Earthtransition.com has arisen from and within one person’s journey.  Over several years I have visited and sometimes revisited a range of prehistoric sites both in Britain and further afield. Some of this exploration has been with friends, some alone. The earliest pages, now re-posted here, originally appeared on Mixtunes.co.uk a music website run by a friend Simon Embleton. What has been the connection between these two interests?  The close relationship between music on the one hand and many prehistoric sites on the other allowed an overlap of activities to develop and it was within that space that the ideas and analysis of the early articles developed. Around the same time I began to feel the need to relate to aspects of the world through music more actively and bought my first drum. In this way a longstanding love of music as something to be listened to began to give way to a less passive relationship with humanly organized sound. This happened in the context of, sometimes within the radius of, the stones. It seems inseparable from seeking to develop an understanding of the stones.

Earthtransition offers a personal perspective on and approach to a set of issues and concerns that are of far wider interest. The individual journey, that is to say, is undertaken within the unfolding of a broader story, or set of narratives, concerning prehistory that are of growing importance to increasing numbers of people. Earthtransition’s focus on prehistoric sites, their cultural significance and their exploration, is part of a broader and deeper rediscovery of and engagement with the archaic. It is assumed that anything even approaching an adequate framework for this must incorporate both evidential research and imaginative extrapolation. The underlying issue concerns the relationship between the mental and physical creations of human beings and the feasibility of a more harmonious accord with the wider matrix of forces and relations within which the distinctively human evolves. Put differently, Earthtransition aims to contribute to an understanding of our possible futures and, inseparable from that, to a clarification of the transient character of our current crises and the attainability of ways beyond them.

Earthtransition recognises our current social reality, overshadowed by exploitation and warmongering, as in fact dizzy with positive possibilities.  It further trusts that clearer insight into earlier social forms can only facilitate the development of more balanced and, in a real sense, more human ways of life.

Earthtransition assumes the unsustainability of prevailing hierarchical and persistently aggressive social arrangements. It assumes that the earth demands a human transition that can only be conscious but which, equally, must be critical of the selves that we inherit. To understand the world and its potentials we must nurture inventive forms of self-understanding, and vice versa.

My own academic background lies largely in sociology and historical anthropology. There we encounter notions of “primitive communism” and (for those who like to call themselves civilized) the surprising character of social life at low levels of the division of labour.  We learn of counter-dominance strategies and tactics and of a long human legacy of egalitarian political strivings and achievements. We make discoveries which bear on the increasingly urgent need for more cooperative, less domineering and less formatted ways of life in our times and beyond.

Earthtransition, in sum, shares common ground with a range of journal and web-based networks with diverse emphases and accents.   Where links can be agreed these will be established in the interest of solidarity around the non-imitative rediscovery and re-exploration of the prehistoric.  This requires consideration of insistent archaic voices which whisper around the rusty scaffolding of modernity and its post-modern offspring.  It is all as contemporary as that.

David Binns

30th October 2004

email:  davebinns@earthtransition.com