodate pretty well anything anybody wants to do by way of a ritual.
As long as it didn't even leave a mess, didn't damage anything. It wasn't too noisy.
This was a perfect working arrangement. So the whole problem should thereby have been resolved.
But we entered stage two of the problems from the late 2000s.
This was after being granted status as a special interest group with connexion with prehistoric monuments.
Some pagans began to claim a unique right to represent the ancient peoples concerned.
This claim had been made earlier, but been made largely as a reaction to the hostility shown by the powerbrokers in the equation.
Now some seem to move beyond that and try to evade the agreement of archaeologists.
Heritage managers and attempts to prescribe the way in which sites were conserved, excavated and used by others.
This took a number of forms. One was an automatic demand of rice at entry to restricted sacred sites and without payments.
The second was the right to decide if archaeologists should excavate in certain places or not.
And if they did excavate, how the right to decide the conservation measures then taken.
The most famous flashpoint here was a Bronze Age timber circle in Norfolk, which the media dubbed sea henge,
which became a coast led collision between heritage planners, managers, museum managers, archaeologists and the constellation of pagan groups.
The third demand was to be able to determine how human bones dug out of ancient graves and sacred sites were displayed in museums.
This was in many ways, the bombs that rose from a Christian view of the dead would be the argument being.
And on the face has some legitimacy that archaeologists have always respected Christian graves,
just some extent with a right to consider the remains as eligible for reburial and a general sense that sacred ground was being disturbed,
which wasn't applied to the old or dead. But it extended further to a demand to determine how bones were displayed in museums and gave the sense
that these pagan groups could be custodians of the artefacts concerned and the human bodies concerned,
rather than simply a group with a special interest in them.
You can judge from my tone here that this is the point at which I had to change sides.
Having lobbied for the rights of pagans to be regarded as a special interest group,
I had now to argue for the rights of archaeologists and heritage managers to deny the claims that were now being made upon them,
because I couldn't have it both ways. Nor could anybody making the argument if what we were asking for was an equality amongst
the public with special access granted for special occasions and special needs.
But otherwise a level playing field in prehistory in which anybody is conjectural
reconstruction was as good as anybody else within the evidence then to acknowledge
that pagan groups or some of them had some kind of hotline to the ancient dead and
the right to speak for them in their voices simply because of their heritage claims.
What was simply not permissible? Now, at the end of this decade, things seem to have settled down for the time being.
The more extreme demands that I have mentioned have been refused.
But the display of human bones in museums has become more sensitive and more restricted, and that's generally recognised as a a good outcome.
And some archaeologists are actually inviting pagans to bless the opening of their excavations,
thereby admitting them to some sense of spiritual partnership in the process, allotting them a real which perhaps they can fulfil.
But the situation is uneasy. To conclude, this is an issue at these sites.
These are interest groups. I'm including archaeologists, academics,
heritage managers as interest groups that operates across and against a number of fishermans in our culture that
between the idea of a poly vocal society in which different viewpoints are valued against that of an official message,
a story of England, a communal history that can unite different ethnic groups and interest groups,
a chasm between public to moms and dads,
the sense that we are beholden to the public who are largely all paid masters and mistresses against that of the right of experts,
passing rigorous tests to be acknowledged by the nation as having a special right to speak for
the nation and against many of the public and the views of how things should be viewed and run.
The idea of the quest remands as a scholarly enterprise.
The idea that you start with a question or a problem, you then have a narrative of how you find the answer and then you find the answer.
The scholarly equivalent of throwing the Riggins.
Now to getting the Golden Fleece or achieving the Holy Grail against the idea of open ended interpretation
that we could never know a lot about the past and therefore having more different ideas about it.
Often, side by side, it's the healthiest outcome.
And finally, the idea of multiculturalism against the plea for an abiding national narrative which can keep together the English,
the Welsh and the Scots and every component's ethnicity that is part of those rounds.
So in other words. The situation continues as one of indecision.
Potential confrontation and the lack of any overriding approach or philosophy nationally or
regionally or in interest groups which can cater for the situation in which we find ourselves.
I suppose the good news in all this is that it means that what we're doing together today and what we do as individuals actually matters.